Why band music in schools is what it is

[nancylebov]

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/who-likes-band-music.html#comments

Answers to why band music is standardized into something which has so little resemblance to what most people listen to for fun, with a sidetrack into why people listen to live music at all.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Are we talking about marching bands or concert bands here? Or, if there's just one band, in which context?

When I was in high school, our marching band repertoire was fairly narrow, with the expected school songs, a lot of marches, and some arrangements of popular tunes from a few years back.

The concerts had a lot more variety, including arrangements of classical pieces.

When I was in the MIT band, it specialized in original music written for band, which was mostly 20th-century music.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

Interesting that it took well down into the comments before someone raised what one would think might be a key issue: the expense of purchasing arrangements and/or getting performance rights to the really good pop music.

(Also, based on my experience in high school band ages and ages ago, band arrangements of pop tunes are -- from the point of view of most of the band members -- stultifyingly dull to play. Our high school had a so-called "drill team", which is Southern-Baptist speak for a chorus line of dancing girls in revealing outfits, who were allowed by the unwritten rules of high school social interaction to have second choice of the football players after all the cheerleaders had made their picks,† and the band was stuck learning a new piece every week for their part of the halftime show. Words cannot express how mind-numbingly boring those arrangements were. Or how much the female band members hated the drill team girls. But that's a separate issue. I think.)

And heck, there are people out there who like band music. Mostly former band members, probably, but there are a fair number of us. It's been decades -- and I was never very good (I was, in fact, the third-worst clarinet player in Denison, Texas) -- but the start of the trio of the National Emblem march can still make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

†As opposed to the band geeks, who were by equally unwritten law only allowed to date other band geeks.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

I played in full symphonic orchestras most of my school years. We had great arrangements, including things like Eleanor Rigby and Theme from The Pink Panther, along with lovely classical arrangements such as Felix Mendelssohn's The Hebrides "Die Hebriden" (Fingal's Cave). I rarely attended Band things, and here around DC, you get lots and lots and lots of John Phillip Sousa - if you don't know The Washington Post March by age 6, somethings wrong. lol

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

OH, and we played Killing Me Softly in Marching band, too. So some pop music is out there for full band.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

I agree with most of the points brought up- that wind ensemble is different from pop orchestration, that some pop "music" (esp. hip-hop and rap) is completely unsuitable for wind band, tradition, the skill level of the students, and the expense of buying new arrangements if and when they exist.

There is one other point to be made, though. There are some pieces of music which just plain sound better as band music- including a lot of pop songs that, without bands, would have deservedly vanished into the ether. (25 or 6 to 4, anyone? Better yet, The Final Countdown?)

This doesn't excuse the vast overuse of Andrew Lloyd (blech) Weber by bands, though. When I was in high school, two out of three bands put the main theme from Phantom of the Opera into their repertoire. (Since the repertoire of a crappy small-town high school band consists of Alma Mater, On Wisconsin, and one other song, you can guess how often I heard that played... badly.

And I was in a top-notch (although tiny) band system- taught not merely to read music but to sight-read music, to memorize, to tune instruments, to practice practice practice. I knew just how very, very bad some bands were... and still had to sit and listen from an average distance of about sixty yards, ten nights every fall.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

And I was in a top-notch (although tiny) band system- taught not merely to read music but to sight-read music, to memorize, to tune instruments, to practice practice practice. I knew just how very, very bad some bands were... and still had to sit and listen from an average distance of about sixty yards, ten nights every fall.

Our band was fairly good, as well -- our problem was that our school was the smallest school in a division that included the school districts in places like Richardson and Highland Park, which even then had much more money and a much deeper talent pool to draw from. Nevertheless, we were always a bit scornful of bands who didn't play their marching music, at least, from memory. (Another reason we all hated the drill team: we had to quick-memorize a new piece every week for their blasted dance routine.)

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

I happen to like band music, and I'm not a band geek (unless you count a very brief stint playing snare drums in grade school). The unique requirements of band arrangements make it really a whole genre unto itself, even when it's a well-known pop song being played. And my college, LSU, has one of the best bands anywhere...the Golden Band from Tigerland!

Trust me, you haven't lived until you've heard a marching band do the "Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show...

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

I was very lucky: my dinky small-town school system that was so weak in every other area had 2 exceptionally good music teachers, 1 vocal and 1 instrumental. We nearly always lost the game, but we nearly always "won" the halftime.

Band was not graded. There weren't even seat rankings. With occasional exceptions, the freshmen played 3rd parts, the sophomores 2d, the juniors & seniors 1st. (Attrition kept these numbers in balance.) The best senior player became 1st chair; there was rarely any question who that was. (I mentioned exceptions: I was 1st chair 1st clarinet from 8th grade to graduation. This did a great deal to help make my life *out* of band hell.)

Concert band was a long history of the director picking mildly ambitious music that had to be abandoned because the band members passive-aggressively refused to exert themselves or just plain lacked the technical chops. Not the band director's fault, but as the sole instrumental teacher K-12, he could only do so much. Being a rural school district meant few to no afterschool practices -- what, pay the bus drivers overtime?

In college, most of the band was music majors who were planning to become music teachers themselves. This led to more than the usual variety & creativity in the music and marching routines. I still remember fondly the lengthy Stars Wars medley routine that was picked to showcase some expensive new percussion instruments but worked musically as well. And of course, marching down the field playing the main theme as (quite literally) thousands cheered thrilled more than just my inner band geek.