Klarinet Archive - Posting 000880.txt from 1997/04

From: "Michael D. Moors" <mdmoors@-----.us>
Subj: Re: marching bands/band competitions
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 12:21:34 -0400

To Ed Lacy:

I didn't view your post as taking "potshots" at marching band at all. As a
band director/clarinetist let me bring up an even more tragic subject. It
is truly sad when band festival set the agenda for the months of
January-May. Many schools that I know of play the same three pieces during
Jan.-May to get the (ego building) superior rating. School administration
is to naive to know that particularly at the middle school level that no
teaching is taking place.

Mike Moors

At 11:45 PM 4/28/97 -0500, Edwin V. Lacy wrote:
>On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, Michael D. Moors wrote:
>
>> Marching band is vital for the PR of instrumental music. Voters will
>> support band in elections because marching band is one of the only groups
>
>I'm not an outsider taking potshots at the marching band world. I came
>from the public school music program, played in marching bands through
>junior high school, high school and the first two years of college. I
>have a degree in music education, and was a public school music teacher
>and band director (including marching) for six years. However, we always
>managed to keep the marching program in some sort of perspective. It
>didn't rule our lives, as it often does today.
>
>When my children were in high school band, they had marching band
>rehearsal the first period of each school day. So, the director had them
>come to school at 7:00 a.m., so that they could have two hours of marching
>each morning. Then, they had a 3 hour rehearsal every Thursday evening,
>went back to school at 5:00 on Friday evening and practiced for a couple
>of hours before their football game. Then there were one or two marching
>contests every Saturday from September through early November. All this
>time, they played only their 13 minutes of memorized music.
>
>Then, when marching season was over and concert band began, the rehearsals
>reverted to the regular schedule of 50 minutes rehearsal per day, with no
>extra, outside-of-school-hours rehearsals. That shows me where the
>priorities are.
>
>All this was in a school in which the director tuned the band only just
>before a marching contest. On the other days, it didn't seem to matter.
>My children were in this band for four years each, and not once did either
>one of them hear the words tone quality, intonation, blend, balance,
>phrasing, musicality, interpretation or many others which are normally
>used in a _musical_ setting. The program finally got so bad that parents
>would go to concerts and videotape them, and then send the tapes to the
>school board members, because otherwise, no one could possibly believe how
>bad it was.
>
>There are schools in this area which will complete their final marching
>contest on a Saturday in November and then on the following Monday, they
>will have the first organizational meeting for the next year's marching
>band!
>
>The band can provide all the PR that it and the school system need without
>taking over the entire lives of the students and their teachers. This is
>why we get so many people at the college level who are totally burned out
>with bands and music. It is also why you very seldom see a high school
>band director as much as 40 years old in a school with a competitive
>marching band program. (I know there are a few exceptions.) I also
>attribute to the fact that my children were relegated to a program of this
>type that neither of them went into music as a profession.
>
>Ed Lacy
>*****************************************************************
>Dr. Edwin Lacy University of Evansville
>Professor of Music 1800 Lincoln Avenue
> Evansville, IN 47722
>el2@-----.edu (812)479-2754
>*****************************************************************
>
>
>
>
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/ O | mdmoors@-----.us
http://edcen.ehhs.cmich.edu/~mmoors/