Lance

98 they sounded AMAZING playing Tchaikovsky. Came right after a tremendous jazzy shows in 96/97. 00 they sounded even better (imo) playing a bunch of Herrmann that had more of a romantic than modern feel. That was after 99. Both of those were outliers to the jazz stuff they were most identified with. Neither of those shows won, though.... But I think BD could pull off anything and sound great.

pretty easy to pick out 3 or 50 conventions that every other top corps uses every year. i could do it for boston and bloo, but i'm an adult. i'd love to see the top 3 from last year all change things up. the formulas have gotten alittle stale to me even though i've liked the products.

didn't read the thread or see the announcement, but i'm assuming it'll be a show based on romantic era stories or literary conventions of the era. yawn. as a pipe dream, i'm down for BD playing some romantic era classical.

I couldn't help laughing the first time a DI got in my face and screamed. Once. Never happened again when 3 more of them seemed to surround me like f'ing dementors in the blink of an eye. I think it was because I grew up with generations of military in my family and they all told me that drill instructors/sergeants were just playing a role. Nobody outside of Dickens novels is that much of a caricature and that was my reaction the first time. But yeah, when 4 of them were surrounding me, "accidentally" bumping into me and pushing me around, I got over the laughing thing pronto. And I did end up having 1 DI out of 5 who was indeed a caricature. Just a nasty little guy who liked having power over others. The other DI's did their best to protect us from him in their own subtle ways. Back to high school marching band inspection back in the day, if anybody forgot black socks before parade inspection, our band director spray painted our ankles and feet black. Different times. And @happycomposer, I'm hoping you'll keep us updated about your findings. I've always been curious about this as well but really didn't even know where to begin.

what is this thread?

i don't care about what gets kept or removed on reddit, but at this point, all you do with victim blamers is reinforce their beliefs if you engage with them in any way. just sayin.

99 was amaa8ng musically to me. Probably maligned because of tarps and taxi parts lol.

80s 3peat 92, 93, 97, 99, 00, 05 Love a lot more but those are my big faves

You can't make a statement like this and say a few sentences later "let it play out in court". Not unless a judge dismisses dci as a defendant. But yeah, dci's lawyers def wont want dci saying anything about this. And for decades dci kept the mo of doing everything possible to avoid being culpable as a governing body when it comes to cases of abuse, always shifting the argument to say each member corps is in charge of policing itself. Truly disgusting and cowardly in every way. They didn't take an active role in getting those policies enacted activity-wide until they had no choice but to do so. Rational adults should be scrutinous of the degree to which they're actually being enforced.

Exactly. I preferred BD 2012 over BD 2014 which puts me in a minority I think, and I didn't care for much of anything they did between 2008-2011 or 2013 like a lot of people in this thread have said. It's just personal taste. Sentiments like "Tee-hee what the heck is DADA!?!?!?!? tee-hee-hee" being conflated with a lack of excellence by a corps? GTFO.

Babies can reduce any DCI show concept down to something that's trashable because it's all so silly if you really think about it. SCV and Crown at finals in 2007 had fans going at each other around me...and the shows were about a giant exclamation point vs horsies. There was some tension between BD and Cavies in 2003. One was about "cool" which doesn't really mean anything while the other was about a giant washing machine for green and yellow spandex onesies or something. It's just band. It all has a giggle factor.

BD 2012 exuded excellence. There isn't a theme a corps has done that isn't pretentious and silly even if it happens to be your personal favorite. It's all just marching band that takes itself way too seriously. People in crowds who try to make their opinion known to people around them are even more pretentious and silly. Real weirdos. Your opinion isn't that special no matter how many fellow weirdos get onboard with you. Every finals I went to there have been people like that. Every adult rolls their eyes and tries to ignore them.

Gross but not unexpected given the talent level out there, the competitiveness out there, and zero regulation of contracts in terms of being fair for performers. I have little doubt this will come to a head eventually. I feel like it's such a niche activity that the top performers could legally be considered "professionals/employees" which could open all kinds of interesting litigation. Look at NCAA basketball athletes right now. Today from Dartmouth, which is refusing to work with the players who voted. All of the emphasis by DCI on calling performers "students" and charging "tuition" hits home a little here: “Given Dartmouth’s decades-long commitment to athletics as an extension of our academic mission, we believe the regional director has made an extraordinary mistake in finding these students are employees,”

no, it's objective truth. meet me here for the first regional and we'll look up cv's for judges scoring music captions. you're 100% wrong. whether or not you're okay with it is opinion. and i respect the opinions of people who are okay with it. but don't say things that aren't true, especially if you try defending them with post hoc nonsense. it's just band, but don't talk about things you don't understand.

This is why I love Crown and Bloo in particular. I can almost always count on a musical product that's just as important to them as visual. It's simply not the case for the majority of corps anymore, and I don't blame them with the scoring being so heavily skewed towards visual. The fact that people with zero musical background are scoring music is yet another reason why scores are really a joke in the activity. It's always been kind of a joke, though, lol.

Yeah, that was rough. And 2000 was my favorite top 3 I ever saw live at finals. Went to 98,99,00, and 07...thanks again for that, @JohnD!. That top 3 in 2000 was a riot. The only other top 3 that compares for me is 93, and I never got to see any of those corps live, just on the PBS broadcast.

Their movement was breathtaking to watch live at finals, and we're talking about a top 2 that was also cooking pretty good with the Cadets and Cavies. BD 2000 is one of those weird shows that (for me) was better early season when it was more raw-sounding musically. It felt almost too refined by finals week. I don't know how to explain it.

I realize it's not their show concept, but that poster screams Roland from King's The Dark Tower series.

Saw Glassmen 99 early season when I was stationed in NC. I had seen their 98 show at finals, and I knew they were going to be good, but that 99 show was really amazing to me in particular. Even though they ended up getting 5th again at finals, I felt like it was a big step up. I loved the arrangement and overall production, and they just sounded like they were on their way to top 3 in the near future.

Well done from a fellow Clarinetist! I love playing bass clarinet. Really fun piece.

gigantic list. dci is what really got me into instrumental/classical music as a young teen. I played in the band and enjoyed it and all, but after getting exposed to the following pieces and composers with dci, I became the kid listening to classical on my walkman/discman (yes, i'm old) while all my friends were listening to Nirvana and Kriss Kross. 91 Star: All of the Respighi stuff. This got me to backtrack and watch some older corps,, including Cadets 87. Ended up going to the library and checking out cassettes of both The Pines of Rome and Appalachian Spring. Ended up wearing out the entirely of both cassettes and my love for classical was born. 92/93 Cadets: The Holsinger stuff they used really got me into wind ensemble music for the first time, and I started to really embrace 6:30 AM rehearsals with my band and understand the stuff by John Barnes Chance, De Meij, Gillis, Nelson, etc that we were playing is really really really good. The only way to get recordings of wind ensemble stuff back in the early 90s was my school's music library where out band director would put all of his sample CD's from publishing houses. I "borrowed" them for a couple years. 😉 93 Star: I had heard Adagio for Strings by Barber, but this opened me to all of his other stuff. Same with Bartok. The fall of 93 is when I started playing for the first time in our local regional symphony and the first pieces I performed at a concert were Mahler 1 and we had a guest soloist do Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, so that was more. dci truly was really the catalyst for all of it for me though.

I could name that tune in 4 notes. 😜

getting caught up. listening to this after heehaw was a jolt lol. hard to imagine a corps not doing this soon. love it.

I made a mistake and will always admit when I do. Sorry for overreacting everybody, lets get back on topic.

100% my mistake then. I should've figured you weren't the type to be negative at all, much less about Mozart, so I apologize.