It was day two of band boot camp - a four-day endurance test that will forever bond the 280 students who get picked for the UW Marching Band. It's a sweaty, stressful rite of passage, designed to cull the weak from the herd.Very nice. I've been listening to these guys practice -- and play in the stadium -- through the open windows of my house for more than 20 years.
"Some people will walk off the field in the first 10 minutes," said Chris Hanson, 22, a senior tuba player. "The next day, only about 70 percent of the freshmen come back."...
Anyone with high school band experience can take part in the four-day tryout. Each freshman gets an audition with eckrone and endures five hours of marching drills and two hours of music rehearsals daily.
About half of the 160 freshmen will end up in the band.
August 31, 2006
"This week, he's Satan. He's trying to scare away as many people as he can while also encouraging them. He's hard-core."
That would be UW Marching Band director Mike Leckrone at UW Marching Band boot camp (as described by a young tuba player):
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YEah, the Band is one of the great unheralded aspects of UW football (outside of Madison, that is). They brought the band out to Seattle in 1992 and all of us displaced Badgers got to enjoy them. THey did a concert at the Seattle Center Flag Pavilion the night before the game so there were a couple hundred of us there doing Varsity and the chicken dance and badly polka-ing to the Budweiser song.
Then came the game. It was the year after the Huskies won the Nat. Champ. and the Badgers were in their second year under Alvarez, so the result was pretty much foregone, but the Badgers actually did pretty well, beating the spread ("We beat the spread! We beat the spread!"). But the Band stayed for the 5th quarter so we did Varsity, chicken, etc. again.
Confused the heck out of the local seagull population, who knew from experience that when the stands started to empty out it meant a feast of popcorn and half-eaten hot dogs. . . .
Marching bands are fun. The high school down the street from us is one of the best in the country and we'll go up in the evenings and watch them practice. Before the school year starts they do a band camp that sounds like UWs. Our neighbor's daughter is a sophomore at LSU and got a full-ride scholarship for the marching band, in large part because of her high school program.
College marching bands are one of the few remaining unalloyed goods on campus. I've known more than a few band members over the years, and the number of bad eggs is lower than probably any other campus group. Maybe it's because they work so hard they don't have time to be bad. Plus, the tend to bring those work habits to class, which serves them well.
I went to U of Illinois, and I believe it had the first college marching band. Plus, even this fall, I expect Chief Illiniwek to come bursting out of the band at halftime. Go, Chief!!
rnBeing in band can build a great sense of responsibility and camaraderie that's unparallelled in most other classes. I don't know for sure about the whole "Baby Mozart" thing (music makes you smarter, so start playing classical music for baby in the womb), but at least here in Texas, the people who make the All-State music groups score way above the national averages in terms of SAT scores. But the sense of community is the big thing, and the comments that very few "bad eggs" are in the band are consistent with my own experience.
One of the beautiful things about playing an instrument is that you can always come back to it, even years later. My college hosts an entire big band made up of engineers, and among my own students is a sixtysomething retired pilot who returned to the horn last summer after not playing for about forty years.
When I entered college, I thought I was going to be a band director, but things changed and I became a jazz musician and private instructor instead. I may teach longer hours and make a little less money than my band-director counterparts, but I do have all my hair, and it's not grey either...which can't be said for all of them, even the ones younger than I.
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