Boise's band played a Sousa tune during their halftime performance. OUr band played a Queen medley..."Fat-Bottomed Girls" no less.
Now, I like Freddy Mercury as much as any straight man can, but college bands need to stick to movie themes and Sousa marches like the good Lord intended. Everything else is rubbish.
I am now officially joining the "Fire Britt Coalition of Aggrieved Marching Band Appreciators."
Thanks for listening.
"Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever they can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser; in fees, expenses and waste of time." -- Abraham Lincoln, (1809-1865) Lawyer and President who saved the United States.
"Without opportunities on the part of the poor to obtain expert legal advice, it is idle to talk of equality before the law"-- Justice Chas. Evans Hughes
Whatever I heard BSU's band playing bored the heck out of me.
yes, but did you noticed how badly they played Sousa?
not to say the pride's rendition of Queen wasn't horrendous....
"I'm a mother****ing party all by myself."
Not to mention Fox didn't to a whole lot in helping either band sound very good. It always amazes me when the TV folks combine sound from mics in the press box and a mic on the end of a camera stuck up the bell of a mellophone or trombone.
That crap doesn't do anybody any favors as far as sound quality.
NOW GO AWAY OR I SHALL TAUNT YOU A SECOND TIME!
that guy's hat is sweet, and i love those shouldery star trek things.
Ugh. I hate Sousa, and I play trombone, where we get good parts. Saying marching bands should stick to Sousa is like saying rock music should've stopped with Elvis.Originally Posted by Okla-homey
Boise's band played a Sousa tune during their halftime performance. OUr band played a Queen medley..."Fat-Bottomed Girls" no less.
Now, I like Freddy Mercury as much as any straight man can, but college bands need to stick to movie themes and Sousa marches like the good Lord intended. Everything else is rubbish.
I am now officially joining the "Fire Britt Coalition of Aggrieved Marching Band Appreciators."
Thanks for listening.
Sorry Homey, I agree with 90% of what you post, but I don't back you on this one.
"Great advice, kid. Way to step up to the plate and knock it out of the park for Team Fail." - bri
movie themes, vomit.
[QUOTE=Okla-homey]Boise's band played a Sousa tune during their halftime performance. OUr band played a Queen medley..."Fat-Bottomed Girls" no less.
But they were playing it in honor the Boise flag girls
I figured this out a couple months ago. No offense intended and with all due respect, here's the dealio, as I see it.
College marching band people think the band is about making the bandmembers happy. Others (as in everyone else) believe a college marching band is about making the fans happy. Unfortunately for both, it appears the two views are often mutually exclusive.
I call it The Great College Marching Band Dichotomy. Note: Band parents, band alums and musicians generally, tend to line-up in the "bandmember" branch therefore they are not sufficiently objective to be categorized in the "everyone else" branch.
Therefore, I humbly offer a solution. Just have a core of decently paid professionals in the band, around which students members can gel if they want to be a part of it. If a few student members get bored or tired of it, they can leave, but the band will be okay because the professionals will carry the load. This approach seems to work at the service academies...and mega-church orchestras.
"Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever they can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser; in fees, expenses and waste of time." -- Abraham Lincoln, (1809-1865) Lawyer and President who saved the United States.
"Without opportunities on the part of the poor to obtain expert legal advice, it is idle to talk of equality before the law"-- Justice Chas. Evans Hughes
It's a nice idea but it wouldn't work. OU barely gives out scholarship money to the students in the band - by which I mean a couple of people might see at most $1,000 per semester, and that's the extreme top end. Most people (that are getting a scholarship at all, which is probably under 25% of the band) are getting $100 to $500 a semester. That's it. There's no budget to pay anyone.
See, I take yet another approach to how a marching band should work. Variety is key - you have to change up what the band is playing constantly to keep everyone happy. You also have to mix really fresh, current stuff with the standby favorites. Then there are two other things you really have to do to keep people interested.
1. Play the **** out of anything you do. Whether the band likes the show or not, you're playing someone's favorite song, and they don't want to hear you play it like you hate it. You have to play absolutely everything you do like you're playing lead trumpet in Stan Kenton's band and they just called up Malaguena.
2. Stop taking yourself so seriously and do something entertaining every once in a while. You have to engage the audience for them to enjoy your performance. If that means every once in a while you do a "sing-along" show and see which section of the crowd can sing louder, do it. If it means you have the flag girls ditch the flags and stage a massive Jackie Chan-style brawl just because it's funny - do it. Anything to do something the audience isn't expecting that will hold their interest. Oh, and when you do stuff like that - you can't do that halfway either.
... that's not food.
One day, I expect GHP to be one kick *** band director.
Apollo Beach Sooner
As a former french horn player, I hate Sousa!!! I was never in the Pride, but was happy to see them blow Boise State's band out of the water on TV
Many changes probably need to be made, but adding Sousa music would be much like that stupid waving crap the band does.
Heh. Thanks for the vote of confidence, but that's one professional arena I plan never to enter. I plan to make my money actually playing an instrument.
... that's not food.
hah....you can 'moonlight' as a band director
Hey, don't get me wrong. One of my main complaints about the band now is that the show selection doesn't really appeal to many people. I get that. The problem is, you've got to balance that with stuff the kids will enjoy playing, and you have to take into account that not everyone likes the same things. If the Pride played all-Sousa-all-the-time, it would be about the size of Boise State's band (In terms of number of people, not girth), because I know very few musicians who enjoy performing marches.
I also think that if they went all-Sousa, the crowd would eventually tire of it. Yeah, I know everyone loves A&M and what they do, but if they saw it every week, it'd get old. (Note: it doesn't get old to A&M people because they're muhfuggin' crazy cult people.) I do agree that college marching band HAS to be about the audience first (a view i totally disagree with for high school), but you can have too much of a good thing, if that's what you consider Sousa to be.
I think we agree that we're not really into the tunes they've been picking out for the band in recent years. We just disagree in how far to change it. I'd love to see college bands get MORE current and stop playing the tunes from the 60s-80s that bands have been playing since the 60s-80s. Hell, take a week, flip towards the students and play some Gnarls Barkley (with some style, for the love of all that is holy), or U2, or something from the last decade and a half. I guess I just think there's room to progress and still entertain, which doesn't seem to be your view. No biggie, 85,000 people aren't gonna agree on everything.
"Great advice, kid. Way to step up to the plate and knock it out of the park for Team Fail." - bri
i don't know, i played sax in jr, high and quit about the time we were playing the love boat and Dallas theme songs. i could read music from playing the piano and was listening to the Stones and Floyd.....and we're playing the love boat theme?
pass.
when I interviewed Coach, he talked about balance being key. Play some marches to keep the traditional/older crowd happy, do some newer things so the kids in the band enjoy it, and do some drum corps style stuff to make the drum corps monkeys happy, and you keep it pretty well balanced so everyone's happy most of the time. Plus when he was in charge, the band played and marched the **** out of everythign they played (like GHP said). However, he drew the line at aggie marching.
the balance thing only works if you're doing everything at a very high level, though. it doesn't work if you suck. if you suck, trying to balance just makes things worse. Seriously, it's like a kid with inner ear problems trying to walk on a tightrope over a bunch of spikes. It's just going to be ugly.
Now they're trying to do even more things than ever (in terms of how BB runs everything and what the band members are in charge of) and pulling off far fewer of them. They've already cut down the number of shows they do in one season, they have more band members. Everywhere you look, they're being sort of stretched, like... butter scraped over too much bread.
Hell, I don't blame you.
"Great advice, kid. Way to step up to the plate and knock it out of the park for Team Fail." - bri
From being at the game:
I couldn't really hear either band very well. However, their band was significantly smaller than ours.
From what I could hear, our band was tighter and sounded better.
Our formations and lines were much crisper than theirs.
Dammit, I want "Boomer Sooner" so loud it rips the top off the building. When "Oklahoma" is playing, I want to barely be able to hear myself singing "You're doing fine Oklahoma! Oklahoma, O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A!"
"The choices we discern as having been made in the Constitutional Convention impose burdens on governmental proceses that often seem clumsy, inefficient, even unworkable, but those hard choices were consciously made by men who had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked." INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983) (Burger, C.J.)
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