Marching Band Trumpet Quotes

I came to that wooden marching band. I stopped and looked. There was a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and drum. Birds don't live alone, I told myself. They live in flocks. Like people. People are always in a group. Like that little wooden band.

The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching.

In my own life, I must confess that I had never felt “manly” until I got married. I was a nerd before it was fashionable, playing trumpet in the marching band and staying in the Boy Scouts through high school. Good things, no doubt, but not cool or macho. I was often mocked and excluded, especially during high school, for my uncoolness. But Kathy looked at me like her knight in shining armor. She has always told me, and continues to tell me, that though all the world may look at me and see Clark Kent, she knows that underneath I have on blue underwear. She has always been very quick to point out and celebrate anything I have done that is courageous. Over the years, bit by bit, it has sunk in. To my wife, I’m Superman, and it makes me feel like a man in a way nothing else could.

Jolly Marchers by Maisie Aletha Smikle Dam Dam Didley Doe Dee Daw Didley Doe Dee Dam Doe Fa So La Ti Doe Animals in a row Prancing as they go Jiggling and Wiggling Tails and head bobbing Mice on drums Elephants on flute Zebras blare the trumpets Squirrels blow trombones Skunks get funky on clarinets Bees on violins Hogs on guitar Parrots and crickets sing Aha Aha Vultures cheer Mosquitoes twirl Wings clapping and flapping Heads go up and down bobbing Marching and skanking Rocking and bobbing Wiggling and singing Dee Daw Didley Doe This is not a circus There are no clowns There is not a palace There are no crowns On and on they go Monkeys in tow Tigers in bow Onlookers stare and glow Donkey takes the podium As conductor of the band Waving his marching wand The band comes to a stand Mule takes a stool And sits in the cool They have reached the bend Where the march ends The ants were nesting So they missed the fest Some got on tambourines And insist they must join in The ants jiggle and wiggle Some play the fiddle Dancing and singing Didley Dam Didley Doe

Amazing Grace” Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found; Was blind, but now I see. ’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved; How precious did that grace appear, The hour I first believed. Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home. The Lord has promised good to me, His Word my hope secures; He will my Shield and Portion be, As long as life endures. Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail, And mortal life shall cease, I shall possess, within the veil, A life of joy and peace. The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine; But God, who called me here below, Will be forever mine. When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, Than when we’d first begun. Lyrics by John Newton, 1779 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (Chorus) Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. I looked over Jordan, and what did I see? (Coming for to carry me home) A band of angels coming after me. (Coming for to carry me home) (Chorus) If you get there before I do, (Coming for to carry me home) Tell all of my friends, that I'm coming there too. (Coming for to carry me home) (Chorus) Traditional lyrics Wallis Willis, circa 1865 “Battle Hymn of the Republic” Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. (Chorus) Glory, Glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on. I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence in the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on. (Chorus) I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal"; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on. (Chorus) He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. (Chorus) In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on. Lyrics by Julia Ward Howe, 1861

I’m basically a nobody in the trumpet section. I like it that way. I hate being in front of people. I think I’m too nervous, or anxious, or something. The only time I ever played a solo was that time during concert band that I accidentally played during a rest. The whole band was silent and I honked out a right note at the wrong time. I was so embarrassed that I wanted to hide in my band locker. - Rigby Raines

In dust, heat, and discouragement and fatigue beyond telling, the British retreat continued. Trailing through St. Quentin, the tired remnants of two battalions gave up, piled up their arms in the railroad station, sat down in the Place de la Gare, and refused to go farther. They told Major Bridges whose cavalry had orders to hold off the Germans until St. Quentin was clear of troops, that their commanding officers had given the mayor a written promise to surrender in order to save the town further bombardment. Not caring to confront the battalion colonels whom he knew and who were senior to him, Bridges wished desperately for a band to rouse the two hundred or three hundred dispirited men lying about in the square. “Why not? There was a toy shop handy which provided my trumpeter and myself with a tin whistle and a drum and we marched round and round the fountain where the men were lying like the dead playing the British Grenadiers and Tipperary and beating the drum like mad.” The men sat up, began to laugh, then cheer, then one by one stood up, fell in and “eventually we moved off slowly into the night to the music of our improvised band, now reinforced with a couple of mouth organs.

You can scare yourself into stuckness by assuming you have to make radical life changes in order to make progress. You don’t. Real change is practically invisible as it’s happening. No trumpets sound. A marching band will not play at your door. Meaningful progress doesn’t feel particularly exciting. Most days, it feels like work. You show up, grind it out (sometimes joyfully, sometimes not), and repeat.

At their invitation we crowded into the spacious control cabin of the great airship, where scientific gear occupied every available cubic—perhaps hypercubic—inch. Among the fantastical glass envelopes and knottings of gold wire as unreadable to us as the ebonite control panels scrupulously polished and reflecting the Arctic sky, we were able here and there to recognize more mundane items—here Manganin resistance-boxes and Tesla coils, there Leclanché cells and solenoidal magnets, with electrical cables sheathed in commercial-grade Gutta Percha running everywhere. Inside, the overhead was much higher than expected, and the bulkheads could scarcely be made out in the muted light through three hanging Fresnel lenses, the mantle behind each glowing a different primary color, from sensitive-flames which hissed at different frequencies. Strange sounds, complex harmonies and dissonances, resonant, sibilant, and percussive at once, being monitored from someplace far Exterior to this, issued from a large brass speaking-trumpet, with brass tubing and valvework elaborate as any to be found in an American marching band running back from it and into an extensive control panel on which various metering gauges were ranked, their pointers, with exquisite Breguet-style arrowheads, trembling in their rise and fall along the arcs of italic numerals. The glow of electrical coils seeped beyond the glass cylinders which enclosed them, and anyone’s hands that came near seemed dipped in blue chalk-dust. A Poulsen’s Telegraphone, recording the data being received, moved constantly to and fro along a length of shining steel wire which periodically was removed and replaced. “Ætheric impulses,” Dr. Counterfly was explaining. “For vortex stabilization we need a membrane sensitive enough to respond to the slightest eddies. We use a human caul—a ‘veil,’ as some say.” “Isn’t a child born with a veil believed to have powers of second sight?” Dr. Vormance inquired. “Correct. And a ship with a veil aboard it will never sink—or, in our case, crash.” “Things have been done to obtain a veil,” darkly added a junior officer, Mr. Suckling, “that may not even be talked about.