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Students Help Design Drill

Erik Parmenter | April 2012


   Teaching at a small school in east central Illinois, it is difficult to find outside help or advice. We’ve always had a decent marching band, but my wife and I are the entire marching band staff. While some directors take their marching band design staff on winter retreats to brainstorm for a weekend, for my program, drill design has always been limited to what I can develop. This year I put together a student-led design team to help think of ideas. The team included the two drum majors and two students each from the color guard, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.
   Usually at the end of the season I start looking through music for next year, and as I get ideas I jot them down. Our show theme, Magnetic, came quickly, and browsing catalogs and listening to music online, I found songs that fit the theme well. At the initial meeting I gave each student a CD with the music on it along with the show theme. They had a week to listen to the music and come up with ideas, impressions, or pictures. The plan was to brainstorm and see what ideas students had.
   The second meeting was for three hours after school on a Friday. I played the music again, then listed each song on a whiteboard and had students volunteer ideas about pictures that came to mind. Each song represents something about magnets or attraction. For every song, each student had three or four different ideas, so we wrote them all down.
   Our opener is a piece called Gravitas. The students thought that it represented attraction or pulling things together. After we had gone through each tune, we came back to this one to sketch and discuss specific ideas and came up with an idea for the first set. The show will start out with the band spread out all over the field, and as the opener builds, they will come together into little groups, which will merge into larger groups. The entire band will end up in the shape of a triangle. Some students thought the first visual should be a circle, but we settled on the triangle shape as a stronger form. They also decided to have one group or section represent the magnet itself, pulling the other groups toward it or pushing them away.
   The second tune, Electricity, will represent repulsion. Students thought there were several spots in there where we could split the band in half with one group moving toward the other while it moves away. The two groups could go back and forth a bit, pushing and pulling each other. That ends with a big impact where everything stops suddenly, and students thought that should be a point where the band scatters.
   The third song, which I may replace, will revolve around the idea of opposites attracting. Both of the charts I am looking at have a couple different themes, each of which will be played separately with the band being split into different groups with each musical theme. By the end of the song they’ll build and come together again. All of the themes will be played to gether at the end of the song.
   Our closer is a combination of Breadfan by Metallica and a song called Alive and Amplified. This movement is going to be called “Electromagnetic.” It’s fast, high-powered rock music. We didn’t get much into this one at our meeting, but student ideas included lots of spinning or fast-moving drill to go along with the music.
   At this point we hadn’t written any specific drill; I wanted to keep the focus on picture ideas. At the end of the meeting I told students to keep listening to the music, specifically the first song, and to bring to the next meeting any ideas of pictures or forms they might get.
   Many of the students’ ideas were quite good, although a couple were impossible to work out on the marching band field. There were suggestions for all sorts of crazy props and costumes, and one student suggested remote-controlled, moveable drum major podiums. I had to point out we were limited in what we could do with such things.
   I plan to keep students involved as long as I can. At a second meeting in March we went through the rest of the first song and planned out as much of the drill as we could. We’ve been at about 70 members for the past several years, so we charted for that number. I would like to have drill for the first two songs written by the end of school.
   These meetings have students thinking about how things fit together rather than just where on the field they were supposed to be. It is my expectation that this will translate to increased leadership on the field this fall from these students. They will know how everything fits together and should be motivated to make sure everybody is doing things right.