Get the latest tech news
High-School Band Contests Turn Marching into a Sport–and an Art
Band kids today don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers.
The military themes were repurposed for football, the patriotic tunes replaced with jazz rock and power ballads: “Black Magic Woman,” “25 or 6 to 4,” “MacArthur Park.” I played violin in the high-school orchestra and sometimes envied the band kids across the hall. “We’ve all burned ourselves already.”) Megan Davidson’s father, Bill, was grilling burgers and rib eyes outside, while his wife, Peggy, whose left arm was in a cast from carpal-tunnel surgery two days earlier, filled in where needed. One morning before the contest began, I spent an hour with Daniel Wiles at Avon High School, watching a video of “Mondriesque.” The show started simply, with five white cubes on the field and the band clustered around them, then built to a kaleidoscopic complexity.
Or read this on Hacker News
