Klarinet Archive - Posting 000885.txt from 1997/04

From: Gary Young <gyoung@-----.com>
Subj: RE: clarinets in marching bands
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 12:21:39 -0400

The dispute over marching bands has brought back some old memories. ("Old
memories": Your cue to tune out.)

My first year in high school in Arlington Heights, Illinois (fall 1953) I
wanted to be in concert band, which meant I had to be in marching band. I
refused to play my wood clarinet outdoors, so the director presented me
with a one-piece metal clarinet. That clarinet got real cold. So did I.

To reproduce this experience, put your metal clarinet in the freezer for 30
minutes (if you want, stick it under the faucet first, to get the effect of
snow), then take it out and play. Don't play Brahms; play something really
"classical" in marching band terms, like (yech!) "Phantom of the Opera."
See what this does for finger dexterity. Now put both the clarinet AND
YOUR HANDS in the freezer for 30 minutes and then play: see if that makes
things better. That's early winter marching band clarinet in northern
Illinois, at least circa 1953. That's not music. That's not clarinet
playing. That's just disgusting. (Is it merely an apocryphal story that a
Minnesota marching band clarinetist got his lower lip frozen to the
ligature and had to have it (i.e. the lip) amputated?)

I finally found a way out: My orthodontist (they had them even then) saw my
picture at the front of the marching band in the local paper (the picture
was lying open on the reception area table when I arrived for my
appointment), and he told me I had to stop playing clarinet. Well, I
didn't stop playing clarinet at home, but I did seize the opportunity to
tell the band director my orthodontist said I couldn't play clarinet in
marching band. Be careful what you wish for: The director put me on
cymbals, a huge old, disintegrating pair with long thin hard leather
straps, a musical purgatory. (I later played in college marching band one
year in Minnesota, for reasons that are completely obscure to me, and have
marched in more 4th of July parades than I can recall -- even up north it's
warm on the 4th.)

I shouldn't generalize from this. Probably with a plastic clarinet, hand
warmers, a less punitive/dumb band director, etc., my experience would have
been less painful. (Or I could have moved to Texas, where I hear it's
warm.) But I do find it difficult to imagine any circumstances (even in
Texas) in which playing clarinet in marching band (as opposed to pep band,
or concert band) is a constructive musical experience, however much fun it
might be as a social experience (and it can be fun, if it's WARM enough).
I think Michael Moors is right: the only institutional purpose of marching
band in high school and college is PR (and to manifest the ideological
subservience of the arts in America to football, and subservience of
musicians to football players and wealthy male alumni), and we should
commiserate with the music educators who must somehow do it. (Though lots
of folks here in Madison WI, where Mike Leckrone has the state of the art
UW marching band, would disagree. Here people go to football games not to
see the games but to see (SEE, NOT HEAR) the band.)

That's about 8 cents worth.

Gary Young