Pete Freedman

Are you saying it will be FloMarching for sure? Their site says nothing about it, and nothing is listed on their upcoming events tab. Also, is DCI requiring a higher interframe compression bitrate guarantee? All of the youtube clips I saw matched my own live experience, which was well toward the lower end of the scale in the linked video.

Are you guys sure Richard Saucedo and Robert W. Smith composed those works for free? I would think they would be more expensive, not less. Play/Arrange/Perform rights are statutory and fairly low, I thought. Commissioned works would be more. Wouldn't it be an insult to ask your arranger to compose works for free? I wouldn't think of it. In fact, aren't arrangers fees generally more than license fees for a given work (not counting negotiated media fees by DCI). Wouldn't any responsible director offer more than the normal arrangement fee? And as far as DCI negotiating media fees, I would expect the composer/arranger to get fairly standard rates there as well.

It has been said many times that higher placing lines have better instruction on average. Certainly there are master instructors at the top of the activity. Of course, all things are rarely equal, and the strength of talent showing up at auditions must be a big factor in the scores. We could hypothesize that better instructional staff should be reflected in a steeper caption score curve during the season, particularly achievement scores. However, most of them seem to improve at about the same rate, so I'm not sure about that. For an individual, though, I would think being in a line with roughly your same skill level would maximize improvement. Jumping to a better corps when you've outgrown the lower corps would make sense (if that's the goal) even if their instructors are no better. The music will definitely be harder.

Um, KathyG, By any chance did you pull Trumps head out of that shako? :) Interesting idea, anyway... I mean about the sorting thing ...

You make some good points, but I'm only talking about the morality aspect raised by the OP. Regardless of how many or few people transfer to Harvard from state schools, I don't think there's a moral problem to feel guilty about in doing so. Nor does anyone associated with such institutions, to my knowledge. And I still say that it would take a pair of brass ones (ovaries, perhaps) for a director to preach about the disloyalty of transfers while routinely accepting members he/she must presumably consider morally deficient. Of course they don't really. But it can work. I don't know if anyone in the activity still preaches loyalty of this sort, but if they do it's just a guilt trip to get mms to stay. Young people are impressionable and easily conned, I'm afraid. Their judgement is still forming in their prefrontal cortices, poor dears. Until 25 or so. Instructors themselves leap around DCI with gay abandon; each year we await with baited breath the latest announcements of instructors we've heard good things about moving to our favorite corps. Directors too. All of whom will get fired the second it turns out the results don't match the hype. Loyalty! All of this is not to say a member shouldn't listen to their own inner voice on the matter. They may feel loyalty and wish to honor that. In such a case it comes from within. Such loyalty is perfectly normal and I'm not saying they should ignore it. But then it's part of why they actually want to stay, not a part of why they should stay anyway. Does that make sense?

Now for perhaps a more controversial answer: Today these units are essentially summer music schools on wheels, and operate that way. I never heard of a college student feeling guilty because they transferred to another school. Think drum corps are different because of the history and tradition and pride? Then why do they audition the kids again each year, with no explicit guarantee of acceptance? I've never heard of a corps doing this. There is no guarantee they will accept you again, so why on Earth should the students feel guilty for not going back? The corps themselves have created the current environment of constant upward mobility, and I guarantee the OP's son's corps will take top talent from corps 13 - 45 in a heartbeat and often does. He should feel no more guilt than his director does when he feeds off all those lower corps.

Is your son planning to be a professional musician, dancer, or performing arts educator? If that's the case then he should go where the most admired instructor is. If he is already at that corps but wants to experiment, then he should go to the corps with a renowned instructor that has a different approach. This is his chance to experience a diversity of great instruction. I would put loyalty second in such a case, because of the transformative difference a particular instructor can make in the career of a pro (or a budding teacher). In any event, it sounds like your son has been pretty loyal for several years. Whatever he chooses, he shouldn't feel guilty about it. On the other hand, unless he goes to BD there is always the risk of being beaten by his old corps!

The rest of time will be called the Insufferably Patronizing Era, as our phones express the solution to the Hodge Conjecture in the form of a Sestina while telling us how valid our opinions are too.

The problem with this isn't that people will go to see concerts like this; they won't. It's impressive technology, but it's only impressive once, as a novelty. It won't have fans. At least not until AI has evolved to the point that there's an actual person in there. However, it may undermine people's interest in live human events. Once it's cheap enough (don't blink) we'll start seeing this kind of thing in coffee shops, grocery stores, or just on the street. Well played live music will no longer be a special event. It will be a freebie. A giveaway. An annoyance, even. How much will people pay to see humans performing almost as well as the robots at Olive Garden? This will not merely compete for the live music market as we know it, it will destroy it.

Here's my breakdown of why these arguments are not persuasive, imo: The fraternity argument: Gender-based fraternities and Sororities are terrible. Fraternities are old boy networks that exist to party and pass power down through the network to the next generation. Sororities exist to allow rich girls to associate with rich boys in the old boy network. Academic 'fraternities' that have actual value are generally gender neutral. It's not healthy to discourage association with the opposite sex. It's far better for young people to associate in an integrated way early and often. (Granted, they have the rest of the year to do so.) "We are all male and we always will be ... ", a restatement of the issue, and a declaration of intent to continue. " ... and our 'mindset' is not anti-woman ... ". Agreed. The Cavaliers are great people who are not trying to hurt anyone. The question is whether the practice in fact does hurt people, not whether it's intentional. " ... develop young men for life ... ". Why not women too? "There were MANY MORE all-girl corps ... ". Back in the day the reasons were different. Parents didn't want their kids having sex. If a parent wants their kid to be in the Cavaliers in order to keep them from having sex on tour, it may be logically foolish in that it wouldn't work, but at least it's a cognizable argument. I think that was also the reason for places like Vassar. But they also changed as they realized it wouldn't work. And that's really the main point. At one time people thought it was good for kids to associate with their own gender to develop them as men and women. But now that's not widely believed. Optionally, a girl should have several boys as friends and a boy should have several girls as friends in the mix. "I'm not into this gender-bender "fluidity" movement ... ". This issue has nothing to do with gender fluidity. You see that, right?

False choice. There is no choice between one and the other. Forcing the top corps to regress wouldn't create new drum corps at the bottom end. It might, however, end the seven year streak of record attendance at Indy.

Regarding costs, any judged contests of educational institutions are probably going to effectively reward those institutions with the biggest budgets, biggest talent draw and highest visibility. A contest based on GRE scores would reward Harvard and Yale. That's not surprising. The 990's thread pretty much confirmed that budgets correlate highly with placements. Also unsurprising. To tour you need to pay the expenses of touring. That's not unreasonable. But most touring corps don't spend anywhere near what the top corps spend. The financial drop-off is incredibly steep, even within the top 12. The idea that you need to spend big staging bucks to tour is unfounded, I think. Top corps (i.e. rich corps) spend those bucks to get a theoretical few extra tenths in GE. Given their budgets it's not unreasonable. Often the staging is pointless, and distracting. I liked the Bluecoats stage but they may have suffered because of it. Maybe it took too much time and resources to deal with it. Who knows. In any case big staging certainly isn't mandatory, and can even backfire.

Good point. However, your avatar does kinka look like the Cadets designed a snowflake!

Thank you for this description. It had several things I didn't know. Do you think the reveal uniform is intended to be insect-like to match the butterfly wings of the guard? That's the way I took it.

It was a reminiscence about 60 years of excellence. It contained callbacks to those shows here and there, and references to diamonds (60 year anniversary is the diamond anniversary) and a recurring caterpillar-to-butterfly theme - the metamorphosis from the past to the future.