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Stepping up Hawkeye Marching Band performances
Grad student helps arranges music, drills for Hawkeye Marching Band
IOWA CITY — His mother calls him “a walking musical note,” but these days, Drew Bonner is more of a marching musical note.
As one of the graduate teaching assistants working with the University of Iowa Hawkeye Marching Band, he’s written 148 minutes of marching music since June, “which is a lot,” he said, often arranging hits from pop to heavy metal and Iowa’s own Meredith Willson for halftime shows.
And while he didn’t design or arrange the music for today’s Taylor Swift halftime show at Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City, he did arrange two of the pieces for the Nov. 11 tribute to veterans, “American Patrol” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
For his role in the marching band, he said he’s “become kind of the go-to music editor, I would say, because I've been arranging music for so long.”
Bonner, 32, a third-year UI doctoral candidate, has become “pretty quick” at arranging, aided by a computer program that puts the parts in the right key for each instrument.
On the other hand, creating drills — the patterns that band members take on the field — is “actually pretty time-consuming,” he said. “The (computer) program that plots out the movements and designs is very advanced, and the learning curve is pretty steep.” He spent about a month plotting out designs for the three songs played during the Oct. 7 UI homecoming show.
The graduate teaching assistants take turns working on the halftime shows, he said, noting that colleague Cory Schmitt arranged the music and designed the drill for the Sept. 16 Caitlin Clark tribute, which included a formation of Clark shooting a basketball through a “hoop” on the stadium’s Duke Slater Field.
“One of the great things about being here is that we're students, but we get to act like directors for a week when we design shows,” Bonner said. “We teach the whole thing ourselves, we design the whole thing ourselves.”
The band program’s directors approve the shows before they hit the ground, and then evaluate the grad assistants’ teaching efforts, giving them pointers.
“It's really helpful, but it's on us to make sure that the band's ready for performance on Saturday,” he said. “Not a not every school does that for their students. … This isn't just an exercise we're doing for a class — you get to design the show and do it for real, and teach, and conduct during the games, and everything.”
New game day shows
It’s a big commitment, from beginning to end.
The band learns new halftime shows for every home football game, and rehearses 10 hours a week — from 3:40 to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, with an additional music-centric rehearsal from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesdays. Game days are long, with members being at the stadium five or six hours before kickoff, to rehearse on the field, then play pregame concerts inside the Rec Building and on the field.
Bonner loves every beat, from rehearsals to pregame to half-time and to the minute or seconds the band gets to play during timeouts on the field.
Copyright laws require fees for permission to play virtually all the music the band performs, but the costs to secure rights for broadcast are prohibitive — so the only people who see the shows are in the stadium.
“If you want to have that broadcast, you’ve got to pay for it,” Bonner said, “and so it is kind of unfortunate, because yeah, it would be great” to have TV audiences see the shows, too.
But the band has another eager audience across the street in the UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital. The young patients, families and caregivers gather every home game day by giant windows in the hospital to watch and wave to the Kinnick crowd that waves back.
“I love The Wave — it’s the best tradition in college football,” Bonner said of the emotional moment at the end of the first quarter, where everyone in the stadium turns and waves to those in the hospital windows.
The Wave also gave him his favorite moment with the Hawkeye Marching Band — when he arranged Pat Green’s “Wave on Wave” for the band to perform with Green at Kinnick on Sept. 15, 2018.
Bonner wasn’t even at the UI yet when Eric Bush, director of the Hawkeye Marching Band, reached out to have him arrange that piece. He was working on his master’s degree at the University of Texas-Austin, and freelancing as an arranger to help pay the bills.
He continues to arrange marching music for high school and college bands across the country. As a composer, his music has been performed not only by bands, but also in regional, national and international workshops and festivals.
Journey to Iowa
His roots with Bush go back even farther, after Bonner finished his undergraduate degree at Penn State.
“(Bush) just started a new job right after I graduated,” Bonner said. “I was doing some light arranging work for him. He liked my work, so when he got the job here, he called me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to write for Iowa?’ ‘Yeah, sure.’ And so we have been working together (at Iowa) since he got the job in 2018. Then in 2021, I moved here and became officially a student and everything.
“So it's kind of been a crazy journey,” Bonner said from his desk in the UI Voxman Music Building downtown. “Sometimes I still wake up and I say, ‘I live in Iowa.’
“I truly love it here — the people are all great,” he said, noting the size of Iowa City is more like his hometown of Tamaqua in Pennsylvania. Though he grew up a little more than two hours from New York City, where he went on field trips to see Broadway shows, then later studied in Austin, Texas, he said he feels “more at home here, in the rolling flatness of the cornfields.”
Winding back the clock, he said he “was always a musical kid.”
“I played the drums growing up. When my mom would tie my shoes, I played drums on her head,” he said.
He also took piano lessons, beginning in grade school. When it was time to choose an instrument for school band, drums would be the natural choice. But since he already knew how to bang out the beat, he took a cue from his older brother, who played tuba, and chose the euphonium --“which is like a small tuba, and sometimes called the baritone,” he said.
He said he “plays a little bit of everything,” including guitar. He even played in rock bands in high school, so this year’s Metallica-themed halftime show hearkened to those roots, and included a guitar, bass and drum set on the field. Vocally, he’s a tenor who joined a barbershop ensemble in middle school and sang all through high school.
He has one more semester of course work to finish, then a dissertation to write, so he anticipates coming back next year to finish that. After that, he’d like to be on the other side of the higher education realm.
“I would love to take a job at the university teaching either tuba and euphonium or marching band, athletic band, or combination thereof,” he said. “Someone once told me that the more backslashes you have after your name is the better so, you know, tuba/euphonium/composer/conductor/whatever.”
And the beat goes on.
Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com
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