Marching Bands in America Offer a Unique Glimpse Into the Broader Cultural Landscape and Spirit of the Age

From public events to parades and sporting competitions, marching bands in America show up and perform with music and styles reflecting current trends while also looking back to a storied past.

Embodying pep, spirit, sass, and style, modern marching bands are welcome respites from the drone of daily life or the heated emotions of a football game. Their unique blend of music, color, and sound is capable of transforming even the dullest atmosphere into a celebration. And it’s only going to get bigger from here as technology combines with traditional instruments to produce spectacular shows previously unimaginable.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way and, in many ways, the modern marching band is so far beyond where the tradition started in terms of sophistication that it is hard to compare the two.

Nonetheless, marching bands do have a martial history and that is still a major component of their overall framework even if going into battle is a thing of the past.

You can see elements of this tradition in the strict marching regimentation as well as the cadence of drums and percussion instruments, some of the oldest in all of musical tradition. The later addition of horns and woodwinds as well as increasing levels of refinement and order transformed what was just a herald of battle into an elite unit unto itself.

Naturally, this unit began to embody the values of the corps with whom they marched, contributing to the military tradition of esprit de corps through their unique interpretation of tradition as well as occasional forays into entertainment during downtimes. Being composed of musicians and artists, marching bands were quick to pick up on cultural trends and never shy away from adapting modern music. This is an art in itself as adapting modern tunes to the needs of a marching band does require extensive thought and modification.

From this space, particularly in the United States, we see the beginnings of the traditional marching bands that we associate with parades and football games. The oldest marching band in the United States for this purpose is the University of Notre Dame’s Band of the Fighting Irish, founded in 1845 and first performed at a football game in 1887. Today, a massive culture exists around marching band performances with new designs, instrumentation, marching formations, and performances.

The incorporation of fireworks, lighting, dancing and story elements make modern marching bands a true amalgamation of the performing arts on a broad scale. Given their central role in American football as well as civic culture, and the increasing scope of their purview, marching bands in America are changing almost as fast as the speed of technological progress itself. Again, it is hard to compare the tradition’s origins with the sophistication of its current incarnation and it will probably be just as difficult in the future when looking at today because marching bands are not only an evolving art, they are also increasingly a science.