Last night I was covering a high school football game that was played in a light rain. Both teams had marching bands that performed during halftime.
How hard does it have to rain to make in untenable for a marching band to perform? Can it be so wet that the band can’t blow in to all those brass and woodwind instruments?
Granted this might vary by location depending upon how accustomed to the weather the musicians are.
Having played in marching band, I am fully qualified to answer this question. You don’t play in the rain if you can’t see the end of your instrument. Not because the rain creates some kind of interference with your ability to play, but if it’s coming down that hard, nobody’s interested in hearing you play, they’re all busy running for cover.
Wind instruments get plenty of water in them anyway, from spit, and many of them have valves for you to let the spit out, if their shape isn’t condusive for the spit to rapidly flow out on it’s own.
So would cold weather be a bigger problem than wet weather?
Yup. Your lips can freeze to your mouth piece and your fingers get too stuff to work the valves.
There’s also a distinction between instrument types: woodwinds (flutes/piccolos, clarinets and saxophones in a typical marching band) should not be played in the rain. This is because there are may screws and springs and such that can rust on woodwinds, and be very expensive to repair. Brass instruments (everything else that’s not in the drumline) don’t have this problem, and so can be played in the rain.
I dunno about that. The woodwimps in our marching band never had that problem.
In my college, after every home football win, we’d march up to a large fountain surrounded by a 1ft pool of water, play the bunny hop and jump in one at a time. Then we’d give a short concert in the water including favorites like Hawaii-5-O, Wipe Out, etc. Typically, we’d end with Rock Lobster during which we’d sink down until only our heads, arms and instruments were still out of the water.
The brass players often frolicked in the actual fountain. The woodwinds usually tried to not to soak their instruments. I had a cheap synthetic clarinet, so didn’t really care. 
The real problem with rain is that is messes up the marching. My poor brother lead tuba. The entire tuba line got taken out when one guy slipped on the wet grass: Band people don’t wear cleats. Then, they couldn’t get back up, because they were all wearing giant tubas. This held up half the band, though the others kept playing. Eventually everyone got back and finished the marching set.
Dayum. And my band director used to have a fit if someone spilled a can of Coke anywhere near his band uniform 
Seriously, in my bandfag days, the show went on as long as there was an audience. Once or twice a practice was moved indoors due to a severe downpour, because woodwinds don’t like being soaked, but as someone has already pointed out, they’re damp inside all the time when you’re playing - the rain has to be pretty impressive before it adds to the problem. Brass and percussion instruments shake off the rain better.
Cold weather is more of a problem, although I never saw anyone get her mouth stuck to the mouthpiece. I have, however, seen a drumhead split because it was so brittle from the cold. And it’s hard to keep in tune, too - the cold will make instruments go flat, each by its own individual amount, and the result can be truly horrific to listen to.
I don’t know what it’s like for the woodwinds but water can be a real pain for the drums. Gotta wipe down and dry off everything that’s made of wood as well as the heads.
Sure, they’re damp inside, but the parts that are sensitive to moisture tend to be on the outside of the instrument.
I can never remember a practice being moved inside. If it got bad, we just marched without instruments.
We usually had garbage bags available to cover the woodwinds if they wanted it. And ponchos and the like for the uniforms. I never had a problem marching in the rain and puddles and all the rest, but I hated astroturf. It’s like marching on a sponge when wet.
Aside from the inablity to keep in tune, cold weather never seemed too much of a problem (you keep your mouthpiece in your pocket), but then I never had to play in anything less than 15º.
I was in marching band for eight years, and I don’t ever once recall a practice or performance being called off due to weather. If it rained, we got wet, and that was about all there was to it. There was one time when the football game was called off, but by that time we’d already played the pregame.
In either of the bands I was in, this would not have been considered a problem: The tubae would have continued playing, flat on their backs (and perhaps with a mudfight with the other hand and during rests). But then again, my high school had more of a “standing band” (we were too small for any real formations), and my college had a scramble band. In a more formal marching band, things might have been different.
Well, there was usually some idiot frosh in our band who’d forget and wind up with his lips frozen to his mouthpiece. Not too difficult to remove your lips, but it could be a bit painful.
When I was a member of a high school marching band we used to practice, at 7am, in the “spare” football field, which had typically been watered all night and also had patches of mud. Or I should say had patches of grass. Our band director used to joke, “put on your hip boots and water wings.” People did tend to slip. After that the actual football field was luxury.
If it was actively raining at 7am I believe we stayed inside instead of practicing our field maneuvers, but if it was raining during the game the show went on.
I did participate in one parade that started in a drizzle and ended up in sleet/freezing rain (this was in Dallas). We had traveled for hours on a bus to get there for this parade and the deal was that unless the parade was canceled, we would be playing.
I don’t know if I could have kept playing through something like this. I think I would have been, er, laughing. We did have a tuba player (one out of two, small band) who was sort of accident prone. The band director incorporated his goofs into a routine; it was hilarious. (Oddly enough, the two tuba players were also the two smallest guys in the entire school. The biggest guy in our band played the clarinet.)
I was in marching band for four years (bass clarinet). Of the rain problems we encountered, it wasn’t so much the worry for woodwinds that was bad. It was:
Other than that, it was a nice change from the really hot weather we usually marched in.
My memory from marching band was that football season usually ended just before the first snow. I no longer remember what they did if it snowed during a football game, but I think that the rule was that if it was snowing, the band just played their musical numbers from the stands instead of the field. Cold weather was irrelevant. Everybody - football players, cheerleaders, band members, spectators - dressed warmly. Of course there was some point at which it was so cold that the game was postponed, but if the football players were able to play, then the marching band was able to play. It was wet fields that caused trouble. If it had been raining superhard, they would have postponed the game anyway, so that wasn’t relevant to whether the band played. I remember slipping once during a marching routine and falling and having to get up quick. The fields were somewhat wet and my mind wandered during a tricky move.
Everyone’s experiences have bene pretty much the same as mine. I’m in NE ohio so our weather can be exteme at times
We all played in the rain. Woodwinds brought their cases to the field to keep dry when not playing. They swabbed out their horns when they were done playing (to keep them from warping or something?)
Bands didn’t go on if there was lightning…but neither did football games.
You were required to march in the mud. That’s why you practice roll steps and marching backwards (on your toes). Usually we had one lost shoe per muddy event.
Playing in the snow isn’t that bad. Usually we had 1 or 2 snowy events at the end of our season. The cold doesn’t do much but make everyone horribly out of tune. One year I played for a community band outdoors in 5 degree weather. No frozen lips but my slide did freeze and my friend’s valves froze.
The absolute worst thing about marching bands in the rain was the dry cleaning bill. Our uniforms were wool, so they had to be dry-cleaned when they got wet. We had raincoats issued with our uniforms and sometimes marched with them on (usually when we had a rainy friday that was before a competition saturday). But still pants cuffs got muddy and someone had to pay to get them clean. Rain was an absolute nightmare for our budget and required alot of logistical planning on the part of those in charge of uniforms.
I recall that we were told that if the cuffs of our pants in the marching band uniforms got splattered with mud, we were not to attempt to clean them (which, as ZipperJJ mentioned, could only be done by dry cleaning anyhow). Instead, we were to let the mud dry and then brush it off. If we had merely been splashed with mud and not soaked with it, that was sufficient.
I played piccolo in HS marching band and I can assure y’all that a really intense downpour can damage a woodwind’s pads.
Playing in the rain sucks. It never occurred to me before reading this thread that I was lucky to go to high school in Northern California, where at least it doesn’t get cold enough to freeze the metal to you lip, and thunderstorms are very rare, so there was no danger of getting struck by lightning. Also, it doesn’t rain much until winter, by which time we were largely done with marching. The exception was when we got dragged down to Stanford to play at the East-West game every January - one year it rained so hard everyone left after halftime. That’s when we discovered the real problem of marching in the rain: polyester uniforms smell when they get wet.