THOM HANNUM
Class of 2002
INSTRUCTOR / CAPTION HEAD / MENTOR
Cadet Years: Percussion Caption Head
(1983-1988, 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1987 DCI World Champions)
Percussion Arranger and design team, Carolina Crown
(2012-2022, 2013 DCI World Champions)
Senior Advisor for the Boston Crusaders
(2024-present)
HIS CADET STORY:
From a member of the Brookhaven Crusaders to a Broadway arranger, Thom Hannum may be one of the most influential percussion arrangers of the 20th Century. Thom's work with Crossmen, The Cadets, Carolina Crown, Star of Indiana, Boston Crusaders, and Broadway's "Blast!" has been innovative and inspiring to all who have heard or played his arrangements.
His influence can be found in the fuller integration of the percussion section into the visual ensemble, split-part writing, antiphonal writing and staging percussion score, increased attention to marching cymbals (both visually and musically), the use of timbres in the battery, and the use of colors through auxiliary instruments in the front ensemble and the battery.
In the fall of 1982, Hannum was asked to teach the Garfield Cadets, then based in Bergen County, New Jersey, mainly writing and arranging for the drum line (Morrison, Joey Gaudet, and later Rob James, wrote the keyboard and front ensemble parts.). Hannum would stay with the corps for six seasons (1983–88), and during that time, the Cadets won four DCI championships (1983, 1984, 1985, and 1987). “Writing their percussion music and teaching the drum line was probably the most fertile time of my career because it was a very rapidly changing environment,” Thom admits.
“In 1983, I remember [Nelson’s] ‘Rocky Point Holiday’ was at 184 beats per minute,” Hannum continues. “I never wrote music that fast before! I also remember Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’ in ’84; ‘Candide’ and ‘Jeremiah Symphony’ [Bernstein’s Symphony No. 1] in ’85, and Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’ in ’87. But those first two years, when Jim Prime was writing the brass music and George Zingali was writing the drill, were special because the corps was transforming the idiom and creating new possibilities.
“1987 was just the right place, right time, and right show,” says Hannum. “People were ready for something different, and we gave it to them.” 1987 was also the year the Cadets won “high drums” with a perfect drum score of 20.0, and the year that Hannum began to write more of the front ensemble music.
After taking the 1989 season “off” — although he wrote the drum line feature for Canada’s Dutch Boy that year — Hannum became affiliated with his next World Champion corps, Star of Indiana, based in Bloomington. “Bob Dubinski (a Cadet alumnus) was teaching their drum line in 1990 and he asked me to do some consulting, as well as write the percussion feature,” recalls Hannum. “Their brass staff were many of the same folks I worked with at Garfield, so it was a good fit, musically speaking.”
His roles with companies such as Pearl and Zildjian have helped the evolution and growth of the percussion industry and products. Thom helped develop free-floating snare drums, lighter instruments, sonically designed marching toms and bass drums which are as revolutionary and dominant today as the TDR snare drum and cut-away Toms were in the 1970s. Thom Hannum's presence and legacy loom large in the drum corps activity and his wide and generous shoulders have allowed so many to see more clearly the musical purpose and possibilities of the marching percussion ensemble.
Additional Honors:
DCI Hall of Fame (2001)
World Drum Corps Hall of Fame (2008)
Kappa Kappa Psi Distinguished Service Medal (2019)
Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame (2024)
