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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/20/2015 in all areas

  1. I agree with Guardling, 100% on this: "Members today need to know the history as well as respect those who came before. Afterall if not for them there would be no activity BUT respect is a 2 way street , not one way and IMO those from the past need to respect the fact that if not for those form other decades there also would be nothing today." In my view, it's up to us, the (gasp) elders, to provide the historical context but, equally important, to credit the current practitioners for preserving and yes, advancing, the activity. My first bugle instructor (in 1960) was a WW I vet, Jim Donnelly. He had begun playing in the pre-valve era, invented the French Horn bugle, taught several national champions, arranged "Oaklahoma" for the Skyliners when no one was playing show tunes, and would have been considered a radical by the drum and bugle crowd from the Spanish American War. I was surrounded by dozens of WW II veterans when I joined the Sunrisers in 1963. Fourteen years later some were unhappy that my Garfield kids "sang on the field". Now we have synths. O Bla Di, O Bla Da. We're lucky to have drum corps at all.
    2 points
  2. Over the recent decades, Regiment has surmounted a major financial challenge. While their business side of the operation has been much more positive, their resources are not the deep reserve of other organizations. The "big salary" faculty "names" in the later part of this decade have not brought the competitive success some thought they might have bought. The move to a more energetic, younger but talented and Regiment-knowledgeable staff might be a prudent move on a number of levels, some internal, some financial, jmho w/o any inside knowledge.
    2 points
  3. Tried to start a FB conversation about what is the current status of your old corps sponsor (AL/VFW/church/etc). No one responded. From my reading, living thru the 70s Srs scene and experiencing it first hand in Harrisburg (including info sessions on the subject) I'd say rising expenses and what caused decline of many cities had more to do with it.
    2 points
  4. 1 point
  5. I have a great audio tape that Scotty recorded for me about a year before he died. He talks about the history of the bugle (much of which he was responsible for) and the history of drum corps in general. He even talks about the days when Academy Award winning best actor (1935) Victor McLaglen was a drum instructor for the San Gabriel Dons Drum & Bugle Corps. I really need to post that recording on the internet some day.
    1 point
  6. One word stuck out for me... inexpensive.... cost of outfitting even a small corps is a lot more expensive today even when taking inflation into effect. Used to be able to find used horns more readily and cheaply. Today not so much and if you want Gs, rotsa ruck.... And as for BSGK folding when DCI started from my understanding the Newark area was getting bad and that was hurting recruiting. That would be part of the social flux being discussed. Also how did DCI contribute to the end of a lot of local Sr corps? Had a big drop off in the early/mid 70s too.
    1 point
  7. You completely discarded the fact that corps did not have to join DCI they were long gone with very poor management. all due to themselves. Good intentions, for sure but that wasnt going to fly with the world changing. Yes we all were raw neighborhood kids. You ignore the fact that the neighborhood thing for many things were dying. You cant blame DCI or anyone for changing times. It's been said by other posters some circumstances of the times BUT you would rather blame the evil empire. Drum Corps would all but be dead if it continued the way it was. How could anything survive if it couldnt recognize the world and the participants were changing. Talk about head in the sand. Drum corps had no choice but to change, or die. There were also only a few corps in comparison to the numbers starting DCI . If the others were so in tune why didnt they all do something as a group of many hundreds. Oh I miss the good ole days and the simplicity of life compared to today and would also love to pay 40 cents a gallon for gas and pay 30 cents for a loaf of bread but guess what THAT"S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN, I loved what we had but todays drum corps is far beyond what we ever imagined it could be, from every aspect, talent, design, musically, visually. Thank God the days of squad turns, to the rear march, concert formations, inspections, etc etc are long gone ( and I did both ) You say it was cheap to run a corps YEAH SO, try running just a winter guard program today. Those budgets are as high as drum corps were back in the day if not higher and it has nothing to do with the activity but all to do with the world and what it takes to service a kid today. This thinking is the reason the corps couldnt make it, narrow minded, small picture and the world is wrong. well how did it work out for those with that thought process.hmmmmm This is also what I meant earlier when I said respect is a 2 way street.
    1 point
  8. I hope they don't announce it until the very last second; they can show videos of show music but keep it so vague only few can figure out what pieces they're playing.
    1 point
  9. Don't look now, guys, but there's da&n little left now. And the currently popular "societal fluxuations" argument contains just enough truth to make it seem plausible if you're pre-disposed to believe it. The original basic concept behind the rise of drum corps was as a small, community based, inexpensive activity for ordinary humans, who had no desire to "be serious" about music. Other than the elite units, it was perhaps the collective faults of the hundreds of "ordinary humans corps" for not totally shunning the elitist few. Unfortunately that didn't happen. Many of us strongly advocated that course. We all began as eager amateurs, and wished devoutly to retain our amateur standing. Whether we worshipped at the alter of Tony S, or not, we were immediately singled out as being" part of the problem" by those, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, "Drum Corps Nazis". As with Ironlips, my undergraduate major was history. A couple of points should be raised. Prior to DCI drum corps was in a constant state of striving for survival. Corps formed, and other corps disbanded with regularity. It was almost never about finances. Corps were cheap to operate. It was one of the prime raisons d'etre of drum corps. After DCI it was ALL ABOUT money. Many national caliber units, who had been in existence for over 20 years in 1972, folded within a season or two, strictly for financial reasons. e.g. Blessed Sacrament Golden Knights, a charter member of DCI, didn't survive long enough to enter a single championship contest. DCI, as we suspected they might, scapegoated thousands of us eager amateurs. They threw out the baby with the bath water in their eagerness to cleanse and purify the original concept of drum corps, and mold it into something exalted, and available only to the anointed professionals. They shamelessly devoured the acceptable personnel of the ordinary human corps, putting added survival pressure on those outside the inner circle. Nearly every new "innovation", and management stricture they put in place was designed to increase costs and therefore force more "unworthy" units to disband. It was, I believe, a calculated measure of drum corps genocide. I had originally thought that they were honest sincere folks who got a little carried away in the initial rush of power, and would soon recognize the damage they'd done, and take corrective measures. I was an optimist.....or perhaps, naive. Many of them are truly evil people, who set out to destroy we poor folks who were just having fun. Whether they actually enjoyed watching the pain and anguish they were causing is unknown. Since 1972 hundreds of thousands of kids and volunteers have been systematically excluded from whatever that "activity" is that the powers-that-be have created. Thank God it's not drum corps. I knew drum corps, and DCI ain't it.
    1 point
  10. Age 18 and under...that is the age group of HS Marching Bands...in far greater number than drum corps ever couldd...or did. I jst don't see where the interest would be to create enough of these corps to provide the experience you are contemplating. Those kids already get it. The percentage-wise few who want to proceed to drum corps can do so now...and if you look, the DCI Open class corps are not full, and there are lots of smaller all-age corps that could absorb interested local kids, yet are still tiny. .
    1 point
  11. The important thing to understand IMO is that 3000 heads at a regular season ticket price.vs, the price for prelims and finals is why local appeal wherever finals is held is a very hard sell,..........locals are unlikely to hear a corps rehearsing in their neighborhood and say "hey, let's go see that" once they understand that tickets for their family of five is around $200.00,............you'll get some, but not an additional 1-2000 seats filled,........
    1 point
  12. Most of those 95% of corps from pre-DCI that no longer exist had little, if anything, to do with DCI, so really, you proved the opposite.
    1 point
  13. I would like to say God bless those involved with the American Legion and VFW posts across the country over the decades. Drum corps never even would have gotten off the ground to begin with without the Legion getting it started. The VFW helped take it to a bigger level in the 1960s (on the junior side).
    1 point
  14. So, if I'm not local, and I'm a college student, I not only have to pony up $3k or more, I have to tell my parents that I'm blowing off a semester of school to march? JMHO, but that's insane.
    1 point
  15. A HUGE percentage of those corps disappeared LONG before DCI ever came along.
    1 point
  16. Corps had been giving the veterans the single digit salute since the 1930s. The vets said, "No valves!". The corps got valves. The vets said, "No pulling slides!". The corps pulled slides. (e.g. The Syracuse Brigadiers concert tune, "I wonder what became of Sally" in 1955). The vets frowned on BAC's marimba in IIRC 1966, even though Madison had competed with Glockenspiels since forever. The vets, most particularly Tony S, were thoughtlessly obstructionist at times. They also were like the Church, in that they never just sat down with the corps and explained the reasoning behind their apparently capricious rulings. It might have helped if they had been more forthcoming, but they weren't. The fact that 95+% of all the corps that existed in 1972, prior to DCI, are no longer in existence proves, to me at least, that the vets, and Tony were basically right, and that DCI is basically wrong in their approach to the community function that drum corps were originally intended to perform. It's only old farts like me that GAS. The cool aid drinkers are serenely blissful.
    1 point
  17. Scouts heading out west in 2016: http://www.madisonscoutslive.com/mainsite/2015/09/scouts-to-tour-west-coast-next-summer/
    1 point
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