My favorite thing about marching band is the people, and I think pretty much everyone is going to respond the same way. The band wouldn’t be half as fun without the inside jokes, crazy traditions, and straight-up weird people in it (myself included).
My favorite memory from the marching band might be from earlier this season when we swept a competition (won all captions and got 1st place in our class). We’ve done that before, but this time it was from the perspective of us as seniors getting to share what winning feels like with our freshmen, and that made it a lot more meaningful.
My favorite marching band show is always going to be my freshman year show, Decomposers. It was a really, really fun piece that had some wonderfully challenging technical elements that made me really, really proud when I finally got them under my fingers. Plus, who doesn’t love classical music with a ghostly ghoulish twist?
My favorite costume was the one we wore for our show last year, Captiv. It was really unique and, since it had a hood, we got to have a moment in our show where we dramatically revealed ourselves. (Too bad the wind blew the hood off before then 50% of the time!)
I think most people have similar misconceptions about marching band as they do about cheer. They see us at school events like football games or parades and think that pep rallies are all we do. In reality, we barely ever focus on that. 99% of our time and effort are spent on perfecting our show to exhibit at various different invitationals during our competitive season. We show up about an hour before school starts every single day, and competition days (most Saturdays) last anywhere from 8.5 to 14.5 hours. And as any freshman will tell you, it’s hard. It takes serious mental rewiring to get comfortable with marching in step while playing (especially with rhythms that aren’t on beat), and that’s just the basics. But for most of us seniors, it’s now so engrained that it would be harder to march out of time. Then you have to add in memorizing all 218 measures of music (including the specifics of dynamics and articulation), all 52 sets of location coordinates on the field, and every last piece of choreography. I think people would be surprised to see just how much work goes into it!
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