It's Halftime - Where Did the Band Go?

Do we really want or need a halftime with more jock talk?

     In the interest of transparency, I spent a lot of time in and with marching bands. I started with Hardy Junior High Band in 7th grade, where I was voted an award for what essentially was “most uncoordinated” and went on to march with the Provine Ram Band in grades 10-12 and was even Band Captain my Senior year.  I went to Ole Miss on a $50 per semester band scholarship that at that time, believe it or not, made school affordable for my parents.  After 4 years in Oxford, I graduated and became Mr. Music in the small town of Vernon AL. A significant part of my time was spent planning and teaching halftime shows for our band, and marching band was one of the reasons many of our kids chose to play instruments in the first place.  When I would talk to 5th graders about being in band during their 6th grade year, I would get Senior band members to demonstrate instruments because all the little kids looked up to the big kids and wanted to be like them. Every girl wanted to join the band and become a majorette, and every guy wanted to be a drummer or a trombonist or a trumpet or sax player and sound just like the kids they looked up to. I would watch their eyes as they watched the juniors and seniors and could, with some degree of accuracy, pick out which ones would be doing the same demonstrations to 5th graders in just a few short years.

     Marching band was the most visible part of the music program in our little town, and Friday nights were not just a football game but a social event that most in the surrounding area attended.  Parents and grandparents and alumni and all their relatives came not just for the spectacle and pageantry of the football game and cheerleaders but to listen to the band playing during the game and at halftime. There were a couple of seasons our team went 0-10, but the band showed up and cheered and performed just as if we were 10-0.  We always looked at it as an obligation we signed up for to support our school and our classmates regardless of the score, and while we didn’t advertise it, we knew why the cheerleaders stood in front of the band to cheer. It’s much easier to cheer to an appreciative and responsive crowd, and we knew all the cheers.

     I usually started around 60 kids each year on instruments, and since there were only 600 or so students in grades 7-12, that meant, even with the dropouts and the moveaways and the choices to play football, basketball, baseball or cheerleader enough kids would stick it out to where we usually had 20 or so that graduated as Senior band members each year. If you counted beginner band and Intermediate band and what parents called “Big Band '' there were at any given moment over 200 kids per year actively participating in band year after year. We performed not only for halftime at every football game (home and away) but for Homecoming parade, Christmas parade, and maybe even a Christmas parade or two for nearby towns.  In between we played several programs for the students during school, had after school concerts for parents and relatives, performed every year for District Band Contests and participated in 5 or 6 honor band activities sponsored by various colleges nearby.  There were also solo and ensemble festival, All State Band tryouts, jazz band, Veterans ’Day programs and too many other things to even remember. In between all the music stuff we had rehearsals every day, fundraising and band parent meetings.  Kids, parents, boosters and me - we were all busy functioning as a community support organization.

     My goal was never to create an academy for aspiring band directors, because learning to play an instrument was never about becoming a professional musician. Sure, some of them did go into music and several are directing now, bless their stressed-out little hearts, but the goals were to teach perseverance, persistence, the process of learning the benefits of delayed gratification, and an appreciation of music that went far beyond the “I like that song because it’s got a good beat and it’s easy to dance to” superficiality. Thrown in there too were teamwork, self-discipline and what amounts to learning to speak non-verbally in a different language. There is also significant evidence in research that band and orchestra students achieve at rates up to one academic year ahead of non-music students in English, mathematics and science, and that the longer those students participated in music the higher their exam scores would be.  Research also notes that SAT scores for students that took 4 or more years of music in high school were an average of 40 points higher on each section of the test and 63 points higher on the verbal section and over 90 points higher overall than students that did not take instrumental classes.  In answer to the conundrum as to whether smart students take band or does band make students smarter, my personal anecdotal observations from 25 or so years of teaching the subject at a variety of levels lead me to believe the answer is an unequivocal yes. 

     I’ll also tell you another secret about band you might never have considered.  Nobody sits on the bench.  Every kid plays in every concert, every show and every time. They might not be first chair in the first band, but they will be in there somewhere. They might not be featured twirler in the marching band, but you can find them with their section if you look hard enough.  You don’t have to be a great musician to participate - you just have to work at it and try and do your best. The kid that sits last chair in the flute section might turn out to be the greatest seller of band candy ever.  The last chair trumpet might help load the equipment truck. The 5th chair alto sax probably volunteers to help hand out band uniforms, and the 4th cymbal may be the most positive student in the whole group and provide moral support for every other kid around him.  Everybody has a part, and everybody contributes. Not a lot of groups can say that, can they?

     Research also shows that about 49% of all students in the US in grades K-12 participate in music classes of some type, whether chorus, band, orchestra, guitar or music appreciation. In 2020, data indicated there were a little over 56 million students in those grades in US schools. That means that each and every day there are 28 million students actively participating in some type of music instruction each day. Just for the sake of argument, let’s cut that number down to 25 million and multiply it by participation over the last 10 years.  That means that 25 million kids per year X 10 (even though we are counting the same kids in different years several times) = 250,000,000,000 students in music related classes over the last decade or so.

     Estimates for participation in organized football activities in the US are that about 4 million students per year participate in football. Using the same 10 years and multiplying 4 million X 10 and there are, even with counting some of the same kids over several years, about 40 million people with personal football experience in the US population.  Those means those at every level that have actually played the game in an organized setting with coaches and referees and uniforms.

     Now don’t misunderstand; I love high school and college football and watch and/or listen religiously during the fall almost every weekend. I don’t make the mistake of judging the quality of education provided by any school or university as a function of the wins and losses in any given season, but it is fun to play the “my team is better than your team” game with friends and family.  In younger days I participated in hundreds of backyard and spur of the moment neighborhood games of football and remember the vast majority of those being full tilt, all tackle events where Mama had better not find out you were wearing your school clothes.  It was fun, it was great exercise and was an important part of our neighborhood activities, but at the same time it was physically more than a little dangerous, and we had far more injuries from those games than all our baseball and basketball and bicycle races combined. It wasn’t, and still isn’t for every kid, and still is predominantly a male oriented sport.

     Until somewhere in the 1980’s, TV broadcasts of football games always included the performances of both bands at halftime.  I remember Mama excitedly calling me long distance one Sunday night to let me know she had seen me on the halftime broadcast the previous day. She knew it was me because on the back of my saxophone lyre (music holder) I had written “Hi Mama - It’s Me - Send Money!”  There I was - her boy - on national TV with the instrument she had bought me when I graduated high school. It was - to both of us - a pretty big deal. More than that, the broadcasts of the bands often mentioned the hundreds of thousands of hours and dedication that go into not just learning an instrument, but learning the physically and mentally demanding art of marching in in prescribed ways and at precise times in steps of an exact length to a series of imaginary spots unmarked on any field AND in conjunction with 300 other people while playing, and knowing you are functioning as a small but integral part of something bigger than you.  If you have ever marched in a band you have learned the art of spatial awareness and instinctively understand that the path of a rocket leaving earth and traveling to another planet is never, ever, ever anything close to a straight line…and why.

     I don’t know why those broadcasts stopped showing bands and the talking jocks monopolized the halftime to do analysis and replays and scores from other games and more commercials.  It was probably more about the additional income from added commercial time or trying to justify the use of highly paid ex-players by giving them more airtime than anything else, but it needs to end.  The analysis always comes down to one observation for each team; Team A needs to score more points and stop Team B from doing the same, and Team B needs to stop Team A from scoring and then score more points themselves. The team with the most points at the end of the game will, without any doubt, win.  Everything else is verbal surplusage. 

     There are hundreds of thousands of us current and former bandos that would love to see what the bands do at halftime, what music they are playing and maybe even be a little judgmental about their marching technique and musicianship. You can also - usually - get a good idea of the age of the band director by noting the era of the music the band plays. From a highly personal standpoint as a teacher, player and former participant, I find a good halftime show not only entertaining but a source of comfort knowing those kids are learning the same lessons of good citizenship, camaraderie and musicianship I learned through band, and supporting their school and team and community by doing so. College is, thank God, about more than just football, and while the game is a primary financial driver of every other sport and a chief source of alumni donations, there’s more to the game than just the game itself. The sheer spectacle of the entire event and the circus- like atmosphere that surrounds it, from the tailgaters and their temporary tent cities to the players walking through to the stadium to the rekindling of old friendships from college days to cheerleaders to the mascots and everything else in between - including the bands - all need their recognition and highlights at their time and in their respective places.  After all, there’s no shortage of cheerleader shots between the plays is there?  Give the bands their time back, and millions of us will stay and watch. That’s a promise. You can graduate a kid out of the band, but they will always and forever be a bando…and that’s a good thing.

PS - that includes the pre-game ceremony with the National Anthem, too. I mean, really, is there anything said at that time they haven’t already covered in the pre-game analysis?

PPS - Every network has a customer service number or online presence you can contact to express your opinion about the shows and content they air.  Be nice, be concise and remember the person you talk to will probably not be the one that makes any programming decisions but may decide whether or not to pass your message on or not depending on your tone and inflection. Something sweet and simple like “I would like to see all of both band performances during halftimes of college football games” will do nicely. Maybe, just like Arlo Guthrie, we can start a movement.