Rhetoric and Mobility in the Art of Marching Band

We have all, at some point in time, watched a marching band perform in some manner or another - whether it just be them playing in a parade of some sort, or performing an entire show at a high school or college football game. Many of us band kids do not give too much thought or care into the parades, since we simply march in a block down the street playing a tune over and over again. The people are arranged so that the sound will carry the right way (depending on the size of the band), and instruments up front may listen back to the cadence of the drum-line, who are often placed towards the back, to keep in time. Since the band repeats the song as it travels from one point to another, everyone standing along the street gets to hear them at some point in time. Sure, this in itself can be entertaining to audiences. But say you go to a JMU football game, and see this enormous band emerge onto the field from under the stadium and form a shape, while the drum-line plays a catchy cadence. All of a sudden, the drum majors start waving their arms around, and before you know it, there is music while the band marches all of these different formations. Rather than moving forward in one block, band members move all over the place, constantly shifting directions. Instead of playing the same song over and over again, there are several different songs with different tempos. Marching band is a very unique form of rhetoric and mobility that one might not normally think about as such.   Not only is the music in itself rhetoric and the marching in itself mobility, but when the two combine, they form one 15-minute explosion of rhetoric and mobility. This does not just simply happen, though. What goes into these shows?


Drill (the formations that are marched throughout the show) Design has become an art of its own by combining the elements of staging, focus, motion, and form into an unpredictable presentation that captures the audiences’ imagination. The main goal is for the performers to become a moving illustration which brings the music to life. The drill is meant to be visually intriguing and should captivate an audience’s attention from beginning to end, and draw their eyes to focal points. The show, itself,  should also be, not only emotional, but the emotional content should be varied with gradual and smooth transitions between each. The audience should be taken on an emotional journey by the rhetoric and mobility of the music and drill put together.

 “All great drill designs BEGIN with the musical score” says Kevin Ford, a show designer. The flexibility to allow the drill to develop naturally is also key – let the music write the drill. A factor that is important to some drill writers involves looking for the climax or ‘big hit’ in the music so that the drill can be designed to properly build up to whatever they wish to accomplish visually. Different factors of the music can affect the drill in certain ways. The method of articulation (the style in which the notes are played, i.e. soft, connected, slow, fast, separated, loud, etc.) often indicates when to use linear lines versus curves. An interesting trend I have noticed that is often but not always true is faster, more upbeat songs are more likely to use straight lines and blocks (have corners/points in the formation), that might represent the upbeatness, while the softer, slower ballads might use more curves or arches to represent the fluidity of a more connected, legato (notes are longer and more connected) articulation. 

Actually putting the show on the field during rehearsal is tedious, but not as much so as one might think. There is a system and a process for the works of setting the drill. Marching formations around on the field, alone, is called drill and the individual formations made are called sets. 

A set shown as a drill chart. The dots represent where
people stand on the field.

This 'drill' is created using computer programs, which different bands might put on the field in different ways. Usually, each member has their own number (between 1 and however many people are in the band) that identifies which 'dot' they are on a drill chart (just like coordinates learned about in math class, with the plane being the football field). In some bands, they find their spots on the field by finding their 

What coordinates might look like. Each line
is a different coordinate for each set in the song.

number on the sheet showing the set and standing as close to where that 'dot' is on the field as possible. Other bands may print out actual lists of coordinates for each individual spot (measured by taking a certain number of steps from specified vertical and horizontal lines on the field). Once the spots for one set are found, the next one is found, and then the next one, and once at least two consecutive spots are found, the band practices marching from one spot to the next in a straight line. This is done and repeated for each move, and moves are combined for practicing the transitions. After repetition, these moves are stored in our muscle memory, ready to be put to music.

"Our drill design philosophy is that the MOTION of the drill should interpret the music", says designer Brady Massey. Sometimes, the interpretation is literal. Maybe the formations the band makes spell out, or shape something that has to do with the music, directly.  For example, in the Marching Royal Dukes’ pre-game performance, “JMU” spelled out on the field turns into “DUKES” and then the band plays the fight song. This shows, communicates, and spreads school spirit to JMU fans who might be excited to sing the fight song and read "JMU" or "DUKES" spelled out on the field by other people. More often, though, the motion of the drill shapes with the music just to create a nice combination of motion and sound. The formations, themselves, are random shapes that hardly mean anything to the music. For example, during half-time shows,  the formations are more along the lines of blocks, lines, and arches, which shift around to the music in effective ways. Drill is mostly designed so that each of the musical phrases, which are like sentences in a book, are played to the counts of each move. If a phrase in a piece of music has 16 beats, you would likely take 16 counts to get from one set to the next. Sometimes, it might be visually fitting to put in a hold (stand in place and play). For that same phrase, you might move 12 counts, hold the last 4, then go on to the next set. There are many different ways to mix it up that I will not go into, but you at least know the basics.

There are times, especially in the case of a solo, the band would face backfield to make the playing naturally softer. This helps prevent a solo from being drowned out by the loudness of the rest of the band.  Instruments should also be positioned throughout the show in a way that instruments with important parts are heard easily (known as staging). The percussion’s staging needs to be thought through especially well, since they are particularly important to the timing (the rest of the band is listening to them for the beat).