Alex Ross wrote on Unquiet Thoughts the other day about what he calls the “marching-band Shostakovich underground.” It’s a cool post, and awesome to see some notice of marching music from the greatest living writer on the subject of music. Ross definitely did his research, referencing 13 different videos of high school and college marching bands, but unfortunately still didn’t find the answer to his own question of “when Shostakovich began to catch on with bands across the country.” Also, after all these years he still has the comments turned off, so I’m just going to seize the opportunity to respond in full here and also post some kickass videos. People keep asking me for drum corps 101, so…

Shostakovich 10th Symphony, Scherzo. Phantom Regiment, 2002.

The answer that Ross missed starts with my manifesto: a survey of “marching to Shostakovich” (or “marching to anything” for that matter) that features only high school and college marching bands without any mention of  Drum Corps International (DCI) is like trying to identify the best basketball players in the world without mentioning the NBA.

But I absolutely don’t fault him for not finding it – a google search for “Shostakovich marching band” or even just “Shostakovich marching” brings up nothing related to DCI. Also, drum corps lacks visibility in general and is still a cult phenomenon, known by a very small segment of the population (especially on the east coast, and especially among the classical music community). But that hasn’t kept it from evolving into a high art form in the 30 or so years since it crawled away from it’s military history.

Most of the bands Ross discovered were doing shows derived directly from a handful of highly influential drum corps performances:

Phantom Regiment 2002, featuring parts of the 7th and 10th Symphonies and 2nd piano concerto. Skip right to 1:35 for their badass (and often-imitated) version of that scherzo from the 10th, which I previewed above from the parking lot.

Phantom Regiment 1996, featuring parts of the 1st and 5th Symphonies.

Santa Clara Vanguard 1985, featuring Festive Overture.

In the world of marching music DCI does it first, and inevitably in the next decade or so high schools and college bands imitate. Music companies even sell these shows as package deals to high schools and colleges so that their staffs don’t have to write them (as Ross referenced with the “Fire of Eternal Glory” package). But even those companies aren’t innovating anything, but simply watering down and repackaging the shows created by the pros.

And who are the pros? Obviously there needs to be a creative team of adults to create the content, but what’s amazing about this activity is that the true pros are kids, for a couple of reasons. On the most fundamental level, they are the ones who are actually able to handle the physical stress of it. Check out a vingette about the physical demands on a tenor player:

Second, they are the ones who have nights and weekends all year and entire summers to devote to perfection (and they often pay out of their own pockets to do it). I personally retired from the activity at age 16 but even if someone wanted to continue, everyone is forced to “age out” around age 22. Our average summer in drum corps consisted of camps all weekend until the moment school was out, at which point we started 9 am – 9 pm rehearsals, with usually no more than a day or two off the entire summer. We toured for months on busses, slept on gym floors, rehearsed all day long in some of the hottest places in the country right in the dead of summer and performed at night. It’s simply divine hell on earth.

Back to Shostakovich: Ross referenced another post about the “badassery” dimension of the composer’s music. What does it jump at to prove that point? Of course the famous video of Dudamel doing the Shostakovich 10 scherzo, with the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. It’s natural that an activity full of kids would gravitate toward Shostakovich’s music. Kids do badassery better anyway. Even in orchestras, given the right leadership and guidance, some of the fieriest performances can be given by kids performing works for their first time. Drum corps is that fire and adrenaline multiplied by adding movement.

And how they move:

It is a fact that when these shows are imitated by high schools and colleges, the first thing to get watered down is the movement. It’s impossible, dangerous even, to try to do this stuff without hundreds of hours of rehearsal. The level this activity has reached is astounding, yet the majority of the country doesn’t even know it exists. And Shostakovich isn’t the only difficult 20th century composer they are tackling. Drum corps is where I first learned about John Adams, Philip Glass, Samuel Barber, Bela Bartok, among many others, when I was 14 years old. One might think an attempt at Shostakovich by a marching band is a ballsy cult-like venture if one still thinks the pinnacle of the activity is high school kids waddling around a football field playing Beatles arrangements. But do a quick search for Bartok or Stravinsky at this corps repertoire site. It is quite enlightening to the contrary.

Star of Indiana Rehearsing Barber’s “Medea,” 1993.

Moral of the story: sometimes I reaaaaly want to comment on Alex Ross’ blog. But also, summer is coming! The pros will be in your town soon. If anyone is interested I’ll write lots more on this over the course of the summer.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 11:27 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 9 Comments so far
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