On beat and in step

Cadence: The love for performing drives members of drum corps to sacrifice and compete in national championships.

Call it a musical sport.

The young men and women performing in drum and bugle corps not only play instruments. They march and sometimes they run, but they are always moving and keeping beat with the music.

Several hundred of these peripatetic musicians are competing this week in Westminster for the right to call themselves the best. It's an exercise that requires such precision, musically and physically, that one misstep or a wrong note can cost an entire corps a high mark.

"It's very competitive, and it's very physical," said Ed Dempsey, promoter of Drum Corps International, an organization that plans drum corps competitions. "When these kids are done, they're spent."

It takes commitment to be in a corps, begun after World War I by veterans looking for a way to use surplus uniforms and musical instruments. The corps have died out in Maryland and many other places. To participate in a group, children and their parents often have to travel several hundred miles.

Lisa Collins, 19, of Pasadena drives three hours every summer weekend to central New Jersey to be a drum major of the Jersey Surf, a 90-member competitive drum and bugle corps. She finds the corps regimentation relaxing.

Not everyone would find the Jersey Surf's 10 a.m.-to-10 p.m. rehearsal schedule relaxing. Or the three-hour commute, which Collins hates. Or lugging 45 pounds of drums, as some corps percussionists do. Nor would all be willing to sleep on school gym floors, eat food cooked by the side of the road or log 10,000 to 15,000 miles a summer on tour buses. Nor would they want to pay $1,000 for shoes, gloves, gauntlet, insurance and phone calls home to endure all that.

"It's just the love of performing," said Collins, a sophomore at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ninety corps are in Drum Corps International, separated into three divisions. The junior corps attracts teen-agers and young adults from ages 14 to 21, who are separated into three divisions. Division I tours full time from May 15 to Aug. 15. Division II has more members but only practices and tours on weekends during the summer, allowing students to take summer classes or maintain full-time jobs. Division III has groups with fewer than 60 members that tour on weekends.

Fourteen Division II corps performed in preliminary competitions held in Westminster for the title of world champion at the DCI Summer Music Games on Monday. Thirty Division III groups vied for a title Tuesday.

Five top Division II and seven Division III scorers will advance to the finals, held in College Park. Tomorrow, the largest group with the most demanding touring schedule, Division I, will compete at College Park.

DCI is a booking agent for the corps, which travel in groups to perform in parades and shows it produces. DCI and the individual corps are nonprofit organizations, but DCI collects money by charging admissions to shows and corps use the money paid to them by DCI to defray their costs. The better the corps, the more money DCI pays it for performing.

More than 1,000 people turned out at Westminster High School's football stadium to watch this week , and more than 20,000 are expected at College Park's Byrd Stadium tomorrow. Fans have been known to follow favorite corps from competition to competition.

"You don't see that kind of reaction from a symphony crowd," Dempsey said. "It looks more like a sporting event than a concert."

Corps members are very touchy about being called marching bands. They aren't, because they have no woodwinds, just brass and percussion.

The show presented by each corps is far from a conventional display of sight and sound.

At the Westminster competition, Capital Sound from Madison, Wis., performed scenes from Disney's "Newsies" - a musical about kids who sell newspapers on the street - with its color guard dressed as street urchins, pantomiming a street ball game.

"It boils down to what could you tell on a football field in 11 minutes," said Bob Jacobs, executive director of the Surf, whose members performed music and staged reworked scenes from the opera "Carmen."

Many corps were started when veterans wanted to maintain patriotism at home, Dempsey said. He estimates Maryland was once home to 50 to 100 competitive corps. That changed in the 1960s, however.

"You started to see a lot of fallout from the [Vietnam] war," he said.

Today's drum corps consists of a horn line, a drum line and an auxiliary color guard or dance unit. Some members don't feel it's patriotism that brings them out onto the field.

"Now, it's about performing," said Jason Thompson, 19, of Gloucester City, N.J.

Competition is fierce. Of the 14 corps performing in the preliminary competition, five advanced to the quarterfinals. Because the top seven or eight groups were closely matched, the outcome was riding on scores for visual effects, music and general effects.

Each corps has parents and other unpaid staff members planning shows, cooking and supplying first aid.

Many members are music majors and expect to go on to direct marching bands or corps.

Drum corps "was just a level of community and music that I had never experienced before," said Chip Mullins, a 20-year-old tuba player for the Surf from Millington, Kent County.

The Surf's staff tries to emphasize that members should treat it as a learning opportunity.

"If nothing else, they're getting a music education," something not necessarily emphasized in public schools, Jacobs said.

Brian Boots of Catonsville had a simpler explanation for why he returns each year.

"It's just this feeling when you walk on the field," said Boots, 21, a percussionist. "Why spend the summer on the beach? It doesn't change."