the mellophone chronicles

My feet are pointed toward one endzone, my head toward the other. I’m lying on my back in the middle of the giant 50-yard-line “O” on the field at Autzen Stadium. It’s windy and chill, a quiet Monday night in late April, far in every regard from football season. But this evening on a walk, an old friend and I found the gate open, and what he calls the “big quiet” of the empty stadium drew us in.

It’s deeply peaceful here. The green turf is softer to the touch than I would expect, and from field level, the imposing stadium walls look anticlimactic, giving way easily to the wider span of the sky. There’s something calming about the ordered rows of empty seats around us. The darkening blue of the evening sky is occasionally revealed through layers of clouds moving above.

The images I carry with me of the public life of this place make this moment all the more oddly poignant. Absent tonight are the noise, the crowds, the security, the violence, the uniforms, the music, the cheers, the smells, the play-by-play, the Jumbotron, the whole circus. The stadium feels like nothing so much as an empty stage, waiting patiently to be called to its purpose.

Four more months.

Even as the stack of marching band theory books beside my desk grows and grows (amazing that the library lets grad students keep things for six months. Dangerous, too.), other bits of life go on around it.

I recently took my first swing at writing song lyrics. A group of old friends started a collaborative blog back in January, called “Mirth and Matter” (title stolen, coincidentally, from my old email address, which I stole from Shakespeare). Besides offering a good space for a rant, the blog hopes to also inspire/facilitate collaborative creative projects. The music/lyrics Throwdown was the first of these.

Those of us bloggers who identify as “writers” were randomly matched with those who call themselves “musicians” and set loose to collaborate on a song. I luckily was matched with my dear friend Zach, a man of truly frightening talent who lives in Miami. You can find our resulting song here:

http://mirthandmatter.blogspot.com/2008/04/mirth-over-matter.html

The intersection between music and words is an interesting space. Though it doesn’t currently have much of a formal place in this project, I will of course continue to think about it … and Zach has already sent me my next lyric-writing assignment.

I’ve come back to Sarah Vowell’s work as I begin to consider the shape and scope of the historical piece I’m undertaking. I admire Vowell’s uncanny ability to catch me off guard and make historical events, places, figures, etc. rich with meaning totally relevant to my life right here. And be fairly fabulously entertaining along the way.

I’m working on pulling apart a few of her essays to analyze their structure and tone, but I must admit, I keep getting sucked into the delight of her storytelling voice and looking up, pages later, to discover that I’ve been having too much fun to diagram anything.

Here are the first two sentences from an essay on the Gettysburg Address:

“There are children playing soccer on a field at Gettysburg where the Union Army lost the first day’s fight. Playing soccer, like a bunch of Belgians – and in the middle of football season, no less.” (pg. 1)

- “What He Said There” in The Partly Cloudy Patriot, 2003.

I can’t tell you how much I admire the fact that in those two sentences she’s introduced her subject, a sense of place, and her own sense of humor; given us a time peg; dissed the majority of the world’s sports fans; and made sure that I’ll keep reading. The switch from “the first day’s fight,” which seems so somber – almost like she can’t quite look straight at it – to the mock-angry, dryly witty “like a bunch of Belgians” in such a short space makes me totally envious. No need to pick a single tone, Vowell suggests. Humans usually have several going on at once internally, so why should writing be any different?

There are two parts. In the first, the feet, placed together, keep time by lifting each heel in succession while the toes stay planted. Eight of these. Marking time. The second part is simply eight steps forward. Forward march. If all goes as planned, the instep of the right foot, finishing the eighth step, should land exactly on the next yard marker. Eight steps to travel five yards. Eight-to-fives. Marching band’s bread and butter. The left foot always, always goes first: to do otherwise feels more than awkward.

The two-part pattern repeats itself down the length of the field. It is the first exercise of each rehearsal. Eights-and-eights. It’s a transitory moment, those first few sets, feeling the group settle into the physical work of the day. There is something incredibly comforting about this simple exercise, any of them will tell you. A sense of belonging, an old muscle memory that stretches back to being fifteen, nervous and awkward in a parking lot somewhere, learning to stand at attention under the August sun.

Sometimes, there’s music on the stereo to help warm-ups along. Eights-and-eights songs are not too frantic, but keep a steady pace. “Higher Ground” by the Chili Peppers is a favorite. Hearing it, out in the world somewhere, they can’t help but walk in time.

“The All-American Marching Band in 1907 was the first band to break regular military marching rank to form a letter on the football field – in this instance a block P.” (pg. 93)

- “Purdue University Bands” in Bands of the World, Al G. Wright and Stanley Newcomb, 1970.

More importantly, I’ve managed to play an entire fifth on the horn. An odd alchemy of lips and valves combine to make the different notes, and up until now, I’ve been grasping at straws and making somewhat-random loud brassy honks. Today, though, five actual notes, in proper order. I even played it in reverse once. My high school violin teacher would never believe it if he saw me now.

A recording coming soon, once I work up the nerve.

The hat is yellow, or sometimes green, depending on the weather and the director’s whims. Thank the gods of the endzones they did away with the hard-hat reminiscent helmets. The jacket’s big bold “O” is clean, elegant. A far cry from some rival institutions’ furry, snaggletoothed mascots.

Often, there are sunglasses. Always, the odd black shoes with no arch support and total flexibility. Everyone’s feet hurt for the first few weeks. Now the shoes are a badge of honor for some (usually the younger members). A visual secret handshake.

The rest of the uniform’s just details. The green bib overalls, made from some odd fabric blend that creases in unexpected ways, lending an extra awkwardness to the already unnatural appearance of 160 people walking in step.  

Mostly what you notice are those hats, the quilted vests (reversible, you know) that make a communal yellow smudge in the background of photos of the star quarterback. Then there’s the shine and tilt of the silver and gold instruments. You remember the sousaphones. You forget the clarinets.

They are memorable for the fact that if all is going well, none of them is individually memorable. You remember the yellow hats, not the people wearing them. They are part of a whole. They are members.

Go to Sam Bond’s to do research for one project … and come home with a lead for a whole other one. This, I suppose is whay it’s good to have lots of journalistic irons in the proverbial fire, even if the thought of how much is going on right now sometimes makes my head hurt.

Still, wouldn’t do to look serendipity in the mouth.

“The One More Time Marching Band (OMT) has been a Eugene-area institution since 1986. The band got its start playing in the Eugene Celebration parade, and parades have remained close to our hearts. But we’ve also come to love playing at concerts in the parks, at baseball games, and at all kinds of community celebrations.”

http://onemoretimeband.home.comcast.net/~onemoretimeband/index.htm

“The World War was a definite mile-stone in the history of the school band. Previous to 1917, emphasis in the field of school instrumental music was placed on the orchestra; bands, as a rule, were neglected … After 1920 the order was reversed … the interest in band music, developed during the war, was was naturally carried over into the schools.” (pg. 3)

“In general it can be said that, up to the beginning of the twentieth century, chorus practice constituted the sole musical activity in the great majority of the high schools.” (pg. 4)

“Although the World War gave the band movement a decided impetus, it remained for the school band contest to heighten the interest thus generated. The first national contest, held in Chicago in 1923, was organized privately by band instrument manufacturers with the avowed purpose of stimulating the demand for instruments.” (pg. 8 )

- “The Evolution of the School Band,” Prescott and Chidester, 1938.

“By the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the bands had increased their pageantry and were an accepted part of the sports mystique … During the nineteen-twenties the school concert and marching bands began to develop into major performing organizations … the inception of the first university band in Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1840.” (pg. 8 )

- “The Marching Band,” Wells, 1976

The thing I love most about roadmaps is that they so beautifully squash reality into a clean, simple form. The utter complexity of the world, with all its potholes and beautiful views, gets compressed to a single line on a piece of paper, moving in a seemingly arbitrary manner between where you are and where you think you want to be.

Here’s where I am: I am fascinated by the heap of odd confluences that add up to a college marching band. How did military tradition turn into 160 college students in yellow Nike baseball caps playing “Walking on Sunshine”? How does an activity that advocates group identity and blending into a crowd manage to be so utterly, stereotypically American? What is it that makes so many of the people I know decide to give countless hours to this organization, and what are they gaining in return? And why does all of it happen at football games?

Somewhere in that heap of questions are issues of group and individual identity, the cultural and psychological effects of music, the pageantry of modern sporting events, the subculture inhabited by members of a marching band, and the conscious and subconscious role that tradition plays in our lives. Just to name a few.

Here’s where I’m going: A series of three or four articles, each focused on a particular aspect of this experience. I’m imagining one “historical,” deeply researched background piece which I’ll concentrate on this term, one more personal and humorous essay on the dynamics of learning a new instrument and returning to a half-forgotten skill set after years away in order to better understand the truth of the organization’s dynamics, and one or two articles which could be about college athletics as circus, band as subculture, ‘the thing you can’t stop doing,’ or some aspect of this story that I haven’t yet discovered.

My arbitrary single line, as I currently understand it: I have access, contacts in the band, and I’m learning to play the mellophone in order to become a member of the OMB myself next fall, a project that both excites and frightens me. I’m curious about the prospect of practicing some long(ish)-term immersion journalism, and will read works of reportage based on projects akin to this one (Newjack, Random Family, etc.) during the spring and summer.

This term, as the band’s in hibernation awaiting August and the beginning of the football season, I plan to focus on historical background. I want to answer the “how did we get from the military drilling ground to the high school football stadium” question, and plan to turn the answer to that question into a Sarah Vowell-esque essay on the journey and what it means. I don’t yet know the “Big Story” or the “small story” I’ll use to make this into a narrative that’s worth reading, but I feel that finding both of those is a good challenge for a term’s work.

mel•lo•phone n. A marching or military band brass instrument similar in appearance and range to the French horn but slightly smaller and simpler to play.