While the song was originally performed by the band during the 1973 halftime show, Aaron Copland's Simple Gifts has become a pregame tradition. Soon after its debut as a pregame selection, then band director Don Wilcox decided to exclude the song from the show for one year. However, the high demand for Simple Gifts to be reinstated caused Wilcox to add the performance into the very next pregame show.
The highlight of the performance begins when the band gathers in a circular formation in the center of the field. After a drum roll the colorguard thrust gold and blue flags into the air, raising and lowering them for emphasis. The formation then expands in concentric circles as the band begins the reprise.
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Read more about this topic: West Virginia University Mountaineer Marching Band, Traditions
Famous quotes containing the word simple:
“The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind—the mind of a fighter—in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man’s first beginning.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)