English 737-Welcome
I love watching Drum Corps International performances. Though I could have chosen from an infinite number of classically good performances, this genre immediately came to mind. I dispatched at once to find a You Tube video and so thoroughly enjoyed watching this performance I looped it another four times before going to bed. What do I love so much about these shows? I think I am drawn to them because they amalgamate many contradictory symbols. On the surface we see a group of people in uniform animating non-descript forms while playing music. With the corps in the video, all the performers are men and their corps symbol, the fleur-de-lis, is taken from the Boy Scouts of America’s insignia. This scene is reminiscent of military bands; the rigid formations evoke images of rank and file lines (though now the lines undulate), and the players wearing full plumed and corded regalia are disciplined. This is pageantry. This is pomp and circumstance. This corps is as serious as a United States Army band, which takes as one of its duties the provision of security for a command post. Can I say these all-male corps secure masculinity’s post with safe and congenial homosociality? It’s thinly veiled, I assure you.
For as these corps takes up the imagery and instruments of a military band, they trouble these sacred symbols. The rigid line breaks under the impossible strain of hyper-masculinity and forms a softer, more curved form. A sequined dancer alights upon the 50-yard line and takes up a rifle, a flag, a hoop. A streamer. The performance space, typically a bastion of masculine aggression, is electrified by male dancers, blaring trumpets, tinkling xylophones, gesticulating drum-majors, moves termed “park and blows,” and “power wedges.” The men blowing horns, the men dancing, the orders given, the shapes flowing like waves—these signs crash into each other and exceed their original meanings. I am attracted to this excess and its inability to mean one thing at a time.
For me the 1988 Madison Scouts’ arguably definitive arrangement of Malagueña is particularly important because I first watched it during a complicated part of my life. To offer a bit of context, my family used musical performance as an affective conduit; it was the only comfortable way to show emotion. Upon entering my second year of marching band at Illinois State University my parents divorced and the conduit was severed. Marching band became a surrogate means of externalizing emotionality, I think.
One of the pieces the band took up for the 1996-97 season was the ’88 Madison Scouts arrangement of Malagueña. To prepare, we watched the video from the DCI championship, which included the piece I’ve clipped on my blog. This song somehow became the soundtrack to my semester. Which seems right—at once bombastic and raucous, its unceasing cadence and strident soprano trumpets create a cacophony that I cannot vouch for, aesthetically, nor deny its power and beauty. It matched perfectly how I felt inside.
And really, like a divorce, the whole operation is absurd. Young men dance in one-piece uniforms, performers wear glittery sashes–the flailing flags, the seemingly nonsensical field formations; it’s almost asking too much for you to watch it. But all I have to do is click ‘play’ and these ridiculous tears spring. This performance circumscribes many other performativities: masculinity, sexuality, race and class. Taken holistically, it is the perfect metaphor for my life as a 19-year old college kid trying to negotiate these waters with a newly broken family.
