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The marching band to a certain extent is a service organization that, uh, helps fill
some of the expectations in, uh, the university community, including, uh, school spirit and,
uh, we have a high level of visibility, among the organizations that create music on campus.
We have orchestra and choir and band and jazz ensemble and, uh, basketball pep band and,
uh, so forth. But, of all of those, uh, perhaps the, uh, the most frequently seen is the, uh, is
the marching band and we hope that we represent the other musical organizations in a way that
will encourage people to be supportive of our artform, in, in uh, in it's entirety.
For music education majors, we are required to be in marching band for one semester. Um,
that's not why I joined it, though. I'm really passionate about marching band, um, I'm just
really into athletic bands, they're kinda my favorite ensemble to participate in.
We meet, um, regularly like any other class would. We meet Monday, Wednesday, Fridays.
We rarely have any other additional practice outside of that so it's just regular class
meeting time, um, and then we come in before every game, rehearse a little bit and perform
for every home football game.
The most intimidating thing for me was walking in and seeing that my section was almost the
size of my high school marching band. The music's way harder than high school, the drills
are way harder way more of a level of challenge. It's been fun, though.
Well I was really good at marching band in high school and I thought I would, that the
opportunity was here so that I should take it and I really just wanted to meet a lot
of friends that had the same interest in marching band as I do, mostly the social aspect.
I like it in high school and then I decided I wasn't gonna do it again, but once I did
it one year here, I decided you know what, I'm gonna come back because that was a good
time that I had and I'm making a lot of friends doing it so overall, it's been a great experience.
Throughout the season we just kinda become a family, um, and these are the people that,
you know, your friendship lasts a really long time with them. Um, they're the people that
you wanna hang out with everyday and at the end of the day we're just, it's one big family and
we just kinda love each other.
Our job in teaching the arts is to encourage the kids to have a musical experience that
kinda raises the hair on the back of their neck and I'm one who feels that, uh, it doesn't
matter a whole lot if you're playing Black Sabbath on the football field or Beethoven
in the concert hall, if it connects with kids and it helps them start to move toward artistic
expression, um, musical maturity, uh, aesthetic appreciation, um, then it takes all different
kinds of music to, uh, to do that, to meet those needs for the students.
And freeze.