A work of fiction in which, much to the dismay of her band director father, a 13 year old girl is fired from her acolyting position.

No description available.

Evidence of bands at South Dakota State University can be found as early as 1886, only the second year of classes at the Land-Grant institution. From this grew what is known today as the “Pride of the Dakotas Marching Band.” The band was led by six different men over the first twenty-one years of its existence. A highlight of these early years was a trip to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, under the direction of John Parmalee Mann. His successor, Francis J. Haynes, penned the music to the school’s alma mater, the Yellow and the Blue. In 1911, Carl “Christy” Christensen became Director of Bands, and did not relinquish the title for forty-three years. The highlight of “Christy’s” illustrious career was a trip to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1939, in which the band performed for King George VI and Queen Consort Elizabeth. The band has carried on a rich tradition of high-profile performances. In 1962, the band, under the direction of Dr. Warren Hatfield, began a relationship with the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings. For over twenty years, the band performed at their games, and many of these performances were broadcast to a national television audience. Under the leadership of John Colson and Gene Pollart, the band continued to grow and become known for their high-energy, entertaining, and skillful performances. Because of this reputation, the band, under the direction of Dr. Darwin Walker, earned an invitation to the 1981 Inaugural Parade of President Ronald Reagan. James McKinney led the band to the 1997 Inaugural Parade of President William Clinton, the 2000 Fourth of July Parade in Washington, D.C., and the 2003 and 2008 Tournament of Rose Parades. Since McKinney’s retirement, Eric Peterson, James Coull, and Kevin Kessler have each served as the director of the Pride. This document chronicles the history of the band from its origins to 2015.

For the Music is a collection of creative nonfiction essays chronicling nine years of my life from when I first discover music to playing in my high school marching band. The theme of the collection is coming of age, with each piece highlighting a particular lesson I struggle to learn based around my experiences with band. Such situations include overcoming shyness, accepting change, and discovering how to work with others.

acase@tulane.edu / Marching bands and the professional music scene in New Orleans have historically been male-dominated. Even as more female students are beginning to join marching bands, far fewer women go on to pursue careers in music than men do after participating in high school marching bands. This thesis shows how marching bands in New Orleans encourage visual, sonic, and social performances of uniform, normative masculinity that can discourage the professionalization of female band members after high school. Through observation and interviews with band students and directors at St. Mary’s Academy High School, which is an all-girls school, and Warren Easton Charter High School, which is co-ed, it is apparent that many girls are affected by stereotypes and social constructs that deem marching band and the subsequent careers in music to be masculine activities. This thesis looks at the history of marching bands as military organizations, the culture of bands today, and the patriarchal nature of the New Orleans professional music scene to show how marching bands maintain a gender hierarchy that privileges masculinity and can discourage professionalization in music for girls. / 1 / Olivia Broslawsky

No description available.

Students learn more from their band experience than musical concepts. Many students learn leadership skills as a part of their time in band, but these skills are rarely an official part of the curriculum. Additonally, band directors must use leadership to successfully build and guide their program, but are rarely provided formal training in leadership theory and skills. I used transformational leadership (Bass & Riggio, 2006; Burns, 1978) as a framework to examine practices band directors use to learn leadership themselves and help students develop their own leadership. I utilized Deci and Ryan’s (2000) Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and autonomy supports (1995) to help identify director practices that were transformative in nature. Through the use of interviews with three band directors and ten students I examined how band directors learn leadership, how they use it, and how students in band understand the use of leadership by directors and themselves. I found that band directors typically learn these transformative skills through a variety of formal and informal situations through life starting as early as high school. Directors develop leadership skills through the presence of mentors and the use of critical self-reflection over the course of their careers. Directors create a culture of band that is extended to the student body and reinforced through student leadership and peer mentoring. Finally, managerial tasks can be used to help students develop leadership identities (Komives et al., 2005), develop leadership skills, and allow them to act as transformative figures themselves.

Decades of market research have investigated how music can influence consumer purchase, food consumption, and alcoholic drinking. Before market researchers declared music an influencer of atmospheric perception, sociologists discovered the sway of music on crowd collective action in sporting events, political rallies, and societal unrest. There remains a lack of research on how live music may influence football fan behavior during a game. Therefore, this study observed the number of behavioral responses from university students elicited by a university marching band’s music prompts (N = 11) at an American university football game. By recording observations of behavior in the student section during home football games, this investigation found that from the total number of music prompts observed (n =202), 50% (n =100) of the music prompts elicited a behavioral response from the student section.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Karen Arnold / Student engagement has been associated with a range of desirable outcomes in the undergraduate experience (Astin, 1993, Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005) and music participation has been shown to facilitate important personal and social development among its participants (Hallam, 2010). Despite this, no study has been conducted to evaluate the potential benefits of participation in one of the largest and most visible student organizations on campus: the college marching band. The purpose of this quantitative evaluation was to determine whether marching band students express distinctive patterns of engagement within their respective communities as compared with their non-band peers. Items and scales from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) were administered to marching band members (n=1,882) at 20 participating universities with National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division-I football programs. Data were compared with a sample of general undergraduate (non-band) responses (n=6,095) from the same institutions provided by the NSSE Institute. Findings suggested that band students are more engaged with diverse peers along racial, ethnic, political, ideological, and religious lines (p<.01; Cohen’s d=0.26) and they are more reflective in their learning as evident in their willingness to imagine another’s perspective and reevaluate their own views (p<.01; Cohen’s d=0.19). Compared with non-band peers, marching band members indicated greater personal social responsibility on an array of vectors (p<.01; Cohen’s d=0.36) including: developing a personal code of values and ethics, understanding people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, understanding themselves, learning effectively on their own, voting in local or national elections, contributing to the welfare of their community, and solving complex real-world problems. After controlling for a range of pre-college and co-existing variables, marching band membership remained the strongest predictor of these desirable outcomes (β=0.172, p<.01). / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.