Part III: Halftime performances take months to develop, are always different, and typically inspired by the musical tastes of band members
By MIKE McINALLY - February 16, 2024
The Beaver football game against Utah is underway, and the band members scramble back to their seats in the south end of the stadium to provide the musical soundtrack for the game -- a soundtrack that can change at a moment’s notice, depending on what happens on the field.
Olin Hannum, OSU’s associate director of bands and the university’s director of athletic bands, handles conducting duties during the game, using hand signals to signal the selections he wants the band to play at certain points. (Kathleen Smith, the director of bands at Corvallis’ Linus Pauling Middle School and a member of the band’s staff, takes over conducting duties in the third quarter. Hannum says he grabs a Dutch Bros coffee during the third quarter – and sometimes a band alumni will buttonhole him there to offer an instant critique of the band’s performance thus far.)
The most frequent selection played in the stands is the five-note snippet of music played every time the Beavers rack up a first down. (Another former OSU band director, Brad Townsend, wrote that piece.) On this night, as the Beavers collect 15 first downs, the tune – appropriately named “First Down” – is played 15 times.
But Hannum, who watches the video board as he directs to keep tabs on the game and to get a sense of what music might be appropriate at what time, can call on any of 14 different selections – and has a hand signal to go with each one.
“Generally I try to follow the game script,” he says. “If we’re on offense and the team is right in front of us, I’ll hold off on playing to let them communicate. The opposite is true if it’s the opposing offense; I’ll try to play something disruptive.”
It’s not all “Seven Nation Army” and “First Down,” though: A fan with an ear for classical music can pick up snippets from Holst’s “The Planets” and “O Fortuna” from “Carmina Burana.”
Whenever a player is injured on the field – Beaver or opponent -- the band stops playing and members take a knee.
The first half zips by. At 7:24 p.m., less than 90 minutes after kickoff, the band gets the signal to assemble for its halftime show and starts heading back down to the field.
Three minutes later, the band takes the field again, as Steven Zielke, director of choral studies at OSU, paces the sideline with a handheld microphone, narrating the show.
The 70-second selection the band plays as it takes the field for the halftime show (it’s called, naturally, “Take the Field.”) is created fresh each season by Hannum and Justin Preece, the drumline instructor. In each new version, though, they sneak in snippets from OSU fight songs. During early rehearsals, the two challenge band members to identify the hidden Easter eggs; Dutch Bros gift cards go to students who get it right.
Tonight, the band is performing – for the first and only time – a tribute to Dolly Parton.
The idea for the Parton show surprised Hannum when it first surfaced. But that was months ago.
The process of creating the band’s three or four halftime shows each season starts months beforehand, when students and others are invited to suggest themes for new halftime shows.
“Everybody writes down their show concept that they have, including the idea of the show, the concepts, all of that,” Hannum says. That session typically yields about 50 ideas, he says, which eventually get whittled down to three or four actual shows.
“We’re looking for shows that are going to be interesting, not only to the audience that’s experiencing it, but also to the students who are working on it,” Hannum says. “We’re looking for things that are in the tempos that work well for step sizes and for marching to those pieces of music. We’re looking for interesting concepts that haven’t been done before – or haven’t been done a lot. There are certain cliches in marching bands.”
So, for example, you won’t hear the OSU Marching Band doing an Earth, Wind & Fire show any time soon, even though Hannum is an EW&F fan. “But it’s been done,” he says. “It’s been done a million times. The Beatles have been done a million times. What are the shows that haven’t been done a million times?”
He says he’s constantly surprised by the suggestions he gets from the students. “I get exposed to all kinds of weird cool stuff,” he says, like certain genres of Korean pop. (A song by the K-pop band Blackpink worked its way into the band’s tribute to girl groups, one of this season’s halftime shows. The third halftime show this year featured music from the Nickelodeon animated program “Avatar: The Last Airbender” – which many members of the band presumably watched when they were younger.)
And, as Hannum learned during the preparations for this year’s shows, students these days are very much into the music of Dolly Parton. “I wouldn’t have predicted that,” he says.
The Parton show features four well-known tunes: “I Will Always Love You,” “Jolene,” “Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That” and “Nine to Five.”
Once Hannum and company obtain licensing rights to perform the songs, they start working on their own arrangements. That allows them to work up custom-made arrangements that fit the band.
“We arrange the wind parts, and then that arrangement gets sent off to the drumline people,” Hannum says. “And then that whole thing gets sent off to the color guard instructor, who writes the choreography for the color guard. When all of those charts are done, I write drill.”
It used to be that marching band directors worked out drill routines outlining every step of a routine by using graph paper -- hundreds and thousands of sheets of graph paper, each with dots showing the location of every member of the band.
Today, those dots are created digitally -- but the goal is the same: To ensure that every band member knows where to stand to be one piece of a bigger picture. And just a few members out of place means that picture can get fuzzy in a hurry.