2009!

...and so here we are in 2009! It's cold, there's some snow on the ground, and it's time to start kickin' this drum corps into high gear.

For the uninitiated, the drum corps season traditionally starts on Thanksgiving weekend (or around there) and most corps have camps once or twice a month indoors to try to get down technique and learn/memorize show music, parade tunes, etc, etc, etc. It's not as easy as it sounds to stand there for hours and go methodically through every measure...even every note of music, learning it, interpreting it, and listening to staff describe the approach and philosophy behind how to execute it together and at a championship level. At the same time you're learning to play with new members, trying to RECRUIT new members, and wondering where Joe Schmoe who goes to college 8 hours away is and when/if he's going to be in the line.

It's a mental game, this sport of ours. A mentally tough drum corps is going to be able to weather the storm and pretty much deal with all of the roadblocks that we all have to deal with over the course of the season. The winter is about building your mental toughness as much as it is about building up chops, making friends, and learning. At Bush, the staff approaches each rehearsal this way, and testing/training the brains of our members.

For Bush Brass our 2009 began with some marching basics led by our new caption head, Justin McAdams. Justin is the band director of Daniel Boone HS, a large band near Reading in PA...and the guy knows how to communicate his ideas and philosophies. Within minutes he had the line moving, and with each rep you could see marked improvement. The corps is committed to excelling on the field in the visual caption, and this was step one on a long road.

Next we "arc'ed it up" and got into some breathing exercises. I hit them a little harder with the breathing than I did at the Open House, but that's to be expected. Breathing is the whole game for brass. Concentrating on how we INHALE directly impacts how we exhale and thus the quality of sound we're able to produce through the horns. Next we got into the technique program and spent a good chunk of time both days on that...defining the exercises, talking about the intent behind them, and evaluating them upon completion so that each member can self-evaluate and understand where they're at in their development and where I need them to be.

The important thing is establishing the standards right off the bat. We let them know where we expect them to be at the end of the year...and everything before that is a step towards that end point. Show them the finish line and then teach them the steps, stages and smaller goals to get there.

I passed out 4 tunes at the Open House and we spent most of the weekend working through a couple of them. We learned the parade tune and were able to ensemble that (play together) with the battery percussion. It's pretty early in the year to be putting music together, and we were excited to be able to get together and work through a piece as a drum corps. We also looked at some of the other music, but most of the time was spent on the parade tune and...

...the show! As I've talked about here and many other places on the web, our show is called "Scenes from a Psychotic Circus" and is comprised completely of original compositions by Key Poulan written specifically for us and our show. We got the first movement, which is somewhat of an introduction to our crazy circus. It's very much what you would expect to hear, but with some twists and turns...and there's some real meat in there for the horns! Key's doing a great job, and the members were very excited to spend the majority of the weekend pounding out 2+ minutes of show. The brass performed it for the percussion on Sunday, and all were impressed with the composition and with how much we were able to get done on such limited time.

We have another camp this coming weekend on the 17th and 18th. We'll be getting more show music, so that's going to take a lot of the focus over the course of the two days. Saturday will likely be spent working on technique and some of the "old" material. I'm looking forward to hearing the next movement from Key. Should be cool.