Everyone’s heard of the marching band before. It might not even be too much of a stretch to say everyone’s heard the marching band before. During marching season, the Marching Crimsons practice almost every morning on the football field just downhill from the school building, and their Tuesday night rehearsals on the actual playing field echo all the way to Morton Avenue. There are multiple sections in the Marching Crimsons, as with any typical band, but one stands out above all the others: the battery.
Better known as “drumline” to most, the 2013 Marching Crimsons battery includes fourteen percussionists. These individuals provide the backbone to most songs performed by the Marching Crimsons, giving performances the rhythm and beat to help melodies from other sections flow smoothly together. After marching season has passed and the band turns from field shows to more symphonic pieces, the members of the drumline are split into various percussion instruments, learning one, two, or even three separate parts for every song the band plays from November through graduation.
Now this might not sound like too much, as many people tend to believe that percussion is the easiest choice when choosing an instrument. The truth is, it is indeed the simplest, but drums are by no means the easiest to play. In fact, drumline does more than any other part of the band, and they do it all throughout the year. Marching band has field shows at home football games and competitions (a total of, usually, less than ten performances in a season), as well as a handful of parades throughout the autumn months.
But drumline, alongside playing with the rest of the band at these shows, marches in several other parades during every season of the year. They play talent shows, special events (just this July they did two back-to-back performances at an art festival in the downtown square), and have also performed halftime shows for basketball games in the early spring. While the marching band has three practices per week during its season, drumline adds an additional practice to that already-busy schedule, and rehearsals don’t stop after the football games end; during the summer, this schedule even changes to four hours of practice per week until the beginning of band camp in late July.
This year, the Marching Crimsons drumline includes fourteen members spread throughout five different sections. On snare is percussion captain Jeremiah Roberts (senior), alongside Chris Six (junior) and Gabe Spencer (sophomore); behind them on quint tenors are Christopher Bauer (senior) and Michael Kyle (junior), followed by Danyon Beal (freshman) and Morgan Morris (freshman) on cymbals. The bass line brings up the back of the group with Jesse Holloway (senior), Maggie Kaylor (junior), Brett Bettis (sophomore) and Jonathan “Tog” Pattie (sophomore). Also included is the Pit – those who play auxiliary, non-marching instruments. The Pit includes Nicholas Pennington-Peine (senior), who plays quint tenors during parades, as well as Alex Torres (senior) and Claire Lowe (sophomore) who both join the cymbal line when marching.
Recent/approaching events for the drumline include a brief performance at the 2013 Volleyball Senior Night game (Tuesday, October 22), and the final field show competition with the Marching Crimsons for the 2013 season on Saturday of the same week.