On the Fly

Forget football. In the Van Meter household, this is marching band season.

A lifetime ago, Denise and I were band nerds, albeit in different contexts. The tiny marching band in sports-crazed Charleston, AR, was not much bigger than the saxophone section of the Northview Knights, among whom Denise made her best high school memories. I played at Arkansas Tech for my first two years of college, until it became clear that my musical aspirations far outstripped my actual talent.

And that was that, or so I thought. For two decades, our lives rolled merrily along without roll steps or horns-up or halftime shows, until our children brought us back to the field—this time with a new perspective.

Viewed from above, a good band should look like a well-drilled marching corp—understandable, given the military roots of the modern marching band. The musicians and color guard move by rote, their motions rehearsed countless times over the course of many weeks. From a distance, individual movements and sounds meld into a single unit, all those hours of input theoretically producing a reliable outcome.

From a distance being the operative phrase here.

Up close, a marching performance is a study in adaptability. With so many people on the field, it’s almost inevitable that one or more members of the band will be gone for a given day, held out by illness or personal concerns or other obligations. The others—usually different individuals in each set—have to account for those absences and adjust the form accordingly, in real time.

But a missing marcher is one of the easier adjustments to make, since the band can see it coming and visualize the solution. When a fellow marcher makes a mistake, however, the other members have only a split second to decide how to respond. The inclusion of electronic instruments or recorded audio in modern shows adds yet another variable. A faulty cable, a slick patch of turf, a poorly tied shoelace—any of these can force a band into a new, unintended performance space.

What most observers fail to realize is that these things happen in every performance of every show. The one thing every band director and marcher can count on is that something will go wrong. The question is how to deal with these proverbial curveballs.

One answer is better preparation. The more solid reps a band gets, the less likely mistakes will be. And when the unexpected does occur, a good band knows the general structure of the show well enough to get back on track.

The marching band learns the basics on Parent’s Day.

All the preparation in the world, however, won’t eliminate every mistake and mishap. And so band members need training not just in routine, but in improvisation—how to adjust on the fly without panicking or quitting.

Last week, I wrote about the role of LARPs (life action role-playing games) in helping people learn to improvise in unexpected situations. These are immersive experiences in which game play requires participants to adopt the strengths and weaknesses of a certain character in pursuit of a goal. Usually, the quest requires both collaboration and competition, along with the ability to respond to unpredictable circumstances.

Marching band can be a kind of LARP. Done right, so can scientific research and athletics and jazz and finance and campus ministry. If we’re honest, a good percentage of life is improvisation—the convergence of planning and execution.

That definition, set forth by the authors of—and yes, I do read this kind of stuff—an article in Administrative Science Quarterly, captures the importance of a “framework of understanding” within which improvisation takes place. Structures can bind and constrict, to be certain. But they also provide a necessary framework within which new structures can emerge.

Improvisation looks different in various disciplines, of course, but the principle is consistent. Adaptation is a skill. It can be taught. It can be practiced, especially once we have gained competence within a certain sphere.

And this is good news. We are not victims to changing circumstances. We are not cogs in a machine, not predestined to fly while things are good and crash when they are not. Rather, we are members of a greater project—overcoming problems, adapting to changes, adjusting to minimize mistakes.

The hard work that goes into developing a framework of understanding doesn’t bind us. It frees us. We practice and plan, and we execute on the fly. That’s what makes marching band work.

And maybe life, too.