Marching toward perfection
High-flying band in Cupertino built on Olympic-like dedication and big-budget music program
It’s 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, and members of one of the Bay Area’s elite high school marching bands are already sweating on a sun-scorched artificial-turf football field in Cupertino.
Lining up on the field’s yard markers, the teens are practicing moving forward and back with precision, guided by the tick-tick-tick of an amplified metronome. Whether 6 feet tall or 4 feet 10, each will learn to travel exactly 5 yards in eight steps — 22.5 inches per stride.
But the 200 Mighty Mustangs of Homestead High are a long way from moving as one. When they step backward, too many are bobbing up and down.
“I want you to imagine you are a server,” marching instructor Zac Stillwell calls out, lifting his arm as if he’s holding a tray. “And you
have 20 drinks to get to a table.”
Sweat seeps through T-shirts. It’s the middle of summer break, and they’ve been at it for two hours so far, feeling the temperature climb a degree every 10 minutes. Working without their instruments, there is no music, just the incessant ticking. They have 10 hours yet to go this day, another eight the next. But no one complains. They seem to love it all: the marching, the heat, the shared misery.
They know there is a payoff ahead. In less than six months, they’ll travel to Southern California, where they will perform in the Rose Parade in Pasadena on New Year’s Day. Before they get there, they will spend months perfecting their music and moves during a whirlwind run of shows, competitions and football halftimes.
October means peak season, starting with the school’s homecoming parade and game Friday. The next day, Homestead will host an expo of marching bands from its district, and then the Mighty Mustangs travel to perform every weekend through November.
But along with the prestige and the pride, there is another, more important payoff for band students like these, researchers say. The Cupertino teens — buoyed by tradition, devoted teachers and deep-pocketed parents — are immersed in making music, an act that can boost brain development and test scores while teaching the value of teamwork and persistence.
At the same time, the scene on the field exposes the uneven landscape of music and arts education in public schools. Most students have no access to this rarefied world. Public education was supposed to be a great equalizer, but wealthy communities can tip the scales, ensuring their children have more teachers, more technology, smaller classes and better access to the arts.
Few public schools can raise the kind of money it takes to support a band program of this caliber. Homestead’s band requires roughly $400,000 in extra funding to buy custom uniforms, take private jets to national competitions and pay two dozen coaches, including one just for cymbals. Forget the chartered flights — music is often abandoned completely in many school districts when budgets are tight.
A glimpse of what a $400,000 music program looks like can be seen over the next 12 hours on this summer Saturday, as students endure near-triple-digit heat and tend to blisters and strained muscles. What Homestead’s spending buys, according to parents, students and teachers, is opportunity.
The ‘granddaddy’
At his desk in his office, Homestead High Music Director John Burn sits with his laptop open, listening to a mash-up of tunes specially arranged for his Mighty Mustangs: 2014’s “Shut Up and Dance” and 1966’s “California Dreaming.”
Burn, 51, has spent 31 years at this school, first as a student in the marching band, then as a drum major, later as a teacher and a director. Getting Homestead into the Rose Parade is his musical white whale, the “granddaddy” of invitations for programs like his.
Homestead is one of only two California bands, and one of 22 from around the world, to be chosen for the 2018 parade. More than 50 other hopefuls were turned away.
“Hundreds of thousands will see us live, and millions more will watch on multiple TV networks, making it the biggest audience a high school band could ever have,” Burn says.
And so, over the next several months, Burn and his team of coaches will push the students to be impeccable. But their chief reward, he says, is not prestige. Instead, he believes, it’s seeing the benefit of their hard work, of the collaboration and creativity inherent in “spending part of our day making art, expressing feeling.” All qualities, he notes, that employers in Silicon Valley and beyond say they want in workers.
The director closes his laptop. His students on the field this day will begin learning the basics of these lessons in a sweltering refresher course for band veterans and an exhausting initiation for newbies.
Sweat equity
Homestead’s football field is situated at the far end of the school, with green hills to the west and $2 million homes all around. Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Homestead is the alma mater of Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Today it is the domain of kids like Matt Origel. Just shy of 6 feet, the junior looks more like a football lineman than a piccolo player, but what makes him stand out is his intensity. As the hours of practice pass, he never wavers: his posture perfect, his gaze straight ahead, his arms held stiff at 90 degrees as if he’s holding his instrument.
The 15-year-old doesn’t wipe the sweat rolling off his brow until his line has finished a set of steps. After water breaks, he is among the first back on the line.
“For me, when you spend so much time devoted to the program,” he says, “why would you slack off ?”
He practices the flute two hours most days. He wants to continue playing and studying music in college, perhaps along with biology. But that’s not why he’s here.
“Marching band to me,” he says, “is an awesome place where you spend an enormous amount of time with the people you love the most.”
Intense bonds
Big American marching bands, which trace their roots to military units and their modern fame to football games, are overtly extravagant — “maybe the most impractical and expensive form of music education we’ve conceived,” says Stuart Sim, who chairs the music department at Cal State Stanislaus in Turlock.
Tens of thousands of high schoolers across the country — many clustered in states such as Texas, Indiana and Florida — spend hundreds of hours a year perfecting perhaps seven minutes of music and choreography. This despite seeing little traditional glory in it. Sax and flute players don’t get write-ups in the sports pages.
But the camaraderie of band is intense, fueled by shared experiences and inside jokes. It’s why Yolan Chang, 23, is back on the Homestead football field five years after he graduated, a paid, part-time coach on the drum line. Band made him a better person, he says.
“We want to give the kids the same experience we had,” he says.
The Homestead marching band was formed in 1963. The Mighty Mustangs would gain fame as the Fastest Band in the West because of the way they ran onto the field at halftime, playing the school fight song at a lightning pace of 180 beats a minute, a tradition that continues.
In recent years, Burn has been building the band’s reputation, pushing it to greater heights. The quest has included a 2015 trip to the Grand National Championships in Indianapolis, where Homestead took 19th place out of 95 bands. With that exposure came sponsorships from drum makers Tama and Evans, which provided discounted equipment, T-shirts and a few free drums.
Two years ago, the band hired a designer to create a new look — striking green and black uniforms and shako hats with 14-inch plumes. The price tag: $395 each. Burn hopes to get 10 years of use out of them.
He knows how this kind of spending can look given the disparities among public schools in California, where parental support for an arts program at some schools might amount to a few hundred dollars a year rather than a few hundred thousand.
As president-elect of the California Music Educators Association, Burn is lobbying legislators to fund the arts and supporting legislation to better track music programs in elementary schools to ensure all children have access.
He also donated Homestead’s old uniforms to Castro Valley High, where the main school color is also green and the director is working to boost its marching band program.
“It works for all kids,” Burn says of such music programs. “It gives the struggling kids a reason and motivation to show up to school when they might blow it off, and it gives the highachieving kids, well, it separates them from other high-achieving kids.”
Building the band
After scattering for an hourlong lunch break, most of the Mustangs are back on the field well before 1 p.m.
Among them: Junior Shani Zuniga. As one of two drum majors, she organizes the grueling practices, as well as leads the band. She does push-ups on the sidelines to boost her strength. Otherwise, after 10 minutes of conducting, she says, “the arms start to go wobbly.”
Jake Labovitz, 13, is a freshman clarinet player new to the band. His sister, a junior who plays trumpet, encouraged him to join and now teases him during water breaks.
Rintaro Fukuda, a senior, moved to the U.S. from Japan before freshman year. He had no friends, couldn’t speak English, and cried every day his first two weeks at Homestead. Then he joined the marching band, which “changed my entire life,” he says. Now fluent in English, he’s one of its top drummers.
At exactly 1 p.m., a whistle blows and every player is in place. This two-hour session is dedicated to marching sideways with chests forward, a move that requires a twisting contortion that tests the abdominal muscles and which many students struggle to hold. Marching instructor Stillwell makes them lie on their backs on turf that by now is wince-inducing hot on bare skin.
As he leads an ab-strengthening exercise, he shakes his head. “A lot of us don’t have the strength to pick up our legs off the ground,” he chides. “I want you to do this every day.”
An hour later, many are still not sliding correctly, but Stillwell needs to call for a break. Six hours down, six hours to go.
From a bench on the shady sideline, music teacher and band co-director Eric Weingartner watches. There are 100 freshmen in the band this year, he says. Most have some experience, but beginners are welcome, even those who have never played a note. Only the drum line and color guard hold auditions. The primary requirement is commitment.
“There is a reputation to uphold,” he says.
Price of success
On this day, parents are largely invisible. A few drop off lunch or haul a kid to a fast-food joint. But soon, an army of moms and dads will underpin practices and performances, chaperoning and shuttling, arranging meals and raising money — lots and lots of money.
The Fremont Union High School District pays for 2.5 teachers for Homestead’s music program, which also includes orchestra and a jazz band. It budgets $3,500 per year for instrument repairs and equipment and $3,000 to $4,000 to purchase sheet music and other materials.
That’s a pittance compared with the band’s $400,000 budget, which includes travel and other expenses. To cover the gap, band members and their
families are expected to contribute up to $2,000 a year. The parent booster club raises the rest, mostly through operating concessions at football games and directly appealing to friends and alumni.
The few families who can’t afford to contribute can get help from the booster club, says club president Terry Anderson. Band families invest so much money and time, she says, for a simple reason: They think it will benefit their kids at a critical age.
“Parents realize that being a part of this elite band is a special opportunity,” Anderson says. “We see the respect our kids receive from their peers, and Homestead’s reputation makes us proud.”
The funds they raise help pay for 24 part-time instructors, many of them former Homestead students. There are eight marching instructors alone, and coaches for each kind of drum: snare, tenor, toms and bass.
At Castro Valley High, the school that got Homestead’s old uniforms, the marching band has a $20,000 budget, with a requested family donation of $250 per student to cover most of that.
“We are who we are,” says Castro Valley’s band director, Steve Hendee. “I’ve embraced that.”
When Hendee’s band travels and sees competitors like Homestead, the disparity between the programs is stark. Students sometimes ask, “Why can’t we do that?” He doesn’t have a quick answer. But as Homestead’s program exemplifies, the difference is what parents can afford to do.
The two schools get about the same amount from taxpayers. In California, public schools in the wealthiest communities raise, on average, 50 times more money than those with the poorest — $144 per child versus $2.82, according to a 2015 study by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Homestead High has “an amazing level of parent support — they are the haviest of haves,” says Cal State Stanislaus’ Sims. But he adds, “Those kids at Homestead work 12 hours in the heat, and no amount of money makes hard work easy. They earned the life lessons they are getting out of it.”
Students in high-poverty schools, though, are less likely to have access to music education. Those schools that do field programs typically provide fewer courses and often lack dedicated spaces for music, according to a 2012 study by the U.S. Department of Education.
While Homestead students may be defined as privileged, what that means is “they have access to what should be normal, what everyone should have access to,” Sims says.
Life lessons
By 3 p.m., the temperature reaches 95 degrees. The marchers head indoors with their instruments.
In the band room, the 20 or so members of the “pit” have been practicing since 9 a.m. The front ensemble that remains stationary in front of the band, they play the marimba, vibraphones, keyboards, gongs, bass drum — instruments too big to lug around on a field.
Senior vibraphone player Tanner Leone, 17, shakes out his wrists and forearms. “Unfortunately,” he jokes, “this doesn’t build up biceps.”
With college application season gearing up, the senior is thinking about joining the military after ROTC at San Diego State or the University of Montana, schools where he can continue to play in a band.
Marching band might be the “best thing I’ve done in my life,” he says. “We’re very lucky we have this program.”
The sense of urgency does not let up as the afternoon rolls on. In the auditorium, the woodwinds stand amid rows of folded seats. They blow individual notes, hear feedback from Burn, then play scales together, not entirely in tune. Even here, there are crucial lessons to impart.
“If everyone is playing sharp around you and you are in tune, who is wrong?” Burn asks. “You are. It’s more important to play together badly than to play alone.”
‘A huge privilege’
A dinner break allows for time to huddle with friends, eat, rest legs and fill water bottles, then it’s back to work at 6 p.m.
With the temperature down to 85, the students separate into sections to practice the fieldshow medley, songs with a fairy tale theme they’ll play at halftimes and in competition. The flutes practice near the cafeteria, the tubas by the parking lot. Music sounds from every corner of campus.
Ninety minutes later, the full band reassembles in the school’s courtyard. For the first time all day, they’ll play together.
The sun is setting, turning wispy clouds pink. Monica McCandless, a 17-year-old senior, grimaces as she lifts a 30-pound sousaphone onto her sunburned shoulder. All the work is worth it, she says, because “our band gets to do amazing things. The Rose Parade, it’s just a huge experience. That’s like millions of people. It’s definitely a huge privilege.”
Like Monica, most in the band have been playing an instrument for years. Many play more than one. A good number take lessons from private instructors. Still, the field-show music needs a lot of work.
Burn and Weingartner give frequent feedback: Hit notes harder, trumpets. Blow a hole into the ground, clarinets.
If their troops are tired, the only signs are the occasional stretch of a neck or shake of an arm.
“You learn so much about yourself, pushing yourself to your limits,” Monica says. “I think you have to go through it, and be in band, to understand it.”
‘Don’t fade now’
As darkness approaches, and campus lights click on, the students continue to play. More air, Burn urges. More effort, Weingartner adds. Keep up the energy. Don’t fade now.
And then, minutes before 9 p.m., the day is over. The students set their instruments on the ground, but stay rooted in place. Not bad, the directors tell them.
“Make sure you sleep tonight, and shower, too,” Weingartner instructs. “Let your brain rest and your body recover.”
In the parking lot, parents’ cars are lined up, headlights on, trunks lifted to stow instruments.
Still to come before summer ends is band camp, two full weeks of daily training. Then when school opens, every band member takes a music class during the day and practices two evenings a week — and all day on Saturdays.
Most fall Fridays bring a full school day followed by a performance at that week’s football game. Saturdays are for attending shows and competitions: the Tournament of Bands at Cupertino High on Oct. 14, the Irish Guard Invitational at Dublin High on Oct. 21, the Bands of America Northern California Regional Championship at San Jose State on Oct. 28. And on and on.
But on this day, the only thing to think about is tomorrow. In just 12 hours, another all-day practice will start.
Shani, the drum major, takes one last look at her band. None of the Mighty Mustangs has moved. They know better.
“Band,” she shouts, “dismissed!”