cixelsyd

The Madison Scouts are so old that they forgot they existed prior to 1938. Evidence of their activity in 1920 was just recently brought to light. On the all-age side, the St. Peter Govenaires go back to the late 1920s.

Surprised no one has waded in to address the specific questions. Yes. It started with the brass caption in 1982 and 1983, then percussion and visual followed in 1984. I would expect a range of opinions on this... but to compile all that I have heard from testimony of the people involved, there were frustrations with the various limitations imposed on caption judges that pre-dated the innovations to which you refer. For instance, prior to the 1970s, the captions for bugles, drums and M&M were judged entirely in teardown mode. Caption judges assessed "execution", looking for errors and almost entirely limited to deducting the same fraction of a point for each error. There was little they could do to address the three qualitative aspects of errors - tolerance (the dividing line between error and successful execution), severity (how bad/obvious is the error), and duration (how long does the error persist, and how do performers recover). Execution judges also could not consider the difficulty of what was being performed - only whether they perceived errors. Results from one show to another could vary quite a bit from individual judges having different levels of tolerance to error. Several changes were made during the 1970s to start addressing these concerns, but they primarily added "analysis", more judges to give credit for what was being performed. Percussion also had a "degree of excellence" subcaption at one point. But "execution" judging still had the same limitations. The change from teardown to buildup enabled the "execution" judge to become a "performance" judge, free to make and quantify all the subjective assessments alluded to above. All that said, I think there was another change that was at least equally important. Prior to the 1970s, there was very little communication from judges to corps staffs. This underwent a massive transformation, with post-show critiques and recorded commentary becoming standard practice by the 1980s. I prefer to call it "free-form" drill, as asymmetry was not a new thing at all. Drills were only symmetric for a brief period in the 1970s. Prior to that, the rules required you to start on one goal line and finish on the other.

Well, I am quite sure it was not sold illegally. Just to avoid any possible misunderstanding, when I said Blue Devils were "taking over" USBands, I understood that to be a legal, consenting arrangement that was announced publicly... not a hostile takeover.

Any subsequent corps that lawyers can link, or portray as a successor. At this point, you probably cannot bring back Marion Cadets - they had both name and uniform similarities. The whole Erie area is probably banned from starting anything right now, despite having had corps of their own in the past. And forget anything tied to the Bonfiglio family. Surprised they are not dragging Blue Devils into it just for taking over the band circuit.

Apparently, all that matters is whether lawyers will name the new corps as a defendant in a civil suit, rightly or wrongly.

I see no record of 2002 Cavaliers competing in Buffalo.

Actually, it is simple. Simpler than DFTK. Only requires the first two letters.

Following that "logic", we could just throw all victims and reporters out of all corps. Make it an operating policy to do that. Look, no abuse victims in drum corps! I thought the point of the youth activity was to... benefit youth.

And if my 18th birthday is in July, must I transfer from the OC corps to a WC corps that day, and learn a new show mid-season? Or more likely, I simply cannot march either OC or WC that season because no one will have me?

All marchers are taking participant safety training. The goal of that should be to ensure that they all know the full spectrum of options available to them.

SoundSport has no age limit. Some SoundSport teams field "kids", while some others field "adults"... and still others are all-age. Likewise, "alumni" groups are not always exclusively alumni, nor are they always exclusively of a particular age group.

I admire their ambition. But that target date seems overly optimistic.

Careful - that might be enough to make you the next co-defendant.

It just occurred to me that religion is not mentioned anywhere in the report. Anyone know why?

A few thoughts: 1. I do not think anyone is suggesting that GE be judged purely on volume of audience reaction. 2. While home field advantage does exist in certain places, it usually does not apply to DCI finals. Finals has an audience that travels in from all over. Take an example from around that same time - 1997. There was a hometown corps in the Orlando finals and in peak form, but the corps whose crowd response measured on the Richter scale instead of mere decibels hailed from over a thousand miles away in Madison, Wisconsin. 3. Regarding your rhetorical question - should 1999 Madison have beaten top corps in GE - that is the wrong question to ask. Recall that in GE, Glassmen beat Madison. Madison did not even surpass Blue Knights in the effect caption, settling for a tie there. Seventh overall, tie for sixth in "effect". I have no particular dispute with the overall results. But the degree to which "effect" captions take performance into account (and conversely, how much "performance" captions account for design) blurs away whatever distinction we were trying to make. That is why I posted this earlier... ... because in practice, the "effect" caption reflects the overall placement order with hardly a tile even one spot out of place.

Looking over the past ten years, GE judging resembles this:

I am not. But in the spirit of analogy, if the Julliard of the 1950s and 1960s was taking kids off the streets and teaching them starting from scratch and continuing to state-of-the-art expertise over 10-12 years, you could certainly point out that the present Julliard has a much narrower educational focus.

Also worth noting that the military does not claim education is its mission.

My own response to your quoted observations (aside from agreeing with these sentiments) would be only to point out that drum corps provides an opportunity for participants to learn (be "educated") about competition. Meanwhile, I imagine that DCI and their corps believe that the current activity is "educational". To be candid, though, the "curriculum" is now analogous to masters and PhD programs, while the elementary education which the drum corps activity formerly provided is now delegated to literal K-12 schools. With that in mind, to whatever extent scholastic marching arts experience is a prerequisite to DCI participation, any DCI corps will have their demographics dictated to them by the (mostly affluent) schools from which they recruit. Add that to the irony of DCI, a private club operating for 50+ years and still structured on its founding principle of exclusivity, suddenly showing interest about inclusivity.

Agreed. I would go further. I am surprised no one (especially Bluecoats themselves) have not raised this observation. Compare the data they have gathered on their auditionees (1126 in-person, plus 217 virtual) with the 165 selected for membership. There are no demographic differences in who makes the cut. None. Not even socioeconomic status. This raises another thought. From reading this thread, it appears that we are all in consensus regarding inclusivity. We want to know that everyone is welcome to participate, and if we could, we would make sure everyone had the opportunity. But "inclusivity" (opportunities) is different from "inclusion" (outcomes). And the outcomes, as you point out, could reflect who are interested (or disinterested) in participating in the first place. Use of the term "inclusion" instead of "inclusivity", along with the use of terms like "underrepresented" and "underserved", create the implication that demographics of your organization should match those of the general population. Inherent in that is a grand uninvestigated presumption that people of all races, ethnicities, genders, identities, sexual orientations, socioeconomic statuses, and so on, have equal innate interest in doing what DCI drum corps do now. I would not make that assumption. Those last four words, though, might not pan out. It seems that modern drum corps non-profits interested in serving less affluent youth are doing that by developing separate program offerings that are not drum corps (and therefore, are not as inaccessibly expensive).

Or even at all. Blue Stars had an on again - off again feeder corps that was on again performing in 1982. In 1983, the original parent corps stopped competing, but the feeder corps re-entered competition.

They were in an ironically similar situation during the 1958 season, when the corps still went to Legion Nationals in Chicago, wore plain white shirts/shorts and borrowed instruments from other corps, and finished runner-up just 0.3 short of the title. But there is this one key difference:

Maybe you are misreading their intent. Did you think that is what I meant when I posted "the issue there is what judges reward"? If so, I hope my subsequent post clarified my understanding. I am well aware that judges, designers and instructors all steer the creative direction of the activity. Some of them switch between those three roles at different times or in different pageantry circuits, so they are not diametrically opposed factions to begin with. In fact, change usually comes when all three arrive at consensus.

Not a simple question. If I recall correctly, modifications to the sheets normally take the form of a rule change proposal. Anyone can write a rule change proposal, but the rulebook says only corps directors/staff or judges can submit a rule change proposal. Proposals are developed by a committee of judges, designers and instructors, subsequently published, then discussed and voted upon in a series of caucuses at the DCI annual meeting. Certain majorities of instructors, and then corps directors, must be in favor to approve a rule change. So to answer your question, many people create the sheets. The two primary categories of people are corps-affiliated staff and DCI-affiliated judges. The bosses of both groups (corps directors and the DCI Judge Administrator and Artistic Director) have some potential input in the process, should they choose to use it. Why do you ask?

So if I am reading these two points correctly, what this means is that if an organization with skeletons in their closet retains their besmirched name, reputation and insurance coverage, and does not rebrand/reorganize as CAE did, they actually stand a better chance of both: organizational survival providing some compensation for victims