If I had a dollar for every time someone has said “marching band is a sport!” I could by the entire S&P 500. It is a truly silly argument. It’s like saying a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable—it may be technically correct but it doesn’t have any real-world implications. You can put tomatoes in a salad or in a salsa—one of which is mostly composed of vegetables, and one that is mostly composed of fruits. See—it’s just a point of view for the sake of having a point of view. This is not an editorial on such matters—it IS an editorial on approaching music performance like an athlete instead of purely as artistic expression.

  1. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield “Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.” It’s easy to get distracted. I’ve been distracted by outside noise in writing this sentence. Everything seems designed to distract us. That’s what the entire discipline of marketing is for–to distract the potential user or customer. Google and Facebook are companies that literally pay engineers, psychologists, and etc. to find new ways of grabbing and making use of your attention. Other things do it too–our desire for attention, affection, recognition, and so on and so on ad infinitum. The War of Art is antidote to that. If we want to succeed in the arts, in business, in life, we must control the resistance that surrounds us. This resistance is “any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, and integrity.” We can choose to put our higher nature (art, creativity, health, etc.) first and make it truly great, or we can give in