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Slight OT diversion, but an important one. Happy Mother's Day to Terri, all of our DCP Moms and certainly to all of the drum corps mothers we've been associated with through our times. I can't imagine what sort of person I would have turned out to be without your guidance, patience, perseverance and care in those formative years. Thank you all.

Another factor that helps with BAC’s BOD success is its unusual size for a BOD. It is quite large with over 40 members. This enables unavoidable visibility of its function. It is quite diverse in talent and skills as well as personal successes of each member. There is much to draw on, to IAM’s and BAC’s benefit as well as the other groups IAM supports.

I’m getting a ‘87-‘93 vibe from yesterday’s Phan-a-thon. Bringing the past to the present and onto the future. From Tchaikovsky to Herrmann, from Shostakovich to Muse. Very exciting!

Incidentally the majority of BD's donors in the >$1K range are individuals or foundations.

You can do it. I did after 22 years. I actually think I was a more thoughtful player in the 2000’s than I was in the 70’s.

Did you not see their props in 2017-18?

Just this week, the Boston Crusaders released the list of their corporate sponsors on the FB page, so I suppose that there is no harm in mentioning them here. I should note that I am not on the Inspire BOD, so I claim no credit for these sponsors. This is a partial list: Vattikuti Foundation Broadside J P Morgan Chase SS & C State Street Bank CAE Corp Fidelity Investments James & Cathlee Stone Foundation WrkFlws Accenture Eaton Vance Investment Mgrs FiServe Rockland Bank & Trust Aliter Investment Services Merrimack Valley Credit Union Too many to get them all...but Boston has no bingo and contrary to urban myth, there has been no billionaire, tech giant, or organized crime lord who left them money. These are the results of the year around hard work bu the 50 member Inspire BOD.

2023 Phantom Regiment - Exogenesis - Show Repertoire: Isolated System by Muse Supremacy by Muse As If A Voice Were In Them by Oliver Waespi to wALk Or ruN in wEst harlem by Andy Ahiko Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff For I Have Fought the Good Fight by Stephen Melillo

Any chance a mod can pin this thread and unpin the 2022 repertoire thread?

Thanks for sharing the rep and art for the uniforms! The Phan-a-Thon event was great, and is the perfect new annual tradition to kick off another season of the Regiment, brilliantly done by the staff and organizers of the event! Overall I really think the theme for the show and new look is going to be special! I believe it was mentioned during the reveal that this is not a "storytelling" show, but I do think that in someway they will illustrate the story about life and the human existence/experience: where we've come from and where we are going. The Regiment is looking to reinvent itself yet again for a new decade/generation, building off of the momentum from the past two seasons. The look for this year reminds me of the 2015 gold-tinged uniform for the brass/percussion, and the guard outfit has some touches of that 2018 teal. The chevron headgear is phantastic, reminds me of the outfit change from the 2014 show...you can definitely include the chickens and other forms of plumage with a lightweight head piece! Would enjoy seeing the headgear trend return like this in a fresh and modern way. Building upon their brand/identity, there is no mistaking this corps for anyone else! I did some digging and this looks to be the third iteration of the Rach 2 piece ('95 and '17) by the Regiment, and I'm super excited for what JD and this corps can do with a unique blend of music this summer! "You gotta be bold to wear the gold!" Let's go Regiment!

Didn't get to see it, but the reviews have all been glowing. Great job, Dr. Snead, staff and MMs.

I wouldn't normally recommend such a large board but it appears to be working and I'm under the impression that Boston underwent an arduous process to arrive there. But again, if y'all have offered help and it falls on deaf ears, more power to you in-competition. Naw, I was still ducking the industry back then. I am, however, glad they were able to put the fire out. 💦

Maybe. But there's also a whole professional field dedicated to raising funds for non profits (off the golf course.) Some call it Advancement, others Development. Others Donor Cultivation. And they don't just get the money rolling cause the flood gates stay open naturally forever. It's a profession for a reason. Because donor cultivation requires constant attention and care. Constant communication and synchrony with other departments in the non profit. Constant pats on the backs of donors who want them and constant, painstaking hoops to jump through for big corporate donors who will easily take their demands to the next non profit who can meet them better than you. The work is constant.

That big corporate donation action comes mostly from personal networking among executives. It often happens over rounds of golf at the country club, tennis on the courts, cocktails with the boss, fraternity/sorority chums, etc., etc. Once you get those avenues working in your favor they can last a long time.

I find this interesting and a great question/comment. When I arranged or reworked things, sometimes we had performers who couldn't hack the feature, but I wrote something they could perform within that feature that fit to keep them involved and not feeling left out. Some were special needs kids. I wanted to make sure the panel heard and saw that everyone was contributing what they could, and that we weren't cutting anyone. It could be thought of as shady, sure, in that there's a bit of a musical illusion created if one wishes to see it in that way. I and the rest of the staff saw it as better to involve everyone as best as they could be involved, and also to respect the performers. In the 30 or less musician class in the one regional circuit, the winner miked the 15 or so winds they had. That being said, garbage into the mike, garbage out the speaker. There was no garbage. They also rolled the dice and got the balance and sound right at the championship venue. Another competitor had equipment failure, which cost them several places in overtime penalties while the rectified the issues. There's still a bit of a gamble. There, we're talking a very small band, not a cast of thousands BoA juggernaut. From observation, I'm not seeing any of those top-end BoA units suffering for a loss of bodies on any particular instrument. The programs appear to have and get what they need and the overall instrumental music program from entry level on up is obviously built to provide enough well-trained bodies on the various instruments. Can electronic timbres enhance, if used wisely, sure! The thing is, I've studied Carmel's winning performance this year. It's not showing any of the negative excesses described in some of the posts. It's quite sublime. It's caused a lot of grousing from some circles because it's very meat and potatoes and not over baked and over thought and performed very precisely and elegantly. If they are using the electronics to stiffen weak sections, it's extremely subtle. A huge if there...

Welcome back, BigW! I hope your health continues to improve!

The video posted on DCI’s website the other day about what this was going to be had me cautious at first. But now that I see how these pieces fit together, I get what Tony Hall was saying. Muse music being played by Phantom Regiment isn’t something I’d expect to see on the field. Perhaps with Bluecoats or Blue Knights it would easily fit. So Tony Hall was right- this does make me say “wow they are actually doing this! “ As it relates to the theme, I think 2nd Law/ Isolated System is a great piece as a preshow to introduce the Exogenesis concept. I can literally see how this piece sounds when I listen to it. Now, how that leads into Supremacy….yeah, that’s the “wow they are really doing this” for me. Supremacy is like a mix of a James Bond theme song and rock opera- almost Queen like in sound. But thats the beauty of it. JD Shaw took pieces we would never expect to hear on the field in his work with SCV. He made them sound so unique and masterful. I am really looking forward to what he does here with these pieces. So, getting into the back half of the show, the more “ traditional” pieces we might expect to hear - I am curious if the Rachmaninoff is the 2nd movement of that 3 movement piece. If that is the actual ballad of the show. That movement is one of my favorites, and I had hoped for Phantom to have it in a show for quite some time. I had not heard the Melilo piece until tonight, as I found it on YouTube. I can see how this will end the show. Much like the Melilo piece last year, there is some fantastic brass passages, peaks and climaxes, that will be phenomenal to hear. Very much looking forward to what Tony Hall described, this year. This different, yet classic all the same edition of Regiment.

As always, a top notch production. Thanks Robert Cawthorne and the entire Regiment organization. I’m truly excited for the 2023 production of Exo Genesis. SUTA!

Thanks! If not for the good wishes and prayers from so many... I'm deeply thankful. Hopefully the post provided some perspective and food for thought. I'm thinking more about it over dinner!

I’m also excited about the 2026 Alumni Corps announcement. Just enough time for me to figure out how to play again. (The last notes I played were the parking lot run through in Foxboro stadium after 94 Finsls.)

They are stunning!

A while back, Jon Bilby had posted a video short of what the drill was supposed to look like for that show if they had performed it back in 2020 before the Pandemic hit. Let me just say, I hope the drill in this year's show looks somewhat close to what he posted in that video.

"You gotta see these cats from out in the cornfields!", DCI Judge Rich De Cola raved to me in 1975. He wasn't kidding! The main driving force was Darvin Omer "Doc" Crosser, a Korean War vet who founded the corps in '65 and became their first drill and music instructor. They were 'way too hip for their own good when they began knocking on DCI's door. Check this: As the story goes, Jim Ott and some of the Blue Devils staff saw the Precisionnaires and said, in effect, "That's it!". For 1975, these charts, and (particularly) their interpretations, were superior to almost everything else on the field, but a bit ahead of the judging techniques (except for the aforementioned De Cola and a couple of others like Lloyd Pesola). The drumming was too musical to get much credit vis-a-vis the prevailing standards. Argonne had suffered the same kind of undervaluing a couple of years earlier. The only Osage brass instructor from this period that I knew was Bobby Hagglund. He was playing trombone in a progressive R&B band out of Minneapolis called "Haze". They were opening for a kid who called himself "Prince". A peek at their roster will reveal a future corps director and more than a few important instructors and adjudicators, in addition to no small number of members who became professional performers. Like Camelot, they seemed to exist for only "one shining moment" but they certainly sparkled.

The member GoPro videos that I have watched on YouTube have shown me how LITTLE some members actually play their instrument during the 11-12 minutes on the field. Shane spent quite a bit of time hiding behind props waiting to come out for his "wink" moment, for example.

I think that may be unpossible.

It’s the operator. Not the machine. Yesterday, I was listening to Jeff Kievet and Muchachos on that old junk we played. You’d never know it hearing him play.

Heard some recordings of PR at their camp this weekend. They sound fantastic. I forsee them jumping in brass placements. They have a really good hornline over there and the guys in the next few spots above them need to be watching their backs. Havent heard anything about show design or visual, which imo is their weak link But with a brass like that, who cares. Super excited to see how much better it gets cause its already amazing

In what way was Crown doing something new? The app? Opener starting with percussion for build up and finishing that movement with a drill formation that spread the entire length of the field and a long, resolved chord. Brass never plays below fortissimo for the entire length of the opener (I’ll give Crown credit for starting with the fortissimo brass in the opener of 2019 rather than percussion). They move onto the next movement (that’s always about 2x the length of the opener) with the standard technical double and triple tonguing passages and plenty of gratuitous runs that they’ve been doing for years and years and the movement closes with 3 notes rather than playing a long chord, same as usual. Move onto a majestic sounding ballad where they show off their ability to achieve great dynamic contrast, replaying the same melody over and over. Percussion break right after starting with the pit for a smooth transition and then moving into the battery. Closer with some more technical music but this time with complex rhythmic passages rather than double and triple tonguing finishing off with geometric drill that leads into the crown set. All of which has synth vocals and sounds weaving in and out of the show. On YouTube, there’s a video showing just how similar the closing moments of all crown shows are for crying out loud, down to the b flat major chord. The main difference between crown 2017-2019 and crown 2022 is that they went from abstract and meta show concepts to a very literal one. Adding an app does not all of a sudden make Crown’s show different this year. And that’s fine, ALL corps have a formula. In the 80s and 90s, it was called having an identity. For whatever reason, in 2022 it is seen as a negative thing to put down other corps for

The only envelope pushing part of the Bluecoats show in my opinion was the Keytar. Other than that, it was very much more of the same that we have come to expect out of the Bluecoats in my opinion.