Panning for gold – week 2

“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.

 

Description

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.

 

One more time

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

 

Panning for gold – week 1

“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

 

Project roadmap

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.

 

By definition

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.