The Original Logo

The very first Tulane University Marching Band logo was developed prior to my hiring in 2008. This functioned pretty well within the brand philosophy of Tulane University and our association with it at the time – the TU shield is very strong and is also prominently displayed on the front of our marching band uniform. The fleur-de-lis that separated the top and bottom half of the words established New Orleans as its flavor.

That said, even when I was first hired I felt like the logo didn’t stand out as a TUMB brand. I also didn’t like that the full text was in a circular logo that did not scale well – as a social media thumbnail, the text on say, a mobile phone, could be so small that you had to strain if you wanted to read it, and the TU shield was so dominant that it made our thumbnail virtually indistinguishable from the broader Tulane University thumbnail.

So after a couple of years in the program, I started asking myself, “How would I change this?”

The 2013(ish) brand shift

While changing the brand was in my head early on, it wasn’t until the 2012-2013 school year that I started to actually experiment and open up Creative Cloud with a fresh vision for the brand. As I started development, a few conceptual components coalesced as its foundation.

1. Stylizing the TUMB

The TUMB acronym was well-established both internally and with the community, so I wanted that to dominate the brand presence more than the fully spelled out “Tulane University Marching Band”. I also wanted to move away from using a circular shape for the full brand logo – while circular was good for social media thumbnails, it wasn’t great for banners or headers. I imagined that the visual icon/element that I was building into this could eventually stand on its own once it was well enough established with the brand text.

When conceptualizing how I would style the text, I wanted to establish a stronger link to Tulane Athletics. At the time, their primary brand revolved around a stylized slanted T, something that we had incorporated into our pregame drill sets – we made a “straight T” that linked to the Tulane University T and then moved to the “slanted T” that mimicked the Athletics T as the end of our performance of the Tulane Fight Song.

So I decided to use that slanted T as the basis for the TUMB text design. While there were certain aspects of that slanted T that were a direct mimic – the slant angle, the double-color border – I made a few deliberate differences to make it feel like an homage rather than a straight copy:

1. Although the official TU logo and the Athletics T used serifs, I decided to go non-serif. This was because the TUMB’s pregame drill set lacked serifs for ease of readability based on the number of members we had at the time, so I wanted our text to reflect that. I also felt that the serif was too formal for the overall image of the TUMB I was trying to project.
2. Color choices. The Tulane Green was considered by my boss to be an important part of our brand identity, so I decided to lean in on that and make the fill of the text green. The border of light/Newcomb blue and off white were a part of Tulane’s official brand colors at the time (while pure white was not), which I thought worked well – the muted white accentuated the Tulane green better than pure white.

(As an aside, a very subtle thing I did with the final version was shift the “UMB” two pixels to the left from the default spacing from the T, necessitating creating two separate text blocks for the “T” and the “UMB”. I felt like the default spacing made the negative space between the T and the U too far apart in comparison to the space between the other letters.)

2. The Visual Image/Images(?)

The other primary conceptual element revolved around answering the question, “How do I create an image/symbol that people can immediately associate with the TUMB?”

A single color silhouette of a marching band member in uniform was one of the first things that popped into my head, but unlike what ended up happening, my original concept was not to associate the brand with the trumpet player as the sole silhouette. Instead, I wanted a more advanced concept of brand identity – to allow the silhouette itself to be flexible and changeable every one or two years, unifying it as the TUMB brand more by having it always include four elements:

1. The official Tulane dark blue as the silhouette color
2. The silhouette always being clearly a TUMB member playing an instrument, dancing with poms, or spinning a flag
3. Always having the TU shield be present in the silhouette
4. Always have the silhouette be placed in the same spot relative to the TUMB text

I pitched this to the staff at the time, taking prominent action shots of various TUMB instrumentalists and turning them into silhouettes – a trumpet player, a bass drummer, a flute player, a color guard member. My boss in particular was highly resistant to the introduction of this new brand in the first place and was even more unconvinced about the silhouette being ‘flexible’, so in an effort to compromise and to try to push the brand forward at all, I said, “let’s table that piece of it – for the time being, we can use the trumpet figure and we can revisit whether we use other images to replace it in a couple of years.” Eventually, my boss reluctantly agreed to move forward and so the new brand was established and launched. In the first two years of its implementation, I tried a few times to revisit the idea of swapping out the silhouette for a different one over time, but I eventually gave that up when it became clear that I wasn’t going to win that fight.

Despite losing that part of the battle and despite the shift being a little shaky to start and more gradual than I would have liked, the new brand eventually became an invested part of the TUMB identity for the staff, its members, and its community, and a strong and dominant brand force that I had intended it to be from the very beginning.

Naturally, once it reached that point, I was already thinking about a change.

Rebranding for the TUMB Centennial

Sometime in 2018/19, I was itching to redo the brand logo that I had created, and decided that using the band’s centennial in 2020/21 would be a good vehicle for that change.

Part of the desire for the rebranding came from external factors:

• Tulane Athletics shifted their brand away from the slanted-T to its current Riptide logo.
• Brands at the more professional level were shifting to be softer, particularly when it came to text fonts and styles.
• Tulane University reinvented its brand philosophy to include more modern color schemes and nuanced brand concepts, particularly around the TU shield and what they called the “TU shield abstractions“, a flexible use of the TU shield outline that could be customized for varying purposes. I gained access to those assets, as well as Tulane’s official fonts (whereas the font i used for the old TUMB logo’s text was something that was bundled with Adobe PS/Illustrator’s default font set, a font I chose because I felt it was the closest mimic of the Tulane Athletics T in style).
• The Tulane Bands staff wanted to shift away from considering the “TUMB” as the overarching brand for the entirety of our organization. since the brand didn’t quite fit as the parent for the Concert Band, Soundwave, or other parts of us that weren’t exactly “marching band” related.

However, more of my desire to change the brand was motivated by my heightened understanding of brand even outside of these external factors. While I’ve always had an instinct for branding concepts, my execution particularly when it comes to logos has been mostly self-taught, and there were things about the visual logo part of the brand that the less-experienced-me from 2012/13 created that the more-experienced me realized were glaring errors.

Some of those errors were easy and subtle to fix – the green glow around the silhouette was at times eliminated entirely, particularly for certain printing processes, use of monochrome versions of the brand, or embroidery that couldn’t translate that glow in a meaningful way. The TU shield was used incorrectly according to Tulane’s brand guidelines (because I put it on a slant and distorted it to mimic how it would be viewed on an actual uniform), so we took that out of some of our designs.

But what became clearest to me over those years was that the trumpet figure itself was both philosophically and practically too complicated.

When i created the original silhouette, I simply took the original trumpet photo, trimmed it to encompass the player only, then applied a solid fill overlay.

Practically, the plume in particular with all of its detail was hard to replicate in embroidery situations or when the resolution of the end result was limited. I was already bothered by the fact that we had some versions of the icon that had the glow vs didn’t, had the shield vs didn’t, but the complexity of the physical shape not translating to certain printing situations meant that even the physical look of the icon had variants which always rubbed me the wrong way even if it was only barely perceptible to the human eye.

Introspection about this and more direct observations of brands both successful and unsuccessful over a period of many years led me to better articulate the philosophical understanding of why the brand I created was not as strong as it could have been:

Brand logos are symbols, icons, and successful ones are clean in their symbolism. No successful brand icon is photorealistic.

While the 2012/13 TUMB brand was done pretty much completely on my own, the office dynamic had since shifted to be more collaborative in general, so the staff came together to talk about the new branding in meetings and email exchanges. When we all sat down to initially discuss my rebranding ideas in conjunction with theirs, I advocated strongly that we eliminate the trumpet figure and start completely from scratch. I wanted to create something more abstract that could encapsulate our program, leverage clearer shapes and lines that could be synergized with the Tulane color palette. This was met with strong resistance – my boss in particular had grown to love the icon and associated it very closely with the TUMB brand (which in one sense was incredibly gratifying), and Andrew, the other Assistant Director was leaning in that direction as well.

After a few back and forths about it, I decided to try to find a middle ground. “If we’re going to keep the trumpet figure,” I said, “let me at least try to clean it up and fix what’s broken about it.”

So I fired up Illustrator and did just that.

Phase 1: Everything but the plume

The first iteration of this was to ignore the plume issue because I wasn’t sure how to tackle it yet and simply take the bumps and creases around the bottom half of the body and in the negative space between the two arms and smooth them out whilst keeping the same overall shape. I also opted to simplify the trumpet and take out the valve pipe detail.

While that last decision was subject to debate, even smoothing out the bottom half got positive response from the rest of the staff who now had a clearer idea of what I was trying to accomplish. From there, I went full speed ahead and started fine-tuning the curves, balancing the left and right sides, and a myriad of other micro-changes to how all of those vector curves were built while simultaneously exploring bigger picture modifications with the plume detail. This turned into a series of back and forth stages where I would mock up three or four different revisions of the current design, send them to the rest of the staff (which now included our newly hired Program Coordinator) for feedback, discuss the changes, and then mock up new versions based on the feedback.

The process ended up being incredibly fun and engaging as a group playground/project, one of the more enjoyable full-staff collaborations I’ve had with this job. I played around with a few different elements:

• protruding hat brim – in the original image, the brim of the hat was present as a three-dimensional protrusion. I wanted to switch the approach of the image to be more like a symbolic straight profile, so I modified the shape of the hat brim to reflect that. It went through several different iterations/shapes – between curves vs rectangles vs triangles. At one point, Andrew suggested taking the brim out altogether. When I tried that, i didn’t initially like it because I felt like the loss of that detail and separation between head and hat was important.
• trace hat brim – one way that I tried to compensate for this was to create a break in the head and hat with a trace line. I had originally thought about this as being white before changing my mind to conceive of it as transparent. This was met with mixed reactions – including my own. I didn’t open up that rabbit hole necessarily because I felt like it was right, but I wanted to put it out there as something radical that could still help retain the separation I was looking for if we eliminated the brim entirely.
• nose – the other way I tried to compensate for the elimination of the brim was to add a nose protrusion. The protrusion was meant to be subtle, a true ‘edge of nose’ that was not overly noticeable unless you focused on it, but would clearly be missed if it wasn’t there.

As the drafts and processes moved forward, however, I became more and more convinced by Andrew’s suggestion that having a straight line with no nose/brim was simpler and cleaner and that the detail didn’t confuse or muddy up the clarity of what was actually happening. In the end, the straight line with no brim, nose, or trace hat brim ended up being the consensus for all of the staff, a conclusion that I didn’t expect when I first started, but I was ultimately very happy with.

Phase 2: The Plume

At the same time, I was tackling the plume, and I decided to approach it similarly – take out most or all of the detail to make it cleaner. I went as far as making it into a clean oval with no feather detail. While all of us eventually came around to the straight line for the face, that same pure cleanliness for the plume faced stronger and more persistent disagreement. While reducing and simplifying the plume detail was fine, eliminating them entirely eliminated the one organic and unique character that the other staff didn’t want to abandon. While I didn’t completely agree with this, enough of the direction of the image was going my way and my feeling about this was not so strong that I consented. I played around with where that feather detail was located on the plume, sometimes influenced by earlier stages of the brim/nose, before arriving at its final location and overall shape.

The final piece that we discussed and drafted centered around how much division there was between the head/hat and the plume itself. In the original, the head/brim/plume all bled into each other particularly as a three-dimensional profile, and with the new cleaner look and with the loss of the brim, my boss made a suggestion to sharpen and indent a curve that more clearly separated the hat and the plume. I drafted a few versions of this separation, some very extreme, which I liked, but Andrew really didn’t like. In the end, I landed in the middle, giving the curve some definition and separation, but not so much as to make it completely independent from the top of the hat.

Finalizing the brand logo with other brand elements

The final brand took that trumpet figure and wrapped it around the Tulane shield abstract and stylized text – a design that was lifted directly from our custom “100th anniversary” logo we developed the previous year. I knew that I wanted to include Tulane’s new shield abstraction assets as a part of the design, and it was also a no brainer to use “Tulane Bands” as the text to fully embrace the change in our program’s conception to make the “TUMB” an entity within the parent organization of Tulane Bands.

Accompanying this was an alternative “header” that could be used to label sub-ensembles or emphasize certain highlights in print or online. We had talked about unifying this header to be the primary driving force for all of our sub-ensembles, but we eventually steered away from that concept because we wanted some of the sub ensembles to be able to retain their own sense of identity despite being a part of the arching Tulane Bands umbrella, not unlike, for example, Kellogg’s cereal. The Kellogg’s K is printed somewhere on all of their cereal boxes, but the sub-brands of the cereals themselves are all unique and don’t necessarily have direct ties to the K’s brand design. In this new context, Tulane Bands is the Kellogg’s where Soundwave, the Green Wave Brass Band, Shockwave, KKY, the Color Guard, and now the TUMB is the Frosted Flakes/Frosted Mini-Wheats/Cracklin’ Oat Bran/Honey Smacks. They all deserve their own independence under the Tulane Bands primary brand.

Final Thoughts

There’s still work to be done with the branding – I want to redo the Green Wave Brass Band logo from its current design as it suffers from some lack-of-cleanliness issues that plagued the original trumpet figure (since I designed it around the same time). I also am starting to think more about how we approach the potential reintroduction of a TUMB logo – something that doesn’t feel right at the moment because I think that would hinder the pace and understanding of our rebrand since the trumpet figure migrated from the TUMB brand to the Tulane Bands brand.

That said, I’m pretty proud of the work that I’ve done to create and harness the brand of this organization – not just this change, but even the older brand change and the band’s conception of our brand identity over the years. I’ve made my mistakes, and I still have a lot to learn, but I also trust in my intuition and my introspection when it comes to brand establishment at this sort of scale, something that I’ve tried to do not just with my job with Tulane Bands but also with nienteForte and myself. I have no doubt that over time as brand concepts and my comprehension of them continue to evolve, I’ll want to shake things up and reinvent my branding somewhere again, although I imagine that it will come not from my work with the Tulane Bands brand over some of my other projects in the immediate future. My own personal brand logo hasn’t changed now in almost a decade and a half and while a part of me is still in love with it, another part of me is ready to take a step back and blow it all up.

This article was lightly edited after initial posting.

Full Service Awards are awarded to members that will have completed eight semesters in the TUMB by the end of that academic year.

Extended Service Awards are awarded to members that will have completed over eight semesters in the TUMB by the end of that academic year.

Outstanding Section Member Awards: The student leadership (section leaders and drum majors) are given a list of the TUMB membership minus themselves broken down by section.  They all vote independently against that list, and the majority votes win for each section.

KKY Awards: The entire KKY Rho Chapter discusses the potential candidates and decides via committee who receives the awards; for the senior award, all seniors in KKY are excluded from the discussion.

Outstanding First Year Member, Section of the Year, and Spirit Award:

The TUMB staff (including the Shockwave and Color Guard contractors) individually picks two Section of the Year nominees and three Outstanding First Year Member and Spirit Award nominees to be considered for the award.  Those get compiled into a new poll where the staff then votes independently on their first and second choice for all awards.

Any first choice vote earns 5 points and any second choice vote earns 3 points.  The highest point total wins the award.  This process has created at times a rare result where an individual with no first place votes has won the award (when the first place choices are diverse but the second place choices are very narrow).

Director Award: The Director of Bands requests from the TUMB staff a list of up to three nominees for the Director Award.  From that list, he handpicks the award recipient.

I never intended to make any commentary about the national anthem protests that started happening as a result of Kaepernick, but recently the ripple effect of this has bled into my profession in the marching band arena. (For those not aware of what i’m talking about, members of the ECU marching band and the SMU marching band have recently created headlines due to individual members deciding not to play and/or kneeling during the national anthem.)  Because of that, I feel a responsibility to voice my opinion in that context as a representative and potential influential voice for band directors, members, athletic fans, and marching band fans.  I preface this with the caveat that this is not meant to disrespect views contrary to my own beliefs on the matter; I respect any organization’s choices for how they run themselves.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my personal opinion about Kaepernick’s protest is that regardless of the reasoning behind the protest, he is in his rights to protest and express that protest however he damned well pleases within the context of what is permitted in the NFL and his franchise. To me, the protest draws parallels to Tim Tebow’s public expression of his Christian faith, something that I as a non-Christian always found annoying but still respected for similar reasons to this current protest, and it’s clear that in both cases, both players have enough conviction in their reasoning and their beliefs that they are and have always been prepared to deal with any potential backlash. Both forms of expression started important conversations at a national and somewhat global scale, and i give them kudos for being bold enough to risk such a potential negative spotlight because of the strength of their conviction.

I should also say that the idea that all americans should feel pressured to represent their patriotism by standing for the national anthem and to assume that someone who opts not to do so is therefore unpatriotic, unamerican, or anti-military/police makes me immensely uncomfortable. I am a strong believer that one of our country’s strengths is the diversity of our opinions and our ability to freely express those opinions no matter how controversial, and controversial expression does not equate to something quantifiable regarding patriotism.

That said, there’s a fundamental equivalency disconnect between football players who choose to express their individuality by kneeling for the national anthem versus a marching band member or even me as a director.

I got my degree in composition and I consider myself a politically active contemporary art music advocate – my passion for wanting to expose and educate more people regarding contemporary music is why I started nienteForte in the first place.  As the primary music writer and show designer for the Tulane University Marching Band, I could opt to use the TUMB as a vehicle for that political position by incorporating that into my show design – Mark and I had always joked about the idea of doing 4’33” on the field, but more seriously, it wouldn’t be completely outside reason for me to have the TUMB do a classical music show every now and again for my own personal agenda of educating my audience to my field and my passion.

By doing that, i end up placing that personal agenda ahead of the agenda of the TUMB, an organization that I strongly believe belongs to the members and the community more than myself, and that is therefore simply the wrong choice for me to make. This past year, a fan committee expressed about the game day experience that they wanted the stadium and the band to embrace the culture of New Orleans more in their style and their musical choices.  While the TUMB is never going to convert to a show-style band over a corps-style band, we, along with the athletic department, made some executive decisions that fall in line with that desire in our programming choices.  I am a strong advocate for that sort of conversation and that sort of change because I recognize that college marching bands as a collective single entity are a strong brand that belongs to a large body of individuals and entities collectively and equally.

Therefore, my own sense of individualism even as the director of the program is always a lower priority to the brand that I represent for Tulane.  To do a classical or wacky avant-garde show would go against the primary mission of my job, which is to provide excitement and entertainment for our athletic events, to hopefully be the best educator I can be for my students, and to help continue a legacy that will sustain the organization beyond my tenure here, serving the needs of the organization before I serve myself.

As an individual who generally breaks a lot of stereotypes in weird ways, I strongly celebrate diversity and individualism within the members and the staff of my organization.  But the fact of the matter is that the public performance output of the marching band is about the group as a single entity and not about them as individuals.  That’s where the equivalency disconnect between the football player versus marching band member comes into play: the national anthem for a football player is a part of a game’s opening ceremony.  They are preparing to perform.  The national anthem for a marching band member is their performance.  If a marching band member protests the national anthem during their performance, the equivalent for a running back is to decide that he has the right to stop running in the middle of a play if he was crossing over a painted American flag on the turf as a part of his route.  At the point when the helmet goes on and the game starts, individual beliefs – both positive and negative – always come second to the play performance and execution.  And at the point when a marching band member puts their uniform on, they should be held to that same standard and understand the distinction between what is “performance” for a marching band versus a football team.

Is there any place for individualistic expression in the context of a college marching band performance?  I don’t believe so.  The Tulane football program has a had a long standing history of losing records since my tenure here, and even when we’ve been down by 40+ points, the charge I have for myself is that we are Tulane Football fans through and through and we’ll keep cheering, playing, and supporting our team no matter what. I instill that philosophy in every individual that is a part of my program both on and off the field.  You’re not a football fan?  You are now.  You think that the coach sucks?  Keep that to yourself, or spin it in a positive way that’s still supportive of the program.  For me that’s a 24/7 mentality – i’ve been recognized more than a handful of times by random strangers in the New Orleans community as being associated with the Tulane Band program, so I’m always careful about how i approach any commentary I make about anything related to the TUMB or Tulane brand.  It’s only in the past year or so, for example, that I’ve felt comfortable stating publicly that Bob Toledo was a horrible coach for our football team, and his last year here was over five years ago.  Anything that I say or do, anything that the band says or does is under potential scrutiny, and that demands that everyone associated with the program who wants to take advantage of the privileges of being a part needs to fall in line with the TUMB’s brand even if it is contrary to their own.

I think that some would interpret this approach as a position of extreme conformism and compliance; i’d like to instead believe that it’s more about what I feel is a standard of professionalism within our performance art activity and how that links to something that is much bigger than we are as a single entity.  I’m fairly confident that many TUMB members past and present know how much respect I have for their individual lifestyles and life choices. I allow a lot of freedom for individuals to discover themselves, express themselves, and be themselves in a nurturing and fostering community environment whether Trump or Hillary, normative or alternative gender lifestyle, Marvel vs DC, whatever.  But the organization as a whole can only support that level of diversity and individualism long-term when it can rally that diversity together as a unified and cohesive singular when we are representing the TUMB, Tulane Athletics, and Tulane University.  “Roll Wave” is not just a declaration, “non sibi, sed suis” is not just a motto; both are beliefs down to the very core, and i’ll defend the vigilance of those beliefs and everything that they mean in the contexts that I believe best.

I remember very clearly a conversation that Mark and I had sometime in june where he said, “I guess I’m here for another year”, and then suddenly there was a job prospect for Amanda that turned around in an insanely short amount of time – between the time that she found out about the job and her saying, “yes, i’ll take the job” was about three weeks.  There was some bleed-over of responsibility that Mark had regarding music and visual design, but I started the new role as assistant director basically at band camp.

In addition to adjusting to that new position, I also became an active participant as a composer and performer in the contemporary music collective Versipel, and, with the help of my strengthened relationship with one of the newer composition professors at Tulane University Max Dulaney, I also expanded my once-a-year nineteForte contemporary music concert into a three-day contemporary music festival.

Yeah.  It was a busy year.

The last time I felt as stressed out as I did this past year was probably grad school at Oregon over a decade earlier.  A lot of that came down to the fact that we elected not to hire a full-time replacement for my old position until the end of this academic year, so while we had someone in front of the drumline for rehearsals, I was still doing the Operations Manager part of my job in addition to the Assistant Director job.  My boss Barry took some of that slack, but not a whole lot because there’s a lot of my job that he doesn’t know how to do.  So there ended up being so much new stuff that was constantly being thrown into my face between dealing with logistics regarding the new football stadium, the running of rehearsals and coordinating the staff, taking over the Green Wave Brass Band, and a myriad of new administrative responsibilities – just to name a few new things –  on top of most of my old responsibilities, and it put me in a state of stress where i always felt behind and could never catch up.

Particularly in the fall season it was incredibly exhausting and at times very frustrating.  I was very earnest about trying to do my best for the band and had to dig my heels in and work and work and work in order to get even halfway to where I wanted to be. I came out of many of my work days late into the evening and feeling so tired but yet when i got home i couldn’t shut my brain off because I felt like I had to plan out the next one or two days to feel truly prepared.  Add the other new external projects and pursuits, particularly with nienteForte, and I had very little time for rest and detox in my waking hours.  What break time i had i devoted mostly to cooking, trying my best to stay in touch with friends both local and remote, and the occasional board game, video game, or poker game as a means of unwinding and trying to shut my brain off.

It’s hard for me to be truly objective about how well I achieved at all of these new responsibilities.  As it relates to my role as the Assistant Director, I personally look back and say to myself, “you dd a good job but not a great one.”  Not that I think that I’m incapable of doing a great job with the band, I think I have that potential, but I feel like I need two or three more years under my belt to learn, improve, and resultantly have a better handle on how to steer the program in a way that I feel is right for the members and for the organization.  I have weaknesses in how i teach, how i administer, how i plan, etc. that need fixing, and to me those stuck out like a sore thumb this past year.

I still think that that opinion has validity, but that’s counterbalanced by a Thing that Happened at the end of the fall season that completely floored me and forced me to acknowledge to the students and to myself that I did a better job than I thought.  The story is a bit uncomfortable for me to relate to in print because it feels too self-indulgent, but suffice it to say that i severely underestimated the impact that I had on my students at an individual level until the Thing Happened.  It was very disorienting at first, but once i came to terms with it, the mentality I came away with afterwards was – and still is – “Now I have to do great.  I have no choice.  I need to be on my best game all of the time so that I can be great for my kids.”

As it related to the stuff I did with nienteForte, I have to say that I am pretty amazed that the festival was as successful as it was and I’m happy that I was able to have a hand in its success.  The mission of the entire nF project was to expose and excite people about contemporary music, and this year because of Max’s instrumental contribution and drive, it grew into a place that is so much bigger than me and its humble origins.

With all of the new stuff that I had to juggle, some part of my productive life had to take a hit – that hit ended up being my personal compositional pursuits. I had already planned on shelving my LEAP Motion project for a year or two down the line, but I was also supposed to write a wind ensemble piece for a high school out in California, and i had to postpone that indefinitely in addition to two other pieces that I promised people  On the one hand, dropping those projects and breaking my internal rule/goal of writing at least one new piece of music a year was frustrating, but on the other hand, I needed to make sure that I could achieve life balance between my professional and personal goals and what little social life i could squeeze in.

In the past month and a half or so as the school year was coming to a close, I started to reset myself for this upcoming academic year and the goals that I have for myself and for the program in year two.  We finally hired a replacement drumline instructor/operations manager, so once he gets trained and gets into the groove of what’s going on in the office some of my burden here will ease up and i’ll go from an “always-feeling-behind-panic busy” to a mere “insanely busy”. My professional compositional pursuits will gain more prominence again, both creatively and administratively. The featured guest ensemble for nienteForte 2016 is going to bring in ECCE and i’m going to be writing them a piece of music for the festival.  In my head I already know what the piece is going to be about as well as the title - comma you know comma – and i hope to write most of that over the summer so that fall can be devoted to revision.  If i can get that in a good space and stay on top of the music and drill for Tulane, the next creative project will likely be the brass quintet/sextet that i promised Catherine Wilcoxson over a year ago because I suspect that will be relatively easy to churn out once i have a firm idea of the big picture concept in my head.

We’ll see what year two brings.  It’ll definitely be exciting.

To see the listing and a basic job description (and to also apply for the job), go to http://tulane.edu/jobs/ and do a search for “drumline”.

The more detailed version of the job goes like this:

In a nutshell, the job is split into two halves. The first half is instructional – teaching and developing the battery percussion program which spans a wide range of skill levels from beginner to advanced, and also teaching and developing the front ensemble in the rare occasions where we field one. Battery and front ensemble book arranging for halftime shows and new Mardi Gras songs is preferred but is also optional.

The second half of the job is administrative – being the primary person in charge of our databases (uniform, instrument, and student databases which were built by a third-party contractor, attendance and financial databases built by me using creator.zoho.com), our physical inventory, our social media presence and branding, photo and video management/posting and archiving, and other miscellaneous tasks. Some of this work would be split with me.

Expertise in developing a drumline is paramount. Expertise in the other half of the job is not required but is helpful. Ultimately what i want is someone who if they’re not familiar with the operations side can learn and adapt quickly to any of the above tasks at hand.  Familiarity with database programming and/or excel formula building and macro building is a plus.

We’re accepting applications until roughly the end of March with intent to sift through the resumés and interviews during March and April so that the new hire can get in as soon as possible in late April, or early May.

For more information, you can contact me here or email anyone on the primary tulane marching band staff located at tulaneband.org.

The general philosophy of the TUMB creative design is to find a way to make it both simultaneously fulfilling for the membership (most of which are not music majors) and to provide spirit and entertainment for the athletic crowds who go to Tulane football games. Resultantly, the shows fall somewhere between the big-10 philosophy of “easy different show each week” versus where i came from which was “learn two field shows that strive to be drum corps level and use them all season.” Typically we do three or four shows a season that try to maximize effect, deliberately choosing effect over doing anything too artsy or challenging. Not that we don’t want to push the membership, but there’s a limit of how far we can reach given that Tulane is a very demanding academic school of which the TUMB, while a one-credit course, is still considered primarily extra-curricular. We expect them to memorize all of their music and be responsible for their role in the TUMB, but our shows tend to be five-six minutes long, involve maybe 20 drill sets, and may have a challenging moment here and there but is otherwise meant to only gradually push the challenge of the individual players musically.

Les Miserablés is one of the more “Marching bandy” kinds of shows that we’re putting together and so when i was first thinking about the drum solo, i was very much thinking of it in those terms – while a drum solo that has section features is a little retro these days, i still like the idea of features and started writing a snare feature – a four and a half measure deal that could push the kids the right amount for their chops and developmental growth, something that the drumline is getting better at but still has a lot of room to grow.

The problem is, a snare feature that long is something that comes more from the realm of what a WGI show would do. Part of the GE that comes from a long feature in that particular medium is that most of the audience of that medium have at least some idea of how difficult it is to play certain licks and represent a wide range of expertise of what it means to sound clean. So when MCM or Rhythm X have an extended snare feature or tenor feature that can last 15+ seconds with little else going on, it has all of that pre-ceonceived expectation to help maximize its effect.

By contrast, the Tulane crowd generally couldn’t tell you the difference between a flam drag and a paradiddle, wouldn’t be able to have that innate understanding of what a hard lick is versus an easy one or how clean something truly is. So to write some sort of extended section feature of any sort designed to showcase how well a section is pulling off something difficult has very little GE to our audience, and if it pushes too far off the edge of what the line is comfortable with, the work has negative return – if the line can’t play it well, then the immediate audience doesn’t appreciate it any more than they would something simpler that has more effect, and the long-term audience of YouTube viewers and potential future recruits who may have a more scrutinizing ear will be hyper critical of their execution and think that it sucks.

So long features don’t fit our group – things that push the ability of the line that are exposed in a drum solo also doesn’t fit our group. In a strange way, putting the more difficult music in the background is better for us because it gives the kids a chance to grow and develop their advanced chops in a context where that lack of high exposure relieves the pressure of having to execute at a high level other than from a big picture ensemble perspective.

This year, there’s one kink in that philosophy in that we’re trying to put more effort into going to at least one local marching band festival per year of which one of the motivators is recruitment. In order to make the TUMB appeal to them as potential members, they have to be engaged with what the marching band is about overall and what their potential section is about more specifically – for the drumline this again has to do with balance – if the music is too easy, they may feel like they wouldn’t be challenged as a member. if the music is too difficult for the line to execute successfully, they won’t want to be a part of a group that plays that poorly.

All of this is running through my brain as i retailor this drum solo not only to fit within the time constraints given to me, but what the drum solo should achieve on multiple levels. Features overall aren’t out of the picture, but it doesn’t make sense for them to be longer than 2 or 3 measures at most, and the overall composition needs to have a level of effect for the football crowd that has less to do with choppy complexity and more to do with musical and emotional impact.

A couple of years ago, there was some discussion about potentially changing our TUMB logo, which right now is this:

There were a couple of different reasons for this. One was that a circular logo is very awkward to put into print because it takes up a lot of visual space if you want the “Tulane University Marching Band” text to be visible in a small form. Second was that the main logo portion, the graphic shield with the TU in it, is the Tulane University shield and therefore their brand. As a result, glancing at the logo has a TU association with it but not necessarily a TUMB association with it.

The issue was explored but then eventually dropped as low priority. Even though i think it’s somewhat problematic, it’s actually not too terrible because the shield logo is featured prominently on our uniforms and sousaphone covers without the accompanying circular TUMB text:

This is becoming relevant again because we’re in initial talks of trying to design and roll out a new uniform in a couple of years when the new Tulane Community Stadium gets built, and in that talk, we’re putting serious consideration into replacing the shield with a different logo or symbol or removing a logo from the front of the uniform altogether. Given that that shield will no longer have prominence, i rebroached the subject of potentially changing our logo, an argument that we want to either have something distinct from the TU shield as our brand so there’s no potential brand recognition confusion, or (as a compromise to my boss who does not want to change the logo at all) to modify or characterize the shield in a subtle way that makes it more TUMB specific so that the association from the university isn’t lost, but it can still feel like our own.

To experiment with the latter, i messed with creating TUMB image overlays to fill up the green area of the shield to see what it would look like:

If you can’t tell, right now there are three image overlays – one of a baritone player and his horn, three snare drums and some sticks, and some color guard flags.  The idea is that the entire green shield portion of the logo would have overlays of some sort.

I’m not convinced that it’s working, but it could be that i just need to choose my images differently or instead opt for one single large image (such as a trumpet overlay). There’s still a potential problem that if the logo is too small, the character within the green shield would look “dirty” and look more like a mistake rather than something deliberate and purposeful which would weaken rather than strengthen our brand, and it still doesn’t address the issue of the circular text.

So i’m putting questions out there for those who have more informed opinions than me about the subject:

1. Is the logo fine the way it is?

2. Whether it stays the same or changes, how important is it for a sub-organization of a brand, particularly a marching band who is strongly tied to the university community, to have a distinct logo to create brand independence?

3. If it’s important enough to warrant a change, would it be better to a) create a logo that is a modification of the shield to retain strong relation to the primary University brand, b) create a logo that uses some other distinct representative symbol associated with the university (such as the Gumby or Riptide), or c) create a logo independent of all of those things?