Our marching band’s Season 93 production is entitled, “Y=...” but what does that mean and why did we choose that title and the pieces that are being arranged?
Firstly, we look into the title and what this show is about. Y=, as most people know, is the beginning of equations that are usually being graphed, hence the Y representing the Y coordinate of that graph. We took this title as more of an open ended question, as we have not filled in the equation after Y =. We have not filled in the content of this point. We started off wanting to take a look at life and passions and hopes and dreams, but through a perspective that was different from a usual one. We decided to make the show have a two-faceted design, something that we at the Jacketeers tried with our first show, “The Great War”, which was on the outside, a look at war and conflict with the anger of that conflict. On a deeper level by analyzing our music choices, namely “Medea” By Samuel Barber, you’ll find a deeper meaning behind the design in conjunction with the name. Medea is a Greek tragedy about a mother killing her children to spite their father, and in the context of “The Great War”, you could see it as a commentary on the tragedy of World War One, with the “Mother” or the Countries of Europe, sending its “children”, or the soldiers, to die in order to spite other European nations. It was a commentary on why it was a tragedy and why it shouldn’t have happened again.

Now that we’ve explained our multiple layers of design in the past here, we can return to Y=. Y= is nothing more of a prompt, and open ended question, that we decided to use to model our stories of sorts we are putting on the field. On the forefront of the show, its visuals include the different types of functions on graphs in a show about math. However in conjunction with our music selections, especially “The New Moon in the Old Moon’s Arms” By Michael Kamen, which has been used for similar purposes of telling about life before, it tells a deeper story about the different passions and reasons why people live and continue with their lives. Each different graph, function, or point represents a person, a story, a passion, because they are all so radically different and yet similar. This season’s production is a bit more abstract than our past though, and we hope that we’ve not been too obscure or on the nose with either faces of our design.
Good luck to all fellow marching bands this upcoming season!

This would actually be such a cool show idea irl. And good luck to you too!