So....
For any of you who might read this.... You probably weren't intended to read it. That isnt to say that you can't read it, but just know I'm not putting this out there with intent. So, knowing that, don't feel like you have to. This is being posted here, specifically so I can link some people to read it, and I had literally no place else to put it. If you're still interested.... it is a band story. That's right, a band story, specifically a drum corp story. And most of you are band geeks, so that might appeal to you.
This was written for a Creative Writing class, the goal: Creative Non Fiction. Now, there was a page limit... and this actually exceeded that limit. I tell you this, because the professor was bummed it wasnt longer. Just so you know, I wish it was longer too. Oh, and the ending... well, the story was supposed to have a point, and I didnt want to get points docked for not having a point, so I kinda drew a large red neon arrow... Anyway, I'm going to stop stalling... Here we go, let's see if I can make a fake cut work, but knowing me and my luck with LJ, it probably wont work, lol
DCI, or Drum Corp International, is known amongst band geeks and music aficionados as the professionals of marching band. People from across the nation pay thousands of dollars to join various ensembles, spending their summers living on a bus and sleeping on gym floors. Every moment of every day is planned and coordinated, the only free time the players are afforded is when they’re traveling on the bus between states, or once every two weeks when they are given a free day to do laundry.
I was always interested in marching in a corp, but I was scared away by the time commitment of the audition process. The audition process requires you to attend a camp once a month, each of these camps costing the musician an average of two hundred dollars simply to attend. The camps are intense. You arrive, and from Friday to Sunday you work from 8am to 2am, learning how to play as the corp plays, and march with the style the corp has adopted. You are watched at all times, and on the last day the Brass Caption Head takes you aside and the less talented individuals are cut. I was worried I’d be among the less talented, in fact I knew with a certainty that I would be. I didn’t want to go because I was afraid I’d give them all this money and they’d tell me I wasn’t worth it.
My best friend at the time was Chris Fulton, a man I always called Larry. He used to be one of the three drum majors for the Phantom Regiment, a corp that always placed in the top three at finals. He was insistent that I at least try, and no matter what justifications I used, he
would berate me for not auditioning. One day he called me up and told me a corp from San Antonio, Texas, known as the Crossmen, was planning on performing The Planets by Holst. I was so ecstatic I set up an audition and booked a flight down for their next camp. Even though I knew it would be hard work, I wasn’t prepared for exactly what they wanted from me. I cried the first night of my audition in the darkness of the gym, missing home and wishing I’d never bothered to come. It wasn’t just that the work was hard, it was because every day I was surrounded
by people who’d already been marching for a while, who already knew what to do, and moreover, who wanted nothing to do with me. On the second night I sat next to someone I’d never seen before and as we both wolfed down what we could before rehearsal started again, and he explained that until spring training started, no one made friends with anyone, after all, you never knew who’d be cut at the and of the weekend. Now that I understood, I didn’t feel so unwelcome, and I stopped trying to reach out to the people around me. The night before I left, the Brass Caption Head took me aside and listened to me play. First I played an etude I’d prepared, and then I played every random exercise that came into his head. Afterwards he handed me a contract and told me I was in; I was one of five girls who made it.
In May I packed a suitcase and a sleeping bag and moved to Texas. In the beginning we were housed at a Lutheran college. Because they were, shall we say, religious, we weren’t allowed to take off our shirts despite the temperature rising above one hundred degrees every day, and men and women had to sleep separately. Normally this wouldn’t have been a big deal, but when there were one hundred and forty five men and five women, the women were given substandard sleeping quarters. We were placed in a gym where the lights always stayed on,
and the water in the locker room was always icy cold. When we were allowed to sleep in the same room, I was always surrounded by people, and I’d grown to find it comforting. Now that we were separated, I was all alone; I had trouble falling asleep, and found myself watching the walls and floors for any signs of spiders or cockroaches.
On our first day the brass line was taken out to an empty field we’d spray painted with yard lines. The tech set us up in a large circle and explained the drill we would be running to help reinforce in each of us how to dress a circle while we marched. In marching band, lines are easy to dress, you just line up your shoulders with the people next to you. Circles are difficult as you always have to try to stand just behind the people next to you. If you don’t, you end up with diagonal lines instead of a curve. My section in particular was having a hard time with the drill, though it wasn’t because of the circles; it was because of our instruments.
Imagine a trumpet. Double the size of the bell and you have a mellophone - a marching French horn. Make the body match the bell and you
have a baritone. The thing about baritones is that they are big and heavy; the horn is the exact size of my torso. Musicians who play these horns spend all of their excess time training themselves to hold it up by tying a pair of shoes together and draping them over the bell to add weight, or by strapping weights to their wrists and forcing themselves to keep their arms in the correct shape.
Here in this school in Texas, we stood in our circle, our arms shaking, doing everything we could to keep our horns up. Our bells were too big
to see over, but as the tech kept shouting at us to do the drill again and again and again, we could imagine his face watching our shaking limbs and punishing us for it. After the tenth run through there was silence. I was panting, struggling not to groan as my arms trembled, praying that he’d let us stop.
“Alright,” he said, “horns down.”
There was an explosion of air as we all let out our breath and allowed ourselves to crumple, bending and twisting into complex shapes as
we tried to stretch out our cramped muscles before we started again.
“That was terrible.” He said, disappointment dripping from every word. “You need to keep your bells up!”
I felt guilty, knowing that while the whole section was struggling, it was still my fault that I wasn’t perfect. I looked up at the tech to at least acknowledge I knew I’d failed, but he wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t even looking at my section; he was in front of the trumpets. My section
exchanged curious looks, and then we all leaned forward, struggling to hear what he was saying. “You’re instruments are light! You have no excuse! If the baritones can keep their horns up, you need to be able to!”
Even though I knew they were being chewed out, I couldn’t help the happy expression that crossed my face.
“Again!”
The pleasure we felt was short lived as we began doing the drill repeatedly until our arms began shaking again. The tech began shouting
something, but I was too caught up to understand him. At the same time, I knew what he had to be saying. I checked myself over, and once I was satisfied my bell was up, I tried to determine from the sound of his voice where he was standing. I couldn’t tell, but in the back of my mind I imagined it was the trumpets again.
“Damn it, stop.” He said. He hadn’t stopped us in the correct way; we were in the middle of a move, so instead of a crisp uniform halt, we stumbled a few steps, our horns casually falling away. As I’d hoped, the tech wasn’t talking to me. “This is unacceptable. You guys aren’t even
trying!” He rubbed his eyes. “Okay, everyone put your horns down.”
We put our horns down in a uniform arch so our bells would catch the light, and turned around to find our water bottles. The tech was talking, but he wasn’t talking to us, so we began to chat softly, hoping he was too distracted to notice.
We straightened up when he walked back to the center of the circle. “Baritones.” He said. “You guys have been doing good; I’m going to give
you a reward.” Our ears perked up. “Trade horns.”
We were too confused to move.
“You heard me! Baritones, go grab a trumpet.” He turned sharply and whistled. “You guys! Grab a baritone. And you’d better keep those horns up, or you’ll be running laps for the rest of the day!”
My section was overjoyed; we ran over as fast as we could, just in case he changed his mind.
The trumpet I selected looked too small to be real. There was black electrical tape holding a tuning slide on, and faint gold lines crisscrossing parts where the silver had been rubbed away by a sweaty hand. I picked it up, and my hand felt awkward wrapping around the valves. I was used to a horn where my small hands had to strain to hold valves properly, and now with this trumpet, my fingers felt cramped as they held on easily.
The tech was still busy lecturing the trumpets, so I stood at attention, looking at the way I needed to stand with this new instrument. Around me my section was doing the same. Satisfied, I practiced snapping my new bell up and I laughed as I put too much force behind it and the horn almost hit me in the face. It felt amazing, like I was holding onto nothing compared with the baritone. Around me my friends were laughing and smiling. Our section leader scowled. “Don’t get used to this. We shouldn’t even be doing this. You guys need to hold up those horns not these. This isn’t helping you at all.”
We rolled our eyes and turned away, wanting to hold onto this wonderful reward for as long as we could.
The tech clapped his hands. “Alright, let’s do it again.”
I was ready for anything. Marching has never been hard for me; it has always been the horn. The cruel thing about marching band is that it doesn’t last all year, so by the time you finally get used to holding your horn up without any pain, the season is over, and you have to start all over again the next year. Now with this wonderfully light trumpet in my hands, I was starting to see the day in lighter colors, it was like a day off, and around me I could tell my section felt the same.
The tech was obviously punishing the trumpets, he made us repeat the drill countless times, refusing to let us rest. We’d been running it for almost ten minutes when I started to feel something unusual. My arms were starting to hurt. I did my best to hide it, but it was there. I began silently pleading with the tech to let us put our horns down.
When he finally did, I forced a smile on my face. “That was awesome, wasn’t it?” I felt relieved when I recognized the faltering smile on
my friends faces. They’d felt it too.
“Okay guys, fun’s over.” The tech said.
We didn’t run back to our horns this time, but I was happy when I felt the reassuring weight of my instrument in my hands. “Glad you don’t
have to play that all the time, right?” I teased the trumpet player who’d held my horn.
“Yeah,” he said with a laugh.
We began running the drill again, but now it was worse. My horn seemed heavier. My arms began to shake so much sooner, and I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block the pain out. Panting against my mouthpiece, pressing the horn hard against my face in the hopes that it might take some of the weight off, I began to piece together why this was happening.
The first thing anyone notices upon picking up a baritone is that the instrument is heavy, heavy enough that it seems almost unnatural to hold the thing suspended in your arms. Within a few moments the body naturally tries to fix this, by transferring the weight from your arms to your back, so it is, in the end, not your arms that hold it up at all. The trumpet is the opposite. As it is not overly heavy, the body allows the arms to do the work. This often causes baritone players to feel jealous of trumpet players, as by the end of the season a trumpet player will have toned arms, while a baritone player will not.
For the rest of the season I tired to pretend that day was a source of joy and amusement, but in the back of my mind I hoped we never traded
again. The trumpet was fun for a while, but returning to the baritone in the end was bad enough that it wasn’t worth it. It was the opposite for the trumpet players. They suffered with our horns, but when they returned to theirs, holding the trumpets up was easy. After seeing their happy faces I wanted to trade instruments with someone who had a heavier horn, but there was no one I could trade with.
In the end I concluded that every instrument has its own difficulties. The contrabass is ridiculously heavy when held at attention, but balances nicely on the shoulder. The euphonium and baritone are, by comparison, the heaviest of the instruments, but the back does the most of the work. The mellophone is almost as light as the trumpet, but the bell causes it to be off balanced. The trumpet is the lightest, but it forces the arms to do the most work. They all have their problems, but they also have redeeming qualities that encourages players to choose each one. I never really understood that fact until I had to hold a trumpet correctly, and felt how hard it was to do it.