The Art of Marching
by Stella Tarlin
photos by Meria Ivy
Meria Ivy for Fools Magazine
Marching has changed the way I move—my toes arching into rollstep if I want to be fast without running. Marching has changed the way I hear—my ears itching to break apart melodies and rearrange them into forms that can be moved to, that can be played by the three tiers of trumpets that occupy my favorite section. Marching has changed the way I interact with people—challenging me to befriend almost sixty trumpets and navigate a section party. Six years of band camp pain and as many football seasons’ worth of performances have a way of ingraining themselves into a person, of changing the tune of an identity until its prior melody has become something unrecognizable. Most recently, that change has forced me to reexamine my definition of art, to step back and look through others’ eyes in an attempt to show the world what I feel to be true: Marching band can be an art form. It can be beautiful.
From a musical perspective, it becomes almost too easy to brush aside the question of art. A marching show is a musical performance; the band members play instruments. And, in the words of Emily Laverty, my leader in the Hawkeye Marching Band (HMB) trumpet section, “you do have to have a sense of actual musicality.” Iowa’s HMB has an extra two hours of music rehearsal every Tuesday night, after two hours of visual practice. Under Emily’s direction, the trumpet section also meets early before every game day rehearsal, working last minute to find the music in the sound we play. Though these rehearsals are entirely student-run and optional, trumpets are not the only ones to hold them. We don’t sound like professionals by any means, most of us aren’t even music majors, but there’s still a need among the band to sound good, to sound musical–I can’t believe anyone would argue that good music is not a form of art.
Meria Ivy for Fools Magazine
From a visual perspective, however, art becomes more difficult to find. Ben Stone, leader of the HMB drumline’s quad section, argued first that “you’re creating something and performing” as a reason that marching is an art, but it took almost no time for him to second-guess himself, qualifying that “[performance] doesn’t necessarily make something art, but it does in this case.” There is something artistic in the act of marching, something besides the music and the performance. Yet, for both Ben and I, that something resists identification.
Even the visual aspect of marching band can be broken down into smaller pieces, parts of a beautiful whole, but those pieces as well resist analysis. The band is made of sections, of squads, of members. Visual technique breaks down into individual movements and the drill that guides our forms, and the accuracy of a single step depends on size, posture, and the angle of my leg, on forms themselves and the collaborative process of guiding a line as it moves. As a whole, all these elements combine to capture flashes of something artful, but it is difficult to say the same for any single part.
On the level of each member, it could be argued that artistry hinges on the type and level of marching being performed. When a World Class member of Drum Corps International (DCI), the top level of competitive marching, takes the field, surely they’re participating in a form of art. DCI elevates their performance far beyond the need for a football team to open and close for them, and corps members’ individual performances incorporate an undeniable amount of physical artistry. Over the years, corps have come to include many dance elements, and many shows are downright theatrical. Though their physical prowess is impressive as well, DCI members are undeniably artists.
For a collegiate band like the HMB, that assessment becomes much more complicated. Our movements are not those of a dancer. The burning soreness in my legs every August tells me that it takes skill to roll one’s toes in time, to keep up a proper high step, but that movement is regimented, not interpretive. Once learned, a style of marching is repeated robotically throughout a show. Is a dancer an artist if they only know two dance moves? Can that be beautiful? Like the controversy of a solid black canvas sold as high art, there seems to be an unspoken rule connecting artistry with complexity.
I know that I am not a dancer.
Is it possible for individual movements that are not art to add up to something that is? Band members and our steps do not exist in a vacuum, and the combination of our efforts draws massive pictures across football fields. At the very least, the pictures themselves must then be kind of art. Writing drill, the maps that guide our forms, is a complex task. As Emily put it, “you can have a vision in your mind of how it’s gonna look, but… it makes me think of impressionist painters. Y’know, each dot, each specific point, is helping create a bigger image.” And, beyond pulling from the ideas of pointillism, drill writers have to animate between forms, ensure that each image has the same number of points and that those points can reach one another in time and without collision.
Meria Ivy for Fools Magazine
By this logic, larger movements of a marching show are a work of art by their writer, and the band members are the pieces that make up that art. But, to reference a famous example of pointillism, is each tiny dot of paint in Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon an artwork of its own? What if each of those dots had to train for weeks, months, years in order to perfect its color and learn its spot on the canvas? Though college bands aren’t DCI-elite, it’s taken me years to learn to march and guide a form the way I can now. Endless reps of basics to teach my muscles how to push and bend my knees to 120-degree angles, my thighs parallel to the ground. Years of straining my peripheral vision and counting yard lines until I can follow a form, until every step is a perfect 22-and-a-half inches. It’s hard, rewarding work, but I don’t find myself feeling like an artist as I do it. I know as well as anyone that the completed effect of a show, of a set of forms, can be beautiful and exciting to watch, but the process, even in the exhilaration of a show well finished, feels less artful.
Though the examination of fine details often holds the key to a mystery, I struggle with that process here. Like the many small notes of a symphony, each point of color in a painting, each step of a marching show is not a work of art, each member not an artist. Yet, somewhere in the process of combining and coordinating all of those pieces, something artful can be found. And, in that act of combination itself, something beautiful can be found.
When I asked them about what they found beautiful about marching band, every person whose interviews I’ve used here answered that it was the collaboration, the camaraderie. As Josh Neuenschawnder, graduate TA of the HMB trumpets, said, “260 people playing as one, to get 260 people on the same page...I think the connection that’s drawn together… that’s a really amazing thing. I think that’s a really beautiful thing.” Or, as Dr. Eric Bush, director of the HMB, often says, “the band is a family.” We spend countless hours together working to become one unit with 260 moving pieces, and it takes a powerful bond to do that.
Band members are only people, only dots on the field, but collective effort creates much more than a collection of dots. A band is a family made out of strangers, a massive pointillist animation where before there was only the gritty turf of a football field. It is a knitting together of countless people, a meshing of athletics and music and visual art. And, as Dr. Bush said, the meshing of all these components does nothing but allow them to “complement and facilitate each other.” The practice of marching has changed my body and my mind, and when I’m on the field, it transforms me into something more than myself, a part of something grand.
Marching can be a beautiful, exciting experience, and the whole of it can be beautiful and exciting to watch. Hidden behind grid lines and football fans, behind a pre-rehearsal workout and those infamous marching sock tans, is something beautiful. And in that beauty, in the sum of the many un-artistic parts, is an art of its own.
