High-School
     Band Contests
           Turn Marching
                     into a Sport—
                             And an Art

Hell Week had come for the Marching Colonels. It was late July in eastern Kentucky, and a hazy sun hung over Bourbon County High School. In the parking lot behind the band room, the asphalt was hot enough to melt chewing gum. The woodwinds were gathered there in a ragged circle, waiting for the metronome to set the tempo, while the trumpets and trombones stumbled around on the football field below. Inside the school, the leader of the drum line, a knobby fifteen-year-old named Jacob Guy, scowled at the boys slouched in front of him, thin necks bent over bulky instruments. “I’m not getting any effort from anyone right now,” he said. “We’ve been over this. Count out loud! If someone isn’t marking time, it’s five pushups!”

The band had been at this since eight-thirty in the morning. First half an hour of stretching and calisthenics, then marching practice, and now sectional and full-band rehearsals. If they were lucky, they’d get home by six, slather their muscles with Icy Hot, and do the same thing again the next day. All told, they would rehearse close to fifty hours that week, then two to three hours a day for the rest of the summer and fourteen hours a week in the fall. When I asked Grayson Mack, the lead marimba player, if all that practice was hard on his body, he held up his hands. The fingers and palms were wrapped in black athletic tape to cover blisters. “The mallets rub up against them,” he said. “And I have tendinitis and carpal tunnel in both arms. At one band camp, I was eating four Aleves every day. It’s just part of the deal.”

Marching band is more than a pastime in Bourbon County. It’s an extreme sport. The real reason the students rehearse so hard isn’t to play well at football games. They can do those shows in their sleep. It’s to prepare for a series of fiercely competitive marching-band contests in the fall, culminating in the Grand National Championships, in Indianapolis. There are more than twenty thousand high-school band programs in America, some with as many as four hundred members. Over the past thirty years, their shows have evolved into spectacles that John Philip Sousa couldn’t have imagined. The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores. They don’t call it marching band anymore. They call it the marching arts.

“There are three levels,” Tim Gray, the Bourbon County band director, told me. “The traditional bands that don’t compete—pretty much all they do is halftime shows and songs like ‘Louie Louie’—the local bands that compete, and the ones that compete nationally.” The Marching Colonels are in the third category, but just barely. They’re from one of the smallest schools at the Grand Nationals every year, and one of the poorest. “It’s hard for a rural community,” Gray said. “We just don’t have the resources. We have duct tape on our tubas, and they have the professional model. It’s just a different world.” When he first came to Bourbon County, Gray asked the school treasurer about the budget for new music. “She said, ‘Well, you have two hundred and sixty-five dollars.’ And I said, ‘That will buy one song.’ ” Gray was sitting in the band office, slumped back in a rolling chair in green khaki shorts and a black polo shirt. As we talked, a succession of students wandered in. One was clutching a broken flute. Another had a can of chewing tobacco—she held it at arm’s length, pinched between her fingertips like it was full of spiders. “Mr. Gray, we found this in the band room.” He shrugged. “Did you try it?” he quipped. “Was it good?” Gray is fifty-one and has been working with bands or marching in them for most of his life. He has burly shoulders and a close-shaved head, heavy-lidded eyes and a thin circle of beard, and carries himself with unhurried self-assurance. He came to Bourbon County in 2023 from a larger, wealthier school in Morton, Illinois, fleeing a divorce. His ex-wife co-directed his band in Morton, so staying there was out of the question, and Bourbon County had a last-minute opening. “I wasn’t even interviewed till late June,” Gray told me. “Seven days later, I was here. I lived in a hotel for four days while I tried to find a house.”

Somehow, against everyone’s expectations, the Marching Colonels went on to have one of their best years, winning first place for schools of their size at the Kentucky state championship and the Grand Nationals. But that was last year. In a small school, every season can feel like starting from scratch. The band lost nearly a third of its members over the summer. Some graduated; others quit to play sports, concentrate on their schoolwork, or just enjoy a little free time for once. The seventy-five who remained included only six seniors and a worrisome number of seventh and eighth graders, most of them raw beginners. “It’s like we’re making art out of pieces of driftwood,” one band director told me. “You have to build around what’s there.” The big mistake, he added, is to try to turn those pieces into the Taj Mahal.

Marching band is the great remainder bin of American adolescence. It may be the most popular of all high-school activities, and the most indiscriminate. There are no benched players, no roster cuts, no restrictions based on size, skill, looks, or gender. If you can’t play an instrument, you can wave a flag or toss a baton. A teen-ager’s life can feel relentlessly Darwinian. From the moment you arrive at school, you’re tagged and sorted by degrees of intelligence, charisma, beauty, and brawn. But the band takes all comers. To succeed, the older musicians have to work with the young; the talented cover for the tone-deaf. And because participation is both voluntary and brutally time-consuming, everyone has to learn to love the band with a shared intensity. High school is hard, marching is easy—at least for a while.

The idea goes back nearly five thousand years. How do you take a group of feckless, unrelated youths and turn them into a unified force? How do you teach them discipline and common purpose? You make them march. The Sumerians were the first to do this, as far as we know—you can see their troops lined up, shield to shield, in a Mesopotamian stone carving from the third millennium B.C.—and the method later spread to Greece, Macedonia, Rome, and China. Well-drilled troops weren’t just more efficient in battle, the University of Chicago historian William McNeill wrote in his book “Keeping Together in Time,” from 1995. They developed an esprit de corps that transcended other loyalties—or even common sense. McNeill called this “muscular bonding” and believed it to be the foundation of all modern European empires. Teach them to march, he wrote, and the poorest peasants and urban outcasts will obediently bear arms and go to battle.

Music was essential to the equation. “Have them march in cadence. There is the whole secret,” the French military commander Maurice de Saxe wrote in 1732, in his book “Reveries on the Art of War.” “Everyone has seen people dancing all night. But take a man and make him dance for a quarter of an hour without music and see if he can bear it.” The kind of music didn’t really matter, so long as it set the beat and could carry over the tumult of an advancing army. The Assyrians marched to cymbals and iron bells, the Spartans to piping flutes, the Arabs to squealing shawms—like ancient vuvuzelas. “Beat the drum once and the left foot steps forward; beat it again and the right foot advances,” a Chinese text written between the third and fifth centuries B.C. noted. “If the drummer misses a beat, he is executed. Those that set up a clamor are executed. Those that do not obey the gongs, drums, bells, and flags, but move by themselves, are executed.”

The blueprint for today’s marching bands was set in the sixteenth century, by the Mehter bands of the Ottoman Empire. They carried flags and plumes, marched in formation, and played drums, cymbals, woodwinds, horns, and a menagerie of other instruments. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all composed marches alla turca, but the true heyday of military bands was the late nineteenth century, after the trumpet and other valved instruments were invented. Marches like Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” composed on Christmas Day, 1896, harnessed the full power of the brass section. In America, they set off a craze for marching-band music which lasted till the nineteen-forties, when it was gradually done in by jazz and other diversions. At its height, double-time marches, or “screamers,” like “Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite,” sent circus crowds into hysterics—the closest thing to speed metal at the time.

By the seventies and the early eighties, when I was growing up in Oklahoma, marching-band history had slowed to an amble. The bands still wore uniforms and marched in formation, but they did their best to adapt to mellower times. The military themes were repurposed for football, the patriotic tunes replaced with jazz rock and power ballads: “Black Magic Woman,” “25 or 6 to 4,” “MacArthur Park.” I played violin in the high-school orchestra and sometimes envied the band kids across the hall. They were louder and looser than us, blasting away at their instruments and horsing around after rehearsals, red-faced and giddy from marching all morning. But I never envied their music. The orchestra played classical pieces as if we’d made them from scratch—sawed and jointed them out of rough lumber. The miracle was that they could still sound beautiful. The band played pop tunes as if they were classical music—stripped of vocals and puffed up with horns. Muzak on steroids.

It was the end of an era, as it turned out. When I went back to Oklahoma two years ago, for my fortieth high-school reunion, the school’s marching band was unrecognizable. At the homecoming game on the first night, I was getting up to go buy a drink at halftime when a group of dancers strode onto the field, dressed in shiny metallic bodysuits. They gathered in front of a row of what looked like giant abstract paintings and struck a pose. Then they began to contort their arms above their heads like smoke from a flame. After a while, the band crept out from behind the paintings, playing the “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem. They formed long, interlacing lines while the dancers flitted among them carrying flags and tossing rifles. As the music built to a climax—a symphonic piece called “The Inferno,” by Robert W. Smith—the band gathered into an amoeba-like shape that morphed and flowed across the field. Yellow smoke billowed up from the ground, the band played the finale from Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” and the show was over.

I sat and stared at the field, a little stunned. The band’s playing was excellent, and the show was more creative and challenging than anything I remembered from high school. I just had no idea what it meant. I glanced around at my neighbors in the stands. They looked like the Oklahomans I’d grown up with: stout, practical-minded folks in bluejeans and trucker hats. I assumed that they were as baffled as I was, but they were grinning and pumping their fists, whooping and cheering as the band filed off the field. What was going on here?

The capital of the new marching-band culture, where its peculiar evolution has been shaped and adjudicated for the past forty years, is Indianapolis. Texas has the greatest concentration of excellent bands, driven by an exceptional music-education system. Georgia, Louisiana, and other Southern states have their own tradition of high-stepping bands modelled on those at historically Black colleges. But Indianapolis is home to the Grand National Championships and the organization that runs them, Bands of America. It also has two of the country’s most successful marching-band programs: the Avon High School Marching Black and Gold and the Carmel High School Marching Greyhounds. Between them, the schools have won the Grand Nationals eleven times in the past twenty years. In 2022, Carmel won and Avon was the runner-up. The next year, those roles were reversed: Avon beat Carmel, but only by two-tenths of a point out of a hundred. “That’s the reason they’re both so good,” Michael Townsend, a show designer who has worked with both bands, told me. “They sharpen each other’s teeth.”

Avon lies due west of the city, in a table-flat suburb of strip malls and new housing developments, checkered with farmland and churches. When I first visited, in July, the marching band was rehearsing both its fall show and a short routine for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in New York. Daniel Wiles, the band’s artistic director, was in a gym with the color guard, which he also directs. In military bands, the color guard carries the regimental colors and national flag, presents arms, and delivers rifle salutes. In a high-school band, it’s a multipurpose performance troupe. The members wave flags, carry banners, manipulate props, perform acrobatics, and juggle metal sabres and wooden rifles. The Avon color guard was more than fifty strong, all girls, but without the glossy conformity of a cheerleading squad. They were tall, short, skinny, squat, goofy, gawky, elegant, awkward, carefree, and self-conscious. They stood in rows, bending and lurching to the music from a boom box, as Wiles chided them from the sidelines.

“Leila! Come on, do the work, girl! Do the work!”

“You’re way too far forward, Sophia!”

“O.K., that was . . . not good. Let’s do it again. Twelve and eight. Counting is our friend.”

Wiles is roundly built but light on his feet, with shrewd eyes and a grayish-white beard, like a grizzled cherub. He talks fast, with a comedian’s offbeat timing and cutting asides, and moves with a dash of razzmatazz. I asked him if he’d had to soften his manner much for high-school students over the years. “I’m still who I am,” he said. “I’m more like a funny big brother than their father. I’m there to be their mentor, not their friend. I’m not there to make it easy. I don’t believe in that.” His uncompromising approach has its detractors. “You step back sometimes and think, Is this good for my kid?” one parent told me. “It’s definitely walking that line. If your kid is tough enough to withstand it, you stay. If not, you leave.”

When Wiles was in high school, in the mid-eighties, creating shows for marching bands was not a reasonable career goal. Most bands had a single director and no budget for composers or choreographers. “I remember my father saying, ‘You better solve this, because this isn’t a job,’ ” Wiles told me. “And I said, ‘I am going to make it my job.’ ” He lived hand to mouth for a few years after college, working as a freelance color-guard director, buying food with his gas card when the money ran out. Some of his most innovative work was for Drum Corps International, a private organization that runs a competitive band circuit in the summers. Founded in 1971, D.C.I. had become an incubator for the marching arts. It was meant for college and élite high-school players, and its judges awarded more points for challenging, original programs. To win, a band had to do more than march and play cleanly. It had to do something new.

The first thing to go was symmetry. Drum Corps bands like Star of Indiana, under the choreographer George Zingali, tossed out the blocky formations that had boxed in bands for generations, and replaced them with curves, clusters, and expressionistic patterns. “Before 1980, what you saw on one side of the fifty-yard line was the same as on the other,” Greg Bimm, another early innovator, told me. “With Zingali, it was more Jackson Pollock-esque.” The music grew equally ambitious. The jukebox format gave way to scores based on a single theme or classical composer: Bernstein, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich. By the early nineties, high-school bands had joined the trend, adding composers, drill writers, and choreographers to their staff and vying for top designers. Woodwinds migrated over from the orchestra to fill out the sound, then keyboards and synthesizers. Singers and string players began to take the spotlight, with microphones and sound systems to support them. “There are still a lot of people who say, ‘This isn’t marching band. This is just dancy, prancy Broadway,’ ” Wiles told me. “It’s running versus crawling. They want to go back to crawling. But I’m fifty-four years old and I still want to do more.”

Avon’s show was called “Mondriesque.” The band members would be dressed as paintings by Piet Mondrian, the Dutch modernist. The props would consist of forty nesting cubes, the largest nearly five feet tall, painted black, white, and in primary colors. The idea came to Wiles and Michael Townsend after they’d chosen the show’s score. They wanted to use “Russian Christmas Music,” by Alfred Reed—an old concert-band warhorse—but give the staging a twist. Townsend mentioned Russian nesting dolls, which led to colored blocks and nesting cubes, which led to Mondrian. It was an exercise in free association—the theme never really circled back to the music—but it sounded artistic and gave the show a striking look. As the band members marched around in their Mondrian outfits, they would unpack the colored cubes and arrange them into three-dimensional paintings. “Nobody will watch that show and say, ‘I wish there was some more Christmas in here,’ ” Wiles told me.

The top bands try to keep their themes secret early in the season. The irony is that most of the directors know one another and sometimes share information. When Townsend isn’t co-writing Avon’s shows, he directs Carmel’s color guard. “We’re all incestuous,” Wiles told me. “Who cares? If he was working at Microsoft and I was at Apple, maybe we wouldn’t work together, but we’re not solving the world’s problems here.” He shook his head. “It’s such a niche activity—it’s ‘Best in Show.’ But imagine: two of the best marching bands in the world are just twenty-five miles apart. So, yes, there is keen competition. I always tell people: It’s not all about winning, but I didn’t come here to lose.”

Carmel High School is north of Indianapolis, across Interstate 465, in a suburb of lamplit streets and posh boutiques. It was close to 7:30 p.m. when I arrived. Temperatures were in the eighties and the sun had slid to the horizon like a drop of melted wax, but the band was still practicing. The students were lined up outside the school stadium, in a parking lot painted with yard lines and numbers like a football field. They stood at attention for a moment, their arms bent in front of them in various positions, as if holding invisible instruments. Then a voice rang out: “Check! Adjust!” A metronome sounded, and the band began to march.

The voice belonged to Chris Kreke, the band’s director. He was standing on the roof of an observation tower four stories above us, leaning over the railing with a microphone in hand. When I went up to join him, I could see the band’s choreography unfolding below: lines crossing and reversing course, squares collapsing and turning inside out, circles exploding into smaller circles like fireworks in slow motion. The patterns were so complex that the drill designer, Michael Gaines, had to use a 3-D program called Pyware to choreograph them. The coördinates for each player’s movements could be loaded onto a smartphone or printed onto a spiral-bound dot book—one page for each movement—then drilled until they were pure muscle memory. “Look at me!” Kreke said, his voice reverberating below. “That was really good until the end. When we come into page 13, we have to have a much stronger direction change. That is twelve counts, and you have to get a really energetic step-off. Yes?”

“YESSIR!”

The theme of Carmel’s show was “Arcestrations.” The name was a play on the show’s props—twenty-six giant, seesawing arcs made of aluminum—as well as its dark, turbulent score: Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Mastering the choreography alone would take weeks. The length and speed of each step could change from one measure to the next, and the players had to hit their marks exactly to stay in formation. For now, they would rehearse the music and the movements separately, mimicking their playing as they marched. “There are just a lot of simultaneous responsibilities to work through,” Kreke told me. “What direction am I moving? What’s the choreography with my upper and lower body? Do I sound good? Am I playing in time?” And yet, by late fall, every moving gear in this nine-minute show would be meshed together in the players’ minds. Kreke could call out any measure, the band would fall into position, and the music would pick up mid-step at a dip of his baton.

It’s hard to think of another group activity, past or present, of such complexity. The Prussians under Frederick the Great were once the zenith of military marching technique. To synchronize their movements over a terrain, they studied human anatomy and posture. They tried to find the ideal length and cadence for a soldier’s step, then drilled their movements with a stopwatch. Prussian troops could cut obliquely across a battlefield while the enemy was still marching at right angles. They could change course and speed at an officer’s command. In an era when battles could be won by an army’s rate of fire, they could shoot their muskets in a continuous wave.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Prussian Army had doubled its marching rate from six to twelve miles a day. But its soldiers didn’t have to play instruments: they had drummers and fifers to keep the beat. The Carmel band both marched and played. It was like the old quip about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels. The Bartók concerto was hard for any high-school band to tackle, even sitting down with the score. Yet the Carmel musicians had to play it from memory, while marching, dancing, and crab-stepping sideways across the field.

Forty feet below us, under the observation tower, three women were stationed in lawn chairs with a case of medical supplies beside them. Bethany Brown and Janelle Scarberry were band parents and members of the Carmel booster club; Kathy Hogan was Janelle’s mom. They’d volunteered to sit there for the four-hour rehearsal and tend to any minor injuries or other medical issues that came up. “Because we are so qualified for that,” Brown said. They all guffawed. Headaches, bruises, vomiting, and surface wounds were most common, followed by rolled ankles, twisted knees, and the occasional blackout or sunstroke in this summer heat. “Jade just fainted this morning,” Scarberry reported. “Dehydration, low blood sugar, kidney issues. I had one saxophone who tripped over his shoelaces and fell on his face. And some guard girl got hit in the head.” The injuries sometimes came in bunches, Brown said. “We got to chaperon for the Macy’s Parade a couple of years ago. That was difficult.”

“We had sick kids on every bus,” Scarberry said.

“One kid vomited, and he’d eaten sushi right before.”

The real toll of such intense rehearsing builds up over time. Percussionists get tendinitis in their wrists. Horn players have pinched nerves and back pain. Woodwinds get numb hands and tingling fingers. Almost every player I spoke to had one chronic complaint or another. But the color guard seemed to be the most injury-prone. The sabres they juggled weighed a pound and a half, the rifles closer to three. The weapons had to be tossed and caught in rhythm, at varying heights and tempos, while the guards performed spins and acrobatics. “You have to count your rotations,” Sydney Byers, a senior guard at Avon, told me. “But the wind can blow off the toss, or you’ll have the sun in your eyes.” Byers had a broken bone in her foot so painful that she had to wear an orthopedic boot when she wasn’t performing. Others had jammed their fingers with mistimed catches or conked one another with errant throws. Their arms and legs were flecked with bruises. “I like to name mine,” Adele Beleckaite, another senior Avon guard, told me. She pointed to an especially livid mark on her left elbow. “This one’s Timothy.”

Beleckaite’s parents are both Lithuanian immigrants. She has their broad features and powerful frame, but she’s exceptionally flexible. When she first joined the color guard, four years ago, she liked to do back walkovers—bending her body till her head nearly touched her heels, then flipping over onto her feet. One night during her freshman year, she was lying in bed next to her sister when her back seized up without warning. “I just started to scream,” she said. She had a fractured plate at the base of her spine, she later found. “Bending my back in half must have snapped it.” The ruptured disk has since healed completely. In the meantime, though, Beleckaite developed hip dysplasia. “I can feel the ball and socket rubbing up against my pelvic bones,” she said. Like the others, she had no intention of quitting the band.

Late in the fall, Brown wrote to tell me that the Carmel band was having trouble with its props. The show’s aluminum arcs were each twelve feet long and five feet high, and weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds. Dragging them around the field and rocking them into position was proving treacherous. “Burns, smashed hands,” Brown wrote. “Honestly, I’ve seen so many near misses with these kids.” The previous weekend, her son Connor, who plays baritone horn, had been hit so hard by an arc that X-rays later showed that one of his elbows was broken. “He had two Band-Aids slapped on and continued to practice for three hours,” she wrote. The elbow break turned out to be a bone bruise, but her son would have kept on marching regardless. “I suppose the bad news is he would have been much easier to find on the field in a sling,” Brown wrote.

Why do they do it? Carmel High School has ten choirs, six orchestras, eleven concert and jazz bands, and more than fifty sports teams. It has its own planetarium and student-run television and radio stations. Yet every year close to three hundred students join the marching band, and only a handful drop out. Playing a sport can be even more gruelling than marching, and far more hazardous. But sports offer popularity and a chance at individual glory. Marching band, for much of the year, offers shared suffering. The season begins in midsummer, and the first major contest isn’t until the fall.

“It’s the most delayed-gratification activity I’ve ever seen,” Joseph Loria, a Carmel parent, told me. Loria’s son Gavin is a senior in the band’s percussion section. Before he joined, his older sister, Ava, was on the Carmel swim team—a program that has won thirty-eight state championships in a row and sent three swimmers to the Olympics last year. “But that was on the athletic side,” Gavin’s mother, Cristina, told me. “Coming to this side was a shock to us. I didn’t think there could be anything as intense as swimming, and this was even more intense.”

I’d seen Gavin rehearse in the band room and the parking lot, leading the percussion section during its drills. He was a remarkably talented drummer. Tall and wiry, with a shock of black hair that hung across his forehead, he had a shy, inward gaze and a nervous rhythm that ran through his limbs like a ride cymbal. He started playing drums in fourth grade, on his father’s kit in the basement, joined the junior-high jazz band at twelve, and won his school’s Jazz Player of the Year award at fourteen. Then the bottom fell out.

On the morning of his audition for the Carmel High School band, his mother drove him to school and turned around to wish him luck. He was frozen in the back seat, tears in his eyes. “I can’t get out of the car,” he told her. His mother talked him down eventually, and he managed to do the audition. But instead of playing snare drum in the band, as he’d requested, Gavin was assigned to the marching quads—a set of four large drums suspended from a shoulder harness, with a small fifth drum attached. “I hated it,” Gavin told me. “They’re twice the weight of the snare. The first time we wear them, we do a lot of movements without a break. That alone is enough to absolutely kill your body.” At night, his muscles were tight as bowstrings, his legs and shoulders always sore. In the morning, the panic attacks would come. “I couldn’t breathe,” he told me. “My body wouldn’t let me. When I got to practice, I had to fake my way through it. I don’t want to use the word ‘traumatic,’ but it was pretty bad.”

By the following summer, when marching season began, Gavin was doing better. His body was stronger, a therapist was helping with his anxiety, and the percussion director had asked him to play snare, as he’d always hoped. Still, his memories of the previous year were so painful that he was afraid to rejoin. “I thought about it for a long time,” he told me.

Marching band builds character, parents and band directors often told me. “They are learning what excellence looks like,” Joseph Loria said. “You work on the mundane stuff. You do hard things even when there are obstacles—especially when it’s something you love.” The experience teaches patience, discipline, and collaboration, Chris Kreke said. “They’re outside, moving, vertical, not on their phones. There are a lot of benefits.” But it’s hard to see how any of that could get kids onto the field week after week. Few of the students I spoke to wanted to major in music, or even to join the marching band in college. Bands like those at Texas A. & M. and Ohio State, and at historically Black schools like Jackson State and North Carolina A. & T., can be extraordinarily skilled. But most don’t march competitively; they still just play pop tunes and fight songs at football games. As one director put it, “The job isn’t to make art—it’s to entertain forty thousand drunks.”

When Gavin decided to stay in the band, it wasn’t to experience personal growth. He simply knew that he’d miss the drums. “I felt like I was throwing something away,” he told me. Three years later, it was hard to picture the panic-stricken boy he’d been. As the center snare, Gavin now set the pulse for the entire group. The drum majors conducted the show from the sidelines, but they had trouble keeping the beat when the band was spread across a field. The distances were so long that the sound of the musicians in back would arrive a fraction of a second behind the sound of those in front. To maintain the tempo, the drum majors had to ignore their ears and rely on their eyes. They had to watch Gavin march and set the beat to the rhythm of his feet.

It’s a startling thing, in a distracted age, to see hundreds of high-school students pursue a single goal for hours on end, repeating the same thirty-second drills over and over. But it’s not altogether surprising. Teen-agers are built for indoctrination, eager for any way to lose themselves in a collective. Watching Gavin charge across the parking lot, tattooing his drum in perfect time, I could see why he’d stayed. Chin up, back straight, mind surfing on muscle memory, he looked unburdened, free. The blazing focus in his eyes—the fixation on doing one thing right and then another, and another, despite sweat and sun and aching muscles, the churn of anxiety and the weight of expectation—didn’t look like duty or blind obedience to me. It looked like joy.

Late in September, on a Friday night, I went back to Bourbon County for a football game. The Grand National Championships were just two months away, and I wanted to see how the Marching Colonels were coming along. I’d been to Indianapolis earlier that week, and the Avon and Carmel shows were predictably on schedule: props built, music memorized, choreography largely in place. Both bands had won their first local contests, and would go on winning that fall, vying for first and second place when they met at regional and state contests. “The organization of this band is mind-blowing,” Gavin Loria’s mother, Cristina, told me, at one of the Carmel rehearsals. “It’s like a machine.”

The Marching Colonels were not a machine. The week before I came, they’d placed ninth out of ten bands at a contest in LaFayette, Kentucky. Their costumes weren’t done, the sound system was acting up, and the kids were still learning parts. “Some of them are thinking that, because of the year they had last year, they’re going to do it again,” Arthur Hubbard, who owns an HVAC business close to the school, and whose daughter plays baritone in the band, told me. “And they might get their asses whupped.”

The band had a habit of starting slow. Every season was a scramble for funding. Carmel’s yearly budget was a third of a million dollars, most of it raised from parents and local businesses. The Marching Colonels would be happy to raise a hundred thousand. Bourbon County is rural, sparsely populated, mostly working-class. The county seat, Paris, where the high school is situated, has a Beaux-Arts courthouse and rows of ornate shops from the eighteen- and early nineteen-hundreds, when the town was known for its distilleries. Some of the country’s finest Thoroughbreds are raised in the rolling pastures around Paris—Queen Elizabeth II had her horses bred in Versailles, half an hour away. But the distilleries are long lost to consolidation, and when the local horse barons open their wallets it’s usually for sports.

“This is a football town,” Megan Davidson, the president of the band’s booster club, told me. “People just don’t respect the work of the band as much.” The Bourbon County football team was 0–4 on the night I came, with a five-year record of 14–40. Yet a splendid new field had recently been built for the team. “It shocks me a little,” Crystal Howard, whose son Dutcher plays percussion in the band, told me. “We have a national-championship band that is barely getting funded and a football team that may not win a game. And they’re, like, ‘Let’s give them a new field!’ and we’re, like, ‘Can we just get some tubas?’ ”

It was dusk when I arrived, and the floodlights were on over the stadium. The bleachers were still half empty, but a dozen parents were crowded in and around the concession stand, getting ready for the halftime rush. Karen Moore, whose granddaughter is in the color guard, was heating up three Crock-Pots full of chili, queso, and barbecued pork. Crystal Howard’s husband, Matt, who runs a Thoroughbred stable in Lexington, was plunging a basket of mozzarella sticks into a deep fryer. (“It’s O.K.,” he said, when hot oil splattered over his arm. “We’ve all burned ourselves already.”) Megan Davidson’s father, Bill, was grilling burgers and rib eyes outside, while his wife, Peggy, whose left arm was in a cast from carpal-tunnel surgery two days earlier, filled in where needed. She called herself the band nanny. When the parents weren’t working concessions, they were sewing flags, washing uniforms, making sandwiches, hauling equipment, and running sound for the show. On Sundays, a few of them even drove to Cincinnati, an hour and a half away, to raise more money selling drinks at Bengals games. “It’s a wonder that any of us have any sanity left,” one of the parents told me.

Out in the parking lot, Dwight Guy and Bo Davidson, Megan’s husband, were unloading props that they’d built for the band’s show. Guy is a retired fireman, clean-cut and square of form. Davidson is tall and shaggy, with a big grin. He drives a box truck and a flatbed in town, delivering pallets of goods. Neither man is a trained designer, but both are handy and have kids in the band. “I pretty much done this thing, and then Dwight prettied it up,” Davidson said. He pointed to a circular contraption, twelve feet wide, with a rotating platform on top. He’d made it from a salvaged trampoline, attached a motorized winch, and hooked it up to a car battery. “That thing weighs about twelve hundred pounds—about kills two men just to move it,” he said. A pair of huge round frames stood behind it, painted silver and gold like ceremonial gateways. He’d made them out of hay rings that a local farmer had donated. I asked him what role they played in the show. “The portals?” he said. “They’re just . . . portals.”

The show was called “Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons.” Its opening number was from the “Wonder Woman” soundtrack, by Rupert Gregson-Williams. But Tim Gray, the director, had worked as a contest judge and thought that the show could use a weightier theme. He’d been reading “The Power of Myth,” by Joseph Campbell. Instead of focussing on Wonder Woman, he’d decided, the show would tell the story of one of the warriors who’d inspired her character. In Greek mythology, Penthesilea is the sister of Queen Hippolyta—Wonder Woman’s mother in the comic. She leads the Amazons in the Trojan War and is felled by Achilles. “It’s the hero’s journey,” Gray said—from struggle to loss to triumphant redemption. But he did want to include one comic-book element: a pair of mysterious portals on either side of the field. I asked him where the portals led in the Penthesilea story. He gave me a blank look. “Nowhere,” he said. “It’s just a cool prop.” He laughed. “You don’t want to get too complicated. If Grandma can’t understand it after ninety seconds, you’re doing something wrong.”

Football crowds are a tough audience. Grandma isn’t really the problem, though. The people I saw pumping their fists at halftime in Oklahoma were probably family members. It’s the rest of the crowd that rarely pays attention. “Even during the show, at most schools, everyone is talking to each other or going to get a hot dog,” Michael Townsend, the Avon and Carmel designer, told me. “It brings me down to earth. We all take this very seriously—to me, this music is an art form. But going to a football game makes me go, Oh, yeah, nobody cares about this except us.” Competitive bands lead a double life. On Saturdays, at marching-band contests, they play for the cognoscenti: judges, directors, parents, and other players who cheer for every complex formation and musical phrase. On Friday nights, at the football stadium, the band is just an afterthought.

The Marching Colonels were used to it by now. The rise of the marching arts in America hadn’t changed the players’ status much. They were still band nerds. While the cheerleaders preened and hopped around in front of the crowd, and the football players collided on the field, the band was bunched off to one side of the bleachers. Whenever the home team scored or a time-out was called, the musicians had to jump up, grab their instruments, and blast a fanfare—“Go Team Go!” It was a thankless task, capped by a final indignity after the game: because the band parents ran the concession stand, their kids had to pick up all the trash under the bleachers. “I kind of secretly hope the team doesn’t score,” Dutcher Howard told me. “Because then they’ll shoot off fireworks and confetti, and I’ve got to go pick them up.”

Howard’s mom liked to call him Squid. He was thirteen years old, noodle-thin, with big eyes and a ruff of straw-colored hair. He and Gael Martinez were among the youngest kids in the band—Martinez was a year younger than Howard and a head shorter. As the least experienced musicians, they’d been assigned to the rack, an assemblage of sparely used percussion instruments clustered around a rolling stand. It included a triangle, a glockenspiel, a bass drum, a gong, a repurposed drum brake from a car, and an Aztec death whistle that sounded like a human shriek. The two boys were officially part of the front ensemble—the keyboard and percussion players who stood in front of the band, like an orchestra pit, and didn’t march during the show—but they looked like boxcar children along for the ride. “We’re at the bottom of the ladder,” Howard said. “If something goes wrong, everybody in the pit says, ‘What went wrong in the rack?’ ”

Still, they seemed to be having more fun than anyone else. Between time-outs, Howard and the others jumped from bench to bench, trading jokes and doing goofy dances to the music on the P.A. When halftime came, the front ensemble marched to the sideline and stood facing the crowd at the fifty-yard mark, a dishevelled row of grinning boys, waiting for the drum major’s cue. There were eight of them in all—two marimbas, two vibraphones, two synthesizers, and the boys on the rack—and, though they didn’t march, they never stopped moving. They heaved their chests up and down to the beat, hammered the keys in overlapping waves, and bobbed their heads like thrash rockers. “We call it pulsing,” Grayson Mack, the lead marimba player, told me. “We’re marking time, moving together. Even the mallet sticks have to line up perfectly.”

Mack was the oldest member of the ensemble, at eighteen, and my favorite to watch. He had a mop of dark-brown hair bleached blond on top, and bright eyes that peered through his bangs with crazed intensity as he played. “Sometimes you just have to let out the adrenaline scream,” he said. Six years ago, Mack came out as a boy, just as transgender issues were becoming a flash point in Kentucky. (The state banned puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors in 2023.) Some of his friends were still afraid to transition, for fear of being sent to conversion therapy. But Mack’s parents were “fine enough with it,” he told me, and his teachers mostly left him alone. “Bourbon County is a weird outlier in the Bible Belt,” he said. Best of all, he had the band. The front ensemble was full of odd ducks like him, but they were as close as siblings, and when they were playing well they were like one body. At a competition in 2023, one judge commented, simply, “Front ensemble . . . yeaaah.” The group had it put on a T-shirt.

That night’s performance was a work in progress: the finale still wasn’t ready. The show opened with a battle scene—the players pouring through the portals and charging around in silver and black uniforms—paused for a ballad, then ended abruptly with an ominous chord from the brass. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bourbon County marching band!” the announcer declared. “James Wexler, please report to the concession stand. You forgot your coleslaw.”

The home team was winning for once—it would lose in the final minutes, 34–38—so most of the crowd stayed and relaxed into the evening, dancing to “Superstition” as the football players took the field. The night air had cooled and a light breeze was blowing, carrying the smell of popcorn and chili-cheese fries. Behind the bleachers, beyond the glow of stadium lights, someone’s little sister was doing cartwheels on the pitcher’s mound. It was 2024 but felt like a half century earlier.

When I got to the band room, the players were whooping and jumping around. Tim Gray had just given them the night off—they could pick up trash in the morning. I walked over to Dwight Guy, who had run sound for the show as well as making most of the props. “I’ve seen them do better,” he said, with a crooked smile. “But I think we’ll be O.K. We’re an October band.”

Lucas Oil Stadium, where the Grand National Championships are held, is nine stories high and has nearly two million square feet of indoor space. That’s plenty of room for its main tenants, the Indianapolis Colts, and their fans. But on the weekend of the Grand Nationals it feels like an overstuffed clown car. More than twenty thousand costumed musicians and dancers descend on the stadium every November, along with instruments, props, buses, trucks, parents, teachers, and fanatical fans. In logistical terms alone, the event is a marvel. For thirteen to sixteen hours a day, over three days, more than a hundred bands take turns marching on and off the field every fifteen minutes. Volunteers with synchronized stopwatches are stationed backstage, on the field, and in the press box in the upper suites. The bands have exactly four minutes to set up their show. Forty-five seconds before it starts, they’re introduced to the crowd. “Everyone knows exactly what time it is,” one of the announcers, John Pollard, told me in the broadcast booth. “It’s sort of a heartbeat.”

If the event’s structure seems proof of its military roots, its content is a riot of invention, like a French garden overrun by exotics. A band from Newburgh, Indiana, came out in black cloaks and purple berets, like characters from “The Matrix” headed to a poetry reading. Then they flitted around the field like bats. A group from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, reënacted a solo sailing trip around the world, with the band tossing itself about like waves and rocking on skeletal ships. A show called “The Cutting Edge,” by a band from Cedar Park, Texas, doubled down on the title’s pun, with music from “Sweeney Todd” and Samuel Barber, and the band marching around giant barber poles. Some shows were earnest and philosophical, others sentimental or goofy. In “Menagerie,” from a school in Kingsport, Tennessee, the color guard were caged like animals in a zoo, clad in polka-dot bodysuits. In “Shhhh . . . It’s Rabbit Season,” by a band from Mason, Ohio, the musicians marched out in caps and hunting jackets, like Elmer Fudd, while the color guard wore neon-orange rabbit suits. Then the musicians chased the rabbits around to “The Barber of Seville” and the “William Tell” Overture.

The band that other players and directors seemed to admire most—they spoke of it with a kind of awe—was the Outdoor Performance Ensemble, from Tarpon Springs, Florida. The band’s new show was called “Awakening.” It began with the color guard kneeling on the grass, as if in prayer. A circle of monoliths stood in the center of the field, like Stonehenge, with a row of pyramids behind them, all glimmering like prisms. “In the time before time, in the place that never was,” a disembodied voice declared, “light, darkness, and from the space between them magic was born.” For the next ten minutes, the band members danced and swooned and arranged their props in geometric patterns, like giant mandalas. They played “In the Light,” by Led Zeppelin, and other trippy tunes by Radiohead, Max Richter, and Anoushka Shankar, while the voice intoned overhead, “As a child, I wished to touch the light of dreams and bring it before the eyes of day.”

Those last words, I later learned, were by the visual artist James Turrell, a seminal member of the Light and Space movement. The show was beautifully staged, and it had some mesmerizing moments, but its theme was a strange choice for a marching band. If you want to express light and dreams and a Zen-like awakening, why do it with two hundred high-school students blasting on horns and drums? The more ambitious the show, it seemed, the more it chafed against the oddness of its art form. A football field makes an imperfect theatre: the space is too big, the acoustics abominable, the sight lines aslant, the stage painted with a giant helmet in the middle. Yet designers have no choice but to embrace those limitations.

Marching-band shows are like opera: they can seem ridiculous to the uninitiated. A brass section blaring about transcendence isn’t so different from a soprano caterwauling about love. Both arts were born of physical challenges—How can a single voice be heard in a large theatre? How can instruments carry across a stadium?—and both developed aesthetic rules of their own. The more critics and judges rewarded their virtuosity and invention, the more sophisticated the shows grew, and the harder to grasp. “We were born and bred to appreciate symmetry,” Michael Townsend, the Carmel and Avon designer, told me. “It’s in our genetic makeup. Just marching in line or making an ‘X’ is cool. Now we do it on the bias and make a weird line. Is it as appealing? That is the evolution of what we’ve done. We started with symmetry and took the next step and the next and the next, but Mom and Dad are still back there.”

One morning before the contest began, I spent an hour with Daniel Wiles at Avon High School, watching a video of “Mondriesque.” The show started simply, with five white cubes on the field and the band clustered around them, then built to a kaleidoscopic complexity. The cubes multiplied and changed color. The band’s formations split apart and twisted together. The music went from unison lines to thunderous counterpoint. What seemed a little chaotic, at first viewing, slowly resolved into an exhilarating order. “We have secondary and tertiary points of interest. But, if we do it right, we move your eye where we want it to be,” Wiles said. “As the visual coördinator, my job is to have you see what you hear and hear what you see.”

Even armies had to stop marching in formation eventually. They were too easy a target, William McNeill wrote in “Keeping Together in Time.” The Akkadians brought composite bows and shot up the Sumerian shield wall. The Chinese climbed on horseback and rode roughshod over their enemy’s infantry. The machine gun was invented and mowed down opposing regiments. To win a battle, you had to change strategy, do the unexpected, break ranks and divide into mobile units. It’s no wonder that marching bands, after centuries of staying in line, have taken to dodging and weaving across the field. The arrows they’re avoiding now are just the judges’ pens.

The Grand National Championships ended as they had the year before: in a photo finish. Carmel won top marks for its music, Avon for its choreography and other visual effects. When the scores were combined, the two bands were less than a point apart—97.3 for Avon, 96.35 for Carmel—with Broken Arrow and Tarpon Springs close behind. “I mean, we’re shaving hairs here,” the chief judge, John Phillips, told me afterward. “The scores are so close, Carmel or Broken Arrow could have had a more expressive performance and they could have won.”

The Marching Colonels were not among the finalists. They had arrived at the Grand Nationals in a bit of a funk, not sure that they’d make it out of the preliminary round. They couldn’t afford a hotel in Indianapolis, so they were bunking in a military base forty minutes south of town. (Grayson Mack and two other trans students had to sleep in the girls’ barracks, but Mack told me that he preferred it that way: “The smell in the boys’ barracks is just unbearable.”) The band’s first performance in Lucas Oil Stadium was a little shaky. There were timing issues and marching miscues, and the wireless microphones were still cutting out. I sat with the judges during the show, in a darkened skybox above the stadium. The woman beside me was recording her comments as she kept score, and I could hear her ticking off problems as the show went along: “. . . issues with clarity . . . you have to be really careful with the spatial relationship . . . a little distracting at that point . . . that should be the focus. . . .”

Yet the band somehow slipped through to the semifinals and, in its last performance, outdid itself. The color guard, who’d been looking a little sloppy, were suddenly in synch, whirling their weapons in their Penthesilea outfits. The drums and keyboards were locked tight, the whole band playing with fierce precision. “I don’t know what happened,” Tim Gray told me afterward, in the parking lot. “The stars aligned, they ate more peanut butter, they got some sleep. I mean, this is not the most talented group I’ve ever had. They’re fourteen and a half! But, I swear, their warmup was the best I’ve ever heard. No dropped notes! I was, like, Where did that come from? I could have gotten more sleep, drunk less bourbon.”

All around us, the Marching Colonels were laughing and shouting, their faces flushed and uniforms askew. Dutcher Howard was standing over by Utah Hartman, a mellophone player whose parents raise goats and cattle in Bourbon County. “Man, it was epic,” Howard said. “At the end, seeing everyone stand up in a ripple effect. Half the stadium stood up!” Hartman couldn’t stop grinning, his eyes opened so wide that he looked in shock. “That was the best run I’ve ever had,” he said. “It was loud. It was clean. It was textbook, man, textbook!”

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party.

Marching-band contests aren’t like other competitions, the players often told me. Even the biggest rivals root for one another. The Grand Nationals seemed to bear this out. The loudest cheers always came from the bands watching the shows, and after the ceremony the Carmel and Avon players rushed over to hug each other. “With football, you try to make the other team lose,” Grayson Mack told me. “With a band, you go out with this family you just spent six months sweating on the pavement with, and an instrument you love to play, and people you love to play with. And then you see that it’s just one huge community. We’re all band kids here.” ♦