Halftime's Not Just for Halftime Anymore

I opened up the New York Times website this morning (yes, yes, I'm a hopelessly reactionary liberal metrosexual appeaser yuppie and I like my baguette with a little Camembert -- but I really think that Obama's going to change everything) to find this picture staring back at me from just below the masthead:
Well, I thought, brass has arrived!

And it's kind of true. At least in some places. This article is all about a summer camp program that Florida A&M University's Marching 100 has been organizing for the past 18 years, and it just about puts the last nail in the coffin of the complaint that Drumline was a totally crappy movie. (It was, if you really only care about things like plot, character development, and the nonexistence of hoary cliches.) The article itself really nails part of the reason why a program like this is a good thing for all of us:

[T]he rise of hip-hop and the computerized music programs like GarageBand has depleted the pool of young instrumentalists. In addition, many public schools have reduced or eliminated music classes to provide double periods of math and reading, which are tested annually under the education law No Child Left Behind.
[Links added]

Hallelujah! I mean, not like any of this is a big secret, but it's nice when it's prominently acknowledged by the Journal of Record.

This stuff is important partly because, as was pointed out in another recent post, teaching kids to play music often makes them better students in other areas, but also because (with all due respect*) marching band/drumline apparatus has a lot of advantages over the equipment that's usually used to create pop (as opposed to popular) music. Specifically (and incompletely): wind and percussion players don't need electricity, so they have a way easier time breaking down audience/band barriers than most rock bands do and they don't have to rely on the existence of clubs at all, if they don't want to; each band member's status as a producer of (essentially) one note/beat at a time at least points in the direction of a pretty egalitarian structure and group interdependency; the total absence of the cliches of the brooding guitar god and the charismatic lead singer.

More from the article:

The Marching 100 has created a revolution in band style, radically infusing the traditional catalog of songs and formations with the sounds and dances of black popular culture. “It slides, slithers, swivels, rotates, shakes, rocks and rolls,” the band’s founding director, Prof. William P. Foster, wrote in his memoirs. “It leaps to the sky, does triple twists, and drops to earth without a flaw, without missing either a beat or a step.”

Damn, I don't usually commit that many verbs in a day! Is it getting hot in here?

I do have one caveat about the Marching 100 and highly regimented bands like that in general, though. For kids who grow up in really unstable situations, that kind of military-style discipline and order might actually be a healthy thing (for a week, at least). Personally, I grew up with more "discipline" (read: adults with crazy control issues) than I knew what to do with, and by now I'm highly suspicious of people who really like being told what to do.

“They’re serious down here,” said L’Dante Brown, a 14-year-old drummer from the Virgin Islands. “When they tell you to stand still and be quiet, you can hear the mosquitoes flying.”

And when they tell Mr. Brown and the rest to move and make noise, and all the French horns and piccolos and saxophones and trombones sashay into action, the syncopated sound echoes across the hilly campus.

Remember, kiddies: obedience is not always the best response to an order.


* Maybe it's a non-issue, but I'd like to point out that I don't really have a problem with hip-hop or electronic music in general leading to fewer people playing horns today than 20 years ago, if in fact that's even the case. There's something pretty great about people with little or no musical experience having the capacity to create and manipulate whatever sounds they want in their own bedroom and then transmit what they've made halfway around the globe, if they want to. Actually, the growth of non-professionalism in music is part of what's so great about the spike in new brass bands that I see happening these days.