Klarinet Archive - Posting 000241.txt from 2002/10

From: Karl Krelove <karlkrelove@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Marching band --- not what I expected
Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 15:56:57 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gary Van Cott [mailto:gary@-----.com]
>
> I participated in one of the most successful high school marching band
> programs in Southern California in the 1960s. In those days physical
> education was required every year in school in California and
> marching band
> was conducted as a PE class. We had a minimum number of additional
> practices (usually not more than 3 hours per week during marching
> season). That still doesn't prevent me from regretting those
> wasted hours
> marching up and down the football field or the street. How much
> better it
> would have been to have spent some time playing in a jazz band or
> woodwind
> quintet.

Or even playing baseball, basketball, touch football, etc., all of which are
probably much more effective vehicles for Physical Education than marching.
>
> I believe that the situation is much worse now in many places and
> the kids
> are being asked to put in many more hours than we did.

In our high school: 6 hours a week at night plus a couple of hours before
the game (usually Friday unless it's a holiday) plus 2 weeks of
**mandatory** band camp in August (before school begins in September) that
runs, I think, 9AM to 4PM every day. And if the band director has any
thought of cutting back on any of this, there's a very large and vocal
parent boosters' group to make sure he abandons any such thoughts quickly,
and an administration that, by coincidence, is full of former P.E. teachers
to agree with the parents.

As I've already said, and several posts since mine have agreed, DCI and
other such organized marching outlets are populated by willing, interested
enthusiasts. The problem is that frequently high school kids MUST be
available for this extra commitment of time and energy or they CANNOT
participate in the concert band program, which doesn't become active in any
meaningful way at our high school until mid-November or (if the football
team does well) early December.

What originally pressed my button was the implication in Bill's original
post that those of us who complain about school marching programs do so out
of unawareness that a marching band can be musical.

Karl Krelove

---------------------------------------------------------------------