You name it, someone will blog about it!

I'm glad to see that Blogistan is developing beyond the political stuff and the daily diary, "I got up this morning with a headache and ate Cap'n Crunch with too much milk"-type stuff. Not a week goes by that I don't find a new blog and say, "Hmmm, that's not something I'd have thought to blog about." Case in point: a blog devoted to marching bands in Kentucky.

Not that anyone cares, but while I think marching bands are entertaining to watch, especially the drum-and-bugle corps that operate in the summer time, as a compulsory part of being in band, while in high school, I detested marching. As a musical education device I found it completely worthless; the positives often cited by the marching proponents (discipline, endurance, precision) are musical elements that can equally well be achieved in a concert band setting, with actual attention to musical concerns added in, to boot. I always found that it basically boiled down to "We're expected to have a band at the football games and the town's summer parade".

Pretty much every time I voiced this opinion in the music department in college, the collective gasps around me were similar to that you'd hear if you stepped up to the mike at a Democratic National Convention and claimed that JFK was a bad president. But I have never heard a convincing argument for the idea that marching is an essential part of a musical education. String players and vocalists seem to develop their musical chops just fine without marching in funky formations at football games; how the wind players and percussionists singularly benefit from marching has never really been made clear to me.