| I'll never understand why it is people get so hyped
on football. Especially at my school, where the football
team is - to be nice- not as good as one could hope for.
It boggles my mind to see that the football players get
greater respect around school than the band members. It
defies my sense of logic to hear that a
championship-caliber band is told they can't go to
national competition because there's a football game.
This might seem a little off, but bear with me. The band
works just as hard, if not harder, than the football
team. The work that is being done is tough physically,
and requires the kind of precision rarely seen outside
mechanics. You have to get three hundred people to work
together instictively and naturally as a team, when in
football you have less than a dozen at any one time. In
marching band, you have to make unnaturally exaggerated
movements with feet and posture just to get someone in
the stands to notice you're doing it at all. In football,
you have to run into people. In marching band, you have
to do all the physical elements - all difficult things in
by themselves - WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT THEM, so you can
reserve your mind for getting a concert sound out of your
horn. In football, there *is* nothing but the physical
elements to think about. Yet, despite all of this, nobody
even considers the band, and they worship the football
team. But maybe that's changing. At our school, at least, the student body is fairly cognizent of the fact that their band is pretty widely respected among its peers. I think we actually have one of the rare cases where a student is *more* respected for being in the band, rather than less. We don't get the same hype and advertising that the football team does- but its turning out to be that we don't need it. I overheard two guys talking about the football game in the hall last Friday- and they were mostly excited over how the band preformed. Granted, what they were saying was hardly sportsmanlike, and without a doubt crude and vulgar, but it made me think that maybe we ARE doing something right, when even the crude and vulgar portion of our students actually like what we do. Maybe we actually are introducing them to the fact that there's more to marching band than marching up and down in block formation at half time in the football games. There are a lot of people in the marching community that think we've digressed to far from the roots; that our electronic sections and dance interludes, our visuals and music, have spread too far from the military marching styles, and that we are no longer "marching" bands. I'm on the other side of that fence; I think our current trends should continue even farther. It's these trends that have brought bands more into the spotlight, and it's these trends that make it possible for a band to progress farther. It's not something we like to be true, but without public support and recognition, the venue would dry out. It's a changing art form; we're in the middle of a major change. Embrace it. The change is what has kept us around. Love to all- Liokae. |