Marching Harder at Arundel

Ian Burns stands atop a massive storage unit, overlooking a crowd of teenagers in formation.

"March well!" he yells, his voice amplified by a pair of portable speakers on the ground. "Control your upper body. Don't look frantic, please!"

And then after a pause: "I'm not sold, but we're moving on."

Burns is not commanding a platoon of young soldiers, but the Arundel High School Marching Band. On this particular Saturday morning he is urging the trumpets to stand taller and calling on the woodwinds to march faster with orders that would be unintelligible to most observers.

"Twenty-four, twenty-four, six, six, go!"

To most of the musicians marching, this is harder than they've ever worked. And it is new territory for Burns, who is in his first year at Arundel.

The young Boston native with a love of tuba and a Peabody Institute education came to the school with aspirations to transform a jazz-oriented music program into one with a big, proud and award-winning marching band.

"We're kind of stepping up the level of focus for marching band here," Burns said. "We think this is a good opportunity to share what we do with the music program at Arundel High with the community. We really want to make the marching band good."

Burns oversees about 60 musicians, or half the preferred number for a school of Arundel's size. But that has not lessened his ambitions, as the marching band is working to perfect a complex, eight-minute program based on music from the film "Pirates of the Caribbean." It's a routine that requires fast marching—as many as 180 steps per minute—and a lot of stamina.

To prepare the band for such a program, Burns has instituted a fitness element to practices that includes pushups, lunges, plyometrics and weight lifting. The practices include three hours on Tuesday nights, three hours after school on Wednesdays, Friday afternoons before each football game and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

"I think you have to push them pretty hard," Burns said. "We should not accept a mediocre experience. If you're going to do something, there's no reason to not make it excellent."

The band's immediate goal is to consistently look good on Friday nights, when they perform during Arundel High football games. On Sept. 25 the band will host the Wildcat Spectacular of Bands, a regional competition that Burns hopes will grow into one of the largest in the area. Then on Oct. 31, the band will compete in the county competition.

Burns is not promising victories at any of the upcoming competitions, though he is confident the band can compete well.

"This is definitely a building year for the program," he said. "We're just trying to do the best we can every time we pick up the instruments. You get a lot of enjoyment out of it when, if you play a halftime show, it's loud and exciting and people will stop talking because they can't help but notice what the band is doing. That's the end goal, and that's what it takes to win a competition. I think the students would love it if they had that experience."