Military marching bands are common all over the world. But marching bands for schools and colleges vary a lot around the globe. The US and Japan seem to be the most passionate about them, Europe not so much, with some other countries also having them. In the US they are used for half-time performances at sporting events and the choreography on display can be pretty impressive such as this tribute by Ohio State University to blockbuster films.
I used to think that it was a fun activity for students but apparently it is deadly serious stuff. This article describes the grueling regimen that players in the marching band in the Bourbon County High School in Eastern Kentucky go through.
Hell Week had come for the Marching Colonels. It was late July in eastern Kentucky, and a hazy sun hung over Bourbon County High School. In the parking lot behind the band room, the asphalt was hot enough to melt chewing gum. The woodwinds were gathered there in a ragged circle, waiting for the metronome to set the tempo, while the trumpets and trombones stumbled around on the football field below. Inside the school, the leader of the drum line, a knobby fifteen-year-old named Jacob Guy, scowled at the boys slouched in front of him, thin necks bent over bulky instruments. “I’m not getting any effort from anyone right now,” he said. “We’ve been over this. Count out loud! If someone isn’t marking time, it’s five pushups!
The band had been at this since eight-thirty in the morning. First half an hour of stretching and calisthenics, then marching practice, and now sectional and full-band rehearsals. If they were lucky, they’d get home by six, slather their muscles with Icy Hot, and do the same thing again the next day. All told, they would rehearse close to fifty hours that week, then two to three hours a day for the rest of the summer and fourteen hours a week in the fall. When I asked Grayson Mack, the lead marimba player, if all that practice was hard on his body, he held up his hands. The fingers and palms were wrapped in black athletic tape to cover blisters. “The mallets rub up against them,” he said. “And I have tendinitis and carpal tunnel in both arms. At one band camp, I was eating four Aleves every day. It’s just part of the deal.”
Marching band is more than a pastime in Bourbon County. It’s an extreme sport. The real reason the students rehearse so hard isn’t to play well at football games. They can do those shows in their sleep. It’s to prepare for a series of fiercely competitive marching-band contests in the fall, culminating in the Grand National Championships, in Indianapolis. There are more than twenty thousand high-school band programs in America, some with as many as four hundred members. Over the past thirty years, their shows have evolved into spectacles that John Philip Sousa couldn’t have imagined. The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores. They don’t call it marching band anymore. They call it the marching arts.
I had no idea that marching bands had become such a huge thing. I learned that there is even a World Association of Marching Show Bands that organizes annual world championships and that more that 75 bands took part in 2024. In 2023, the countries taking part included Honduras, Congo, Brazil, Bahamas, Angola, Guatemala, Thailand, Poland, Colombia, El Salvador, Netherlands, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Ireland, Canada, Venezuela, Germany, Uruguay and Ecuador.
I was struck by this because it seems to me that more and more things that once were considered recreational are being made competitive and hence taking part has become like attending boot camp. While this will appeal to those who have a competitive mindset, it can also sometimes take the fun out of them and result in some not being able to take part. There may be people who are not very good at some activity but enjoy doing it along with others. In a non-competitive context, they could be indulged. But as soon as things get competitive, they will be ruthlessly cut.
I recall singing in a choir when I was in college that put on a Christmas carol service every year. We worked really hard at it and practiced a lot because we wanted to put on a good performance. I enjoyed the camaraderie and the feeling of working cooperatively with others towards a common goal. Also it was a chance to meet girls. But I was not a very good singer and if it were part of a choral contest, I would have been one of the first to be asked to leave.
This happens in a lot of activities, starting with the very young. It used to be that children would take part in pick up games with other children in their neighborhoods. But now there are sports leagues for all ages at all levels. While I am sure that this results in children getting better at the activity, it may also result in those who are not that good getting shunted aside. It can also result in children not taking part in a wide variety of games and sports but instead specializing just in those for which they show early promise.
Maybe I am an old fogey but I like the idea of children doing a lot of stuff just for the fun of it, not to get trophies.
Synchronised walking / marching is big in Japan. The American bands take the prize for scale -- predictably enough if the pursuit arose from football half-time events I suppose -- but the Japanese approach is all about precision. I’m as impressed by that video now as I was when I first saw that clip, a dozen or so years ago. The only criticism I have for the routine is that the peak moment starting at 1:50 should have been saved for later as a climax.
Also, would a Japanese speaker be kind enough to tell me why the audience ‘ooh-ed’ when 20 people stood up at about 3:55?
Can confirm it starts really young. My oldest wanted to play rec league soccer at 5. This was not a serious pastime--they didn’t even keep score with kids that young. There were 8 teams in the rec and each team played each other twice. They practiced an hour two days during the week and had a one-hour game on Saturdays. But some of the parents in the stands acted like it was a life-or-death event. One of the kids played in 3 different rec leagues; he was always on the ground crying in exhaustion.
By 8, this rec league folded into a statewide traveling team that practiced an hour a day and a game on Saturdays--but the game location changed and the parents could expect to drive anywhere from 1 to 3 hours just to go to the game. And the “home” location for the 8-year-olds was a town an hour away. That was a minimum 3-hour commitment every working day, plus an 8-hour commitment on Saturdays.
We simply couldn’t do that, so he asked to play baseball with the rec. Fine. Went to sign him up for baseball and they asked where my 8-year-old had played t-ball. He hadn’t. Well, he’s simply too old to start baseball, we were told. At 8 years old, without 5 years of experience, he was simply aged out of ever being able to play rec league.
That was such a difference from my own childhood, where kids just showed up and played soccer or kickball or baseball in the street or the park. There were no referees, no bleachers, no mandatory fundraisers. There was no organized sports until high school.
The synchronized walking reminds me of Genki Sudo and World Order, a group that has taken slow synchronized walking to an art form. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI4fJYWKcGa8MvnvLw0qysQ
OSU’s halftime shows are always good, but their pregame show and Script Ohio are deceptively simple but beautiful.
@Ridana:
And my brain immediately started singing “Have a nice day!”
@2 Katydid
I grew up in a similar situation as you. All games were “pick-ups”. You chose up “sides” or teams, set the rules, and off you went (sometimes making up new rules mid-game if it was obvious that someone was gaming the system). There were organized leagues for baseball and football starting in jr. high, but that usually attracted only a small percentage of the kids. I preferred something less organized, like throwing around a frisbee with my pals.
Looking back, I think it was valuable for kids to create their own games and run them themselves. I think leagues tend to get kids thinking in terms of following orders from adults, stifling their own creativity and problem solving. And there’s the issues with some parents taking the outcomes much too seriously, as you mentioned. Perhaps this is an outgrowth of our society’s over reliance on “competition” as the road to improvement.
When it comes to marching bands, I can appreciate the precision timing required, but speaking as a musician, the whole marching thing rubs me the wrong way. Far too militaristic.
Homo Sapiens are generalists. There are of course a certain number of true monomaniacs, and then there are people who at a young age show enthusiasm for one thing over other things who then get molded into functional monomaniacs by social pressures. I always wonder if that second group can have happy lives, especially top tier sports celebrities. If you win an Olympic gold medal when you are in your mid-teens to twenties, do you spend the next fifty years feeling like your best years are behind you? How horrible.
I am a true generalist. I will get excited about one or two things at a time, but usually within six months to a year I will find other things exciting. My one big regret in life is that even if I live to be 150, I will still not get to learn about everything I want to learn. That, and the fact that for each new interest, I have to find storage space for a new set of tools and books.
@jimf: yes, you described my childhood games. One day you might play endless games of kickball, and the next you might play roller hockey in the street and the third might be basketball. You played with whoever was around and teams could vary from day to day, and anyone who wanted to play, played. Sometimes our rules changed mid-game, too, usually in response to what was going on--e.g. “the littler kids get a 3-second head start to base”.
I think there is too much emphasis on competition, which is how you have teenaged musicians working 50 hours a week with taped injuries so they can compete against other children equally hard-worked and taped up, and little girls hypersexualized and similarly overworked into cheer teams.
@moarscienceplz: I also believe a wide experience in a variety of sports is a healthier way to grow up than for a child to be locked into t-ball at age 3 and sent through the baseball pipeline by an over-zealous parent whether the child likes baseball or not. Or, in my area, kids start in football at age 5, running around in padding and helmet in 100-degree summer heat.
#1 Holmes
My Japanese is not spectacular, but the sitting folks were first introduced by name and special job, and the rest of the introductions were by class or some other grouping. Clapping is in response to the bow because you can’t just let someone bow to you. Oohing and awwing was because that particular grouping was so large.
Me, I was laughing at the COVID in the subway joke. You don’t need to understand Japanese for that one.