Music and Movement

Upon initial consideration of the possible roles that movement, alongside music, may play in my life, I drew a complete blank. Though I'm not sure why, I immediately relate movement to dance, which occurs only on rare occasions when I'm involved (and it usually requires a good deal of coaxing). This is largely due to my inability to do anything more than bobble side to side during slow songs, perform my awkard/jerky/happy dance for fast songs, and the little dice trick I learned from Knocked Up.

Then, I woke up and realized how poorly my brain works sometimes; I teach marching band and indoor percussion, both of which are centered around a balance of movement (marching/body movement/dance) and performance of music. It seems outrageous when I think of the activities for which I spend 12 months a year teaching, planning, and writing. Taking an outsider's perspective, watching a group of 20 or so battery percussionists run around a floor, pausing occasionally to park and provide a tasty/beefy ram, while another 10 or so play the various mallet instruments, auxiliary percussion, and electronics just seems odd or, perhaps, nerdy.

I'll elaborate on the indoor percussion activity since it's a bit more my cup of tea. Each group, during their performance, is judged by a panel looking for criteria that fall under three broad captions, each of which is broken into two sub-captions: Music (performance/composition), Visual (performance/composition), General Effect (music effect, visual effect). The idea is for the design team (the people who write the show's music, visual, and thematic elements) to create a product that is completely cohesive in all respects so that whatever idea/theme/story is being depicted in the show is clearly executed. For many groups, the visual has begun to take precedence over the music - a tragedy, in my opinion. If the two elements were "divorced," it would leave one of two options: a standstill marching percussion line or a concert percussion ensemble, though the possibility for storytelling, theatrics, etc... would decline greatly.