As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. Now we come to the most modern marching shows available. Props continue to be more thoroughly integrated into the show, and the color guard continues to be used to add color and visual contrast, as well as actual actors in a story. Electronics are now integrated into the DCI shows as well, and we see the drum majors of Phantom Regiment’s 2008 production being used as characters throughout the entire performance. Many corps are now…

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. As we moved into the new millennium, the color guard moved further from the hornline and drumline as far as uniforms, but began to interact much more with the individual members. Where the early 90s has included an occasional soloist interacting with the guard, now large groups of the hornline were doing full out ballet moves and poses throughout the shows.

Though it had been before, the marching show is now even more dance- and…

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. As music selections moved away from the more traditional Broadway and Latin Jazz themes that had dominated the early years of drumcorps, corps began focusing more on classical-type (mostly Romantic era and early 20th century) and concert band music. This development continued through the bulk of the 1990s, with the addition of more elaborate props and other visual elements.

1994 – Blue Devils
Video unavailable. In 1994, Star of Indiana left DCI and began touring…

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. Last time we saw how the Garfield Cadets transformed the marching by speeding things up and adding pass-thrus and of course the famous “Z Pull.” If 1983-1987 was about revolutionizing marching style, 1988-1993 was about bucking the traditional musical elements. One of the key innovators in this area was The Star of Indiana, who left DCI following the 1993 season.

1988 – Madison Scouts

1989 – Santa Clara Vanguard

1990 –…

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. So far, we’ve seen the first 11 years of DCI. In 1983, the Garfield Cadets began their three-year of DCI dominance with some of the most innovative marching drill ever seen. The Blue Devils won in 1986, and the Cadets were back on top in 1987.

1983 – Garfield Cadets

1984 – Garfield Cadets

1985 – Garfield Cadets

1986 – Blue Devils
Embedding disabled, click here for the video. However,…

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. Yesterday, we saw some classic footage from the first five years of DCI. Today, we’ll look at the next six years.

1977 – Blue Devils
I can’t find a video! I did find one of the Kilties from 1977 (11th Place) though.

1978 – Santa Clara Vanguard
Embedding disabled. Click here to watch the excerpt.

Here’s the 1978 Phantom Regiment (2nd place) finale.

1979 – Blue Devils
Video unavailable. Here is the 1979…

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. Today, we’ll look at the first five DCI finals. Since video footage is rare from these days, I am really surprised to be able to find recordings from each of these years.

1972 – Anaheim Kingsmen
YouTube Embedding disabled, watch the excerpt here

1973 – Santa Clara Vanguard

1974 – Santa Clara Vanguard

1975 – Madison Scouts

Another video is available here but the embedding is disabled. I link to this one…

As the school year winds down, band directors invariably begin turning their minds towards the upcoming marching season. This year, I have a 7th grade percussionist who knows a ton of trivia about Drum Corps International. His father used to march and has taught across the country, so he comes to middle school with a much better background of the history of drumming than most students.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been having some conversations with him and I began to realize that he doesn’t know a lot about the old history of marching, and I don’t know a lot about recent marching history. So I thought I’d go look through the YouTube archives and watch parts of as…

I saw this cartoon posted on The Yellow Board yesterday and thought some of my musician-type readers wouldappreciate it. The cartoon is by John Bogenschutz (www.johnmusic.com).

Over the Christmas Break, a few of the band directors from around the area got together and played some quartets around town. I’m the only one who has played seriously since college, and it’s been about 5 months since I did that too. We were all suffering by the time we got to the end of our gigging. So the “Wonders how much longer he can keep his streak of not touching an instrument going” comment really made me crack up when I first saw it. Anyway, I hope you enjoy Dissection of a…

Here is a brief summary of the last 19 months of my life.

In December of 2007, I was getting ready for work one Friday morning. I got a phone call from one of the high school assistant band directors. He told me that the other middle school director I work with had a stroke and was at the hospital. This was a huge blow to the band program as he has been in the district longer than I’ve been alive. It also made for a difficult month for me that included taking two bands to the Christmas Parade the next day, taking each band to four elementary concerts on consecutive days the next week, and preparing both bands for…

When I first started out, I was living by myself far away from home. I didn’t have any friends in the community outside of the school. And those were either other band directors or band parents. I didn’t do anything to really try to keep in contact with college friends, I sort of had the Lone Ranger type approach.

That was way back in 2002. My how things have changed!  Now, education prep programs all over seem to be requiring students to read and comment on blogs as part of their education. With that being said, I have seen quite a rise in the number of educational blogs out there since I started blogging two years ago.

I have seen…

I was supposed to have my Pre-UIL concert tonight, but we were informed yesterday afternoon that the 7th Graders would be having pre-registration that night instead and they need to use the cafetorium, and gym. Of course! By the time I left school at 5:45 this afternoon, parents were already showing up and trying to go into the band hall. Evidently they had meetings scheduled in there tonight also.

Lemme tell you, I can’t wait to get to the band hall tomorrow morning and figure out what they’ve done with my chairs and stands that I had set up for our 7am rehearsal!

So in my last article, I mentioned that I require pass-offs and also that I cut students….

Calebteaches got me thinking about this today.

How old are you?

Do you have a girlfriend?

Do you have a MySpace?

I love working with middle school kids. When I was teaching 6th grade, I got a lot of these weird questions. Now that I’m working with 7th & 8th graders, I get less of them, but the rumors become more elaborate.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my 7th graders asked me if I was going out with a band director at another school in our district. I told her no. But as I thought about it, I realized this is probably the best rumor that I’ve ever heard floating around about me. Much better than the typical…

I love the week following Christmas break. The students (and teachers) have accustomed themselves to staying up late. Many of them woke up Monday morning earlier than they went to sleep Friday night/Saturday morning. As a result, Monday and Tuesday were sleep-deprived transition days. Classroom management was much simpler on those days than many days so far this year.

I can’t help but think of those poor student teachers who have started waking up before 10am for the first time in years. With college class schedules having 15 minute breaks built in on busy days and three or four hour gaps of relaxation time on the standard days, how are they handling the workload of a real 8-hour day? What…

When I began turning my band around during my second year, I received some of the best advice ever from one of my former band directors. He noted that he had observed three Rehearsal Skills that were lacking in most bad bands. These same three Rehearsal Skills are present in most great bands. The three skills are:

1. Do not turn and talk to your neighbor when you are not playing.
   This eliminates the “but we were talking about the music” part of the “DO NOT TALK” equation.
2. Sit still and quiet when the band director is working with another section.
   I don’t have any idea how many times kids got up without asking to during my first

…

Nothing in the classroom is worth added stress in your life. Nothing.

I know so many band directors (and other teachers as well, but mostly band directors) who get so incredibly worked up over their jobs that they lose their health, marriage, youthful physique, energy, or alienate their own children. Why? Because of their own selfish pride.

Just because nothing catastrophic happens this year doesn’t mean that nothing will. Stress can be cumulative in your life and may be building up and festering over a period of a handful of years.

The best solution is to stop. Now.

How do we avoid stress?
I have written at great length about this in the past, so instead of…

As we begin the summer vacation, I am looking back on what went really well this year, what didn’t work so well, and what needs to change for next year. Below are some of the negatives about this year:

• Lack of social life – While not entirely true, and things have changed for the positively since I began playing in a mariachi in April. But I still notice that I am far away from my family and many of my friends before I moved down here. Even after being in South Texas for four years, I find that my social life is limited to time spent with other band directors, and a small handful of church friends. Maybe that’s

…

This may well be the first time I have written about my teaching life without really setting out a solution or providing much helpful information. Let me know what you think.

Last Friday, the other band director I work with had a mild stroke. He is recovering and is at home resting now. The doctors told him to not return to work for six weeks. As you might imagine, Christmas is a terrible time for band directors to be out like this.

I got to take his band on a Christmas Tour on Thursday, and my band today. We have to make arrangements with other band directors to come over from other campuses to cover the classes that are here…