Silver Sound

I heard it. I heard the silver sound of the trumpet section in the Spartan Marching Band yesterday afternoon from the sidelines at Spartan Stadium. J. T. Madden, director of the SMB, arranged sideline passes for Ed and me so that we would get to experience the band's performance at a football game up close and personal.

The sound of 300 brass, wind and percussion players, all in concert together, filling an outdoor stadium on a 50 degree sunny day in fall is incredible. It envelopes you with its purity and brassiness -- with the rising thunder of the percussion, with the brilliance of the trumpets and mellophones, with the sheer throatiness of the saxes, and the earthy, rooted bass of the baritones and the tuba line.

Mr. Madden's dream of having each section playing the same instrument comes clear when one hears the trumpet line with their new silver instruments. It's as if all the players are blowing into the same organ pipe. There is a unity, a clarity in the sound that we absorbed as we listened on the sideline yesterday.

"This is a special thing that we get to do together on Saturdays," Mr. Madden told the band as they gathered on Dem Field after the game. "There are people who would give anything to be doing what you get to do as a part of this band." 

Then instruments are lowered and placed aside. Arms around each other's shoulders, in one voice, acapella, they sing the MSU Alma Mater. Now the sound of choral oneness drifts across the field and runs along the pathways where golden maples and rusty oaks cast their shadows on an autumn afternoon.

It, too, is a silver sound. It is the sound of students who choose to be a part of a greater good, to be in the band, to make music together, to perform. In harmony, the day ends with, "MSU, we love thy shadows," almost a hymn to the belonging that has made the Spartan Marching Band, with its silver sound, a defining experience for countless students through the years.

Copyright 2011

Wanda Hayes Eichler