Klarinet Archive - Posting 000900.txt from 1997/04

From: gcrawfor@-----.edu (Genevieve Crawford)
Subj: Re: marching bands
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 15:25:00 -0400

>
>At 11:45 PM 4/28/97 -0500, you wrote
>>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.

I love marching band. In high school, I wish marching band was a class,
and I wish that we got credit for it. We didn't have a class hour for
marching band, it was extra-curricular. We had rehearsal every day of the
week from 6:30 am (yes, before school) to 7:50am. This meant we had to be
at school by 6:15am to be ready in time. We would have a 3 hour rehearsal
on Monday nights, and on game days, we would be at school for almost 15
hours straight with rehearsals and the game. And then on some Saturdays
we would have parades and performances.

Our marching band consisted of 250 students who VOLUNTERRED to march (how
many students do you know of who volunteer to get up and practice at
6:15am every morning?). We had no requirement that people in the concert
bands had to march. If we did, we would have had about a 350 member
marching band.

If we didn't have our marching band, we would have lost our entire band
program to budget cuts about 4 years ago.

About pics in marching band. We marched about 15 flutes and 2 pics. My
view is this, if they didn't allow pics or flutes to march, then they
wouldn't allow clarinets to march. Because as you know, clarinets and
flutes are the only two instruments that keep it from becoming an all
brass (and sax's) with percusion marching band. We don't want that to
happen!

By the way, we had 30 clarinets in our marching band and YOU COULD HEAR
US!

Just my opinion.

Jen
Central Michigan University
Music Ed Major

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