DAY 49, THE whiteboard announces. Tree-topped Missouri hills surround Fayette High School like an upturned collar and the sun winks above them. The guys, sitting down to breakfast, cast sidelong glances at the McDonald’s and Dairy Queen overlooking the school and its stadium. “Sweet,” they whisper. According to Fiedler’s marker scrawl outlines, rehearsal runs from 10:30-3, followed by two hours to eat, shower, and pack before departing for Columbia and that night’s DCI regional, in which they’re scheduled to march last, or about 8:30. Then it’s dinner and on to Rosemont for the next day’s annual parade and picnic, with a blessed free day once their duties have been discharged. “We don’t brush our teeth in the drinking fountain/bubbler,” the board’s message warns, followed by: “McDonald’s across the street says ‘You’ve had enough!’… I still have the corporate Amex. :)” Perhaps there is some hope for sweetness after all.
The rhythms of tour take over, each section eking out customary corners to warm up, face the day. Bruno Zuccala describes the teaching routine as breaking the show down to its elemental parts during the week and polishing them, putting it back together and building to peak at each big weekend show. Tonight qualifies, with top-ten perennials Madison Scouts and Bluecoats meeting them at the University of Missouri’s big bowl, and DCI Finals barely a month away. Every last tenth of a point counts, every section must be on top of its game for the corps to have a chance at a seventh DCI championship. Is it pressure? Veteran mellophone Kyle Adelmann chuckles. The difference between the lead in your pencil and a 14-karat diamond is the heat and pressure that exists miles beneath the earth’s crust. If the Cavaliers are mining for greatness—as musicians, as men—there’s no better place to start digging deep within themselves and finding what’s at the core.
Each of his seasons, Adelmann makes a point of reviewing the performance on DVD to see how it stacks up. His goal is always to better his previous effort—achieve cleaner execution, richer sound. Drum corps is the ultimate clinic, bearing only cursory comparison to his experience in a Big Ten college marching band. At the University of Illinois, he says, they’re 400-strong, there to entertain the crowd and play flashy and loud, knock over 60,000 fans with a new show every Saturday. In the Cavaliers, there’s no hiding in a wall of brass. Chances are the glissandi or off-color note in your part is mirrored by only a few other members—and they may be up front playing marimba. Part of the reason they focus on refining one show for 15 weeks is that it’s so head-spinningly ornate, and physically demanding. In college, Adelmann’s “up-tempo” number runs about 120 beats per minute. Here, the pace consistently sprints along at 208—not quite twice as fast. You’re hurtling across the field to twist, jump, climb ladders, spin—all while holding that note. “When I went back to my high school, I was amazed at going from such a high level to such a lower level,” section mate Kevin Nevsimal says.
When Chris Weber and his Prospect High School buddies joined the Cavaliers, they probably had a leg up on other rookies as far as knowing what to expect from the drill and music. Visual designer Michael Gaines and director Jeff Fiedler both taught at Prospect. Still, there’s intensity in rehearsals, a focus expected of members, that makes the first practice unlike anything they’ve experienced. “Coming into the Cavaliers was marching band times ten,” Weber says. “It was a lot faster. In the back of my head, oh man, I didn’t know if I could keep up.”
Mike Bingham calls high school band “controlled chaos.” The director gives instruction and a minute later members might be where they’re supposed to be in order to carry out the command. With the corps, whoever ran rehearsals would be halfway through giving the next order and most of the corps would be ready to go. “There was no extraneous talking,” Bingham says. “Everyone was paying attention to what they needed to pay attention to.”
The step up was just as pronounced musically. Weber went through a staff changing of the guard in 2001 when Bertman arrived. The guys grabbed on to his methods, which involved a lot of listening—noting the sound of the guys around you and working to match your playing to theirs, “so you kind of have a whole cohesive sound that you’re outputting,” Weber says, like one giant brass instrument. The clarity and level of musicianship Chris Michelotti has seen developed in the horn section his last two years rivals anything he’s ever heard in any other corps show. The change from season’s beginning to season’s end can seem almost like two different groups playing.
When Mike Bingham joined in 1997, he’d never had a private teacher, never studied baritone beyond upper-grade-school band. “And they basically taught me how to stop just putting air through a piece of plumbing and how to actually start playing the instrument.” In high school, Michelotti played the music to get through it. “At the Cavaliers we spent so much time learning to play our instruments the way they were supposed to sound. Like, we’d be working on playing concert F for half the rehearsal! And then, after that, we’d move on to some standard exercises, like intervals. And then, towards the end of rehearsal, we’d start looking at some of the music and start putting stuff we just did into the music, rather than just playing the music and trying to make the notes sound like the right notes.” After achieving that, the goal is to reproduce it every time, on command.
The most challenging aspect, though, is putting demanding music with a devilishly-complex drill. The step size is bigger, faster, Michelotti says, and every part of every move is analyzed to make sure you did exactly the right thing in exactly the right place of each and every beat, from straight-ahead marching to high-stepping to jazz running to body obliques and then some. “Just the amount of time put into it,” Weber sighs. “I had never been in a 10-hour rehearsal, straight-through kind of thing before. I think it’s a lot about repetition. You do it so many times—you’re pretty much forced to do it right.”
“It’s the attention to detail,” Bingham says. “There’s no room for errors. And since we do get so much time on the field, in rehearsal, we can refine things down to: ‘OK, I’m playing this note, which is harmony, with this guy six feet behind me, but I share the release with the snare drum hit that’s going on in front of me.’” Putting it all together is what elevates the show.
Mostly, the guys aren’t too concerned with the show’s theme, or the concept, or whether judges are getting what the corps is trying to communicate. They’re virtually insulated from expectations heading into a season. There’s no time. “You’re more concerned with what you have to do to get through the summer,” Michelotti says. “You can’t really worry too much about the more heady concepts because you’re trying to learn everything on the fly,” says Bingham. “You’re trying to cram as much info as you can and still be a productive member of the group.”