Marching: A Primer

    When it’s all on the field – all the movements in lockstep and shapes visible only from far above – a marching band’s performance can seem a strange thing. I know it did to me before tenth grade. As I watched the Homecoming performance one frigid October evening as a freshman, I had no idea how anything worked.
    The answer, as it turns out: band camp. It’s five days of unrelenting midday heat, lots of marching, squirt guns, atrocious (and I mean atrocious) puns, memorization, dehydration, annoying little bits of turf stuck inside socks, and plenty of trial and error. It’s hard, messy, annoying, and yet it’s the necessary start to anything you’ll see on the field a few weeks from now.
    The halftime show itself starts in embryo during band camp, in the shape of gridded charts showing where each performer should be at a given time, relative to the yard lines, hash marks, and home stands. After a day or so of marching basics, the band’s first priority is to memorize these charts – to absolutely internalize them, because during the halftime show, being out of place is bad, but moving to correct yourself after a halt is downright blasphemous. As could be expected, this whole process isn’t the easiest for newbies to grasp, so the band as a whole learns where to march by simple, monotonous repetition, soundtracked only by the click of a metronome.
    To break it down: the shapes the band forms are called charts. The time we spend standing still is called a halt, and the time we spend moving is, fittingly, called a move. One of the first things I noticed when I joined band, and something that still seems like a brilliant bit of misdirection, is that, very often, the moves between charts are much longer than the halts. When you’re watching a halftime show this year, count the number of beats that the band stands locked at attention, and then count the number of beats that it spends moving to its next chart. Almost always, the move will be longer.
    This is, simply, because of the baffling scale of the thing: over three hundred kids forming lines a hundred yards long – lines that are, literally, as long as a football field. And therein lies the other secret of marching band: because of the numbers involved in a show, marching is very often the least concern of band members. After about a week of getting used to moving to a beat (conveniently, exactly how long band camp is), the vast majority of newbies will have mastered the basic components of marching. Beyond that, the band members only have to memorize a few spots on a football field (a field that, uniquely among sports fields, has a regular system of markings that’s perfect for finding your spot) and what order to march to them in. The spots a band member has to march to are often quite far apart (thus, the long moves), but are rarely hard to find. Admittedly, problems happen – there was an infamous pregame show last year where the band appeared to spell out “HUPNETS” – but these are because of absent marchers, not people missing their mark. Marching, on the whole, is simpler than it seems.
    But marching, on its own, is nothing. A silent show by the marching band – three hundred kids walking from place to place, the only noise their footsteps and muffled muttering – would be pretty much worthless. Marching is transformed from a boring quasi-military activity to a spectacle by the real hard part of a halftime performance: the music.
    With some exceptions, new marching band members aren’t used to memorizing music, and some never learn. An open secret in the band is that at any given performance, a sizeable minority of the band isn’t playing a single note, and they have a legitimate, if unfortunate, reason for their actions – memorization is really, really difficult, especially in the volumes required for marching season. Any given show includes three full-length songs, Edina’s two fight songs, The Star-Spangled Banner, and an assortment of patriotic tunes for the pregame show – a feat to memorize by any measure.
    Those that choose to memorize their music, however, are the ones that make the band. They spend hours committing the tunes to their minds, and then, over band camp and the rare out-of-school rehearsal, match the charts they’ve repeated time after time to the music they’re sick of playing, and soon it becomes something else entirely. Fingers and feet begin moving in time to one another, sound and movement matching, and what would be on their own a few middling arrangements with strange instrumentation and a bunch of silly walking starts clicking together into something that’s worth the hours of time on the field and the hot, uncomfortable uniform and the constant commands shouted over a loud, feedback-prone speaker: it becomes pure spectacle, a thing for people to marvel at as they sit on cold bleachers and chatter amongst themselves and watch the moon burn a hole in the chilly October night.