You Dont Now Anything About Hard Work

You Don’t Know Anything about Hard Work

You think marching band isn’t hard? Think again. Growing up in Indiana, going to a small elementary school, I never really had much exposure to music whatsoever. When my sister finally started to play an instrument, I knew somehow I was going to be following those footsteps. And now here I am in the Lawrence Central High School Marching Band and am having a blast. When signing up for band rolled around, I began hearing the awful things that were said about it. Things like; according to Jacob Akers, being in marching band is like a cult, all you do is work, it’s like you’re in the army, marching band is for losers; and according to Greg Price and Tim Rohrbach, marching band isn’t even hard. I was shocked. Of course marching band was hard. I mean do they see what we do out there? I knew the truth. The people who were saying these things were not even in it nor play an instrument. They had no idea. I knew I was going to prove them wrong. Marching band is about working together to be great. Being champions. One thing I know for sure is that marching band is hard and deserves a lot more credit.

Other people in this room might say that no physical talent is necessary for a band member and that all you have to do is march and hold an instrument. Or that, since the band hasn't been taking hits for an hour or chasing after whichever football player happens to be holding an inflated portion of a pig's hide (also known as a football) at any particular moment, band is not hard. Well, let me tell you what we "band geeks" spend our time doing. On top of homework and classes that normal students have, band members must devote their time to memorizing entire pieces of music and the drill that goes with it. Let me tell you that this is unbelievably hard, which is why we get the music almost two months before the season starts. Yes, I know sports players have to practice too, and don't even get school time to do it. Could this be because most sports don't require all that much academic talent and band requires a significant amount of mental skill? Anyway, starting in June (just a few weeks after school is out), we get together on our own time and begin rehearsing music from two - nine pm everyday because there are no "bench-warmers" in marching band. During the summer we attend the 4th of July Parade and have practices and then finally we go to band camp. Contrary to what you might see in an American Pie movie, band camp involves work, stamina, and dedication. For one week, we stay at the school and spend the night. We wake at six in the morning and work until ten at night, taking breaks only for meals. This practice includes basics, sectionals, drill learning, music rehearsal, dance and finally a night rehearsal on the parking lot with everyone for three hours to put the sets we learned that day with music. So no, we don't do two-a-day practices, it’s more like six-a-day practices.

When school starts, the band has practice everyday after school that lasts two to three hours. On Fridays we are there for four- five hours plus we have to perform at the football games where our halftime show is presented for all to see. Now you might say that, yes, the band practices a lot but that doesn't mean anything physically demanding is involved. To that I say this: When you can hold your shoulders to the front side-line while your feet are pointing at the in-zone or completely opposite direction and march in time and play your instrument correctly in time, you can tell me if band is physically demanding. Put this on top of hitting 80 to 120 exact memorized spots on the field at the right time while playing the right notes without the music in front of you and I think you have got a pretty demanding activity.

According to Science Daily, researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training. The findings, published in the online edition of the Journal Brain, show that not only do the brains of musically-trained children respond to music in a different way but also that the training improves their memory as well. After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, mathematics and I.Q.

As for marching band not being dangerous or frustrating, I think people should actually be a part of a marching band before they have room to talk about this. Yes, I know that in football you basically have Bigfoot everywhere around