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 many of the DCI world championship performances as I could find. So I figured I’d share them with you as well. Originally, I had all of the videos on one page, but it ended up being too big, so I have since decided to turn this into a series of articles and break things down into smaller segments. Check them out:

• 1972-1976
• 1977-1982
• 1983-1987
• 1988-1993
• 1994-1998
• 1999-2004
• 2005-2009

In the mean time, be sure to subscribe to the DCI Field Pass Podcast (RSS) to receive the latest updates on DCI events throughout the 2010 season.

Joel Wagner

Joel Wagner (@sywtt) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting. He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. So You Want To Teach? is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.