cixelsyd

I did not claim it was a dichotomy. That is why I used the words "prone to being neglected in favor of", rather than something mutually exclusive such as "banned by penalty of disqualification and shunning from all competitive pageantry arts". I hear you. But I also hear the similarities in approach which I enumerated earlier, now employed in near unanimity in world-class. I also see that as the competitive intensity decreases, more and more corps fall off the wagon and allow a melody or extended musical thought to creep into their designs. The contrast is most evident in SoundSport. Corps aspiring to open-class play DCI style, while teams with no such aspirations just play songs.

Not exactly. Like it or not, the sheets are prejudiced toward whatever they list as attributes. If melodies (or unbroken musical thoughts of greater than 20 second duration) are not called for on the sheets, those design choices are prone to being neglected in favor of what the sheets do call for. If the sheets call for creativity, variety, and range of content, the arranger who cuts up music to barely recognizable fragments in pursuit of those objectives can go into critique with an unimpeachable argument that they are achieving what the sheets say they should.

I wonder how much copyright impacts the choices you just described.

Or their musical thoughts rarely last beyond one phrase. I would call it musical attention deficit disorder (MADD). The scary thing is that this MADDness might never stop. Who has time for melody when there are so many toys that need to be featured? You need a high brass feature, a middle brass feature and a low brass feature (perhaps separate features for baris and tubas). Battery and pit need two features each. Electronics, the biggest culprit, must be featured in six different ways: 1. As a transitional crutch - the more transitions you have (i.e. the more you cut up the music into smaller pieces), the more you score there. 2. Soundscape show intro - starting your show with a minute of electronics makes 9 minutes of actual music performance seem like a 10-minute show. 3. Pit amplification. 4. Brass solo amplification - this is now mandatory. 5. Field microphone usage - either using a mic for a sextet/octet, or an array of mics for staged sectional features. 6. Mount mics on instruments and amplify them anytime/anywhere in the show. After attending to all that, there are only a couple of minutes available for musical thoughts of greater length.

Just add "climb on props", and you have a comprehensive description of the current activity.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know that DCI pays people to make critical commentary on every one of their performances? Some of their hired critics even go out on the field to look for things to criticize. What nerve!

Pleasant surprises: everyone I see live. Most disappointing: Flo.

I want to see if AI will put INT in 7th at finals.

"Peer review" as part of scoring a competition? How would you avoid conflict of interest there?

No... that is a "them" problem.

Your whole post is spot on, but this part was reading my mind. It does seem to me that modern musical design is so much about juxtaposition that percussion features must always be interruptions, not extensions of a musical thought. And to that end, we see more battery features divorced from the melodic percussion in the pit. That practice is in total opposition to why melodic percussion was introduced in the first place - to enable the drumline to perform a musical composition all by themselves.

Maybe the Lisle audience reactions are suffering in comparison to those at the BOA symposium show in Muncie two days prior.

1. Because design, at any instant in time, is such a shallow pool. 2. Because designers are often formulaic. They use the same patterns year after year, just with different source music and themes.

At this rate, that will happen. I would prefer it be done by promotion instead of attrition, though.

That explains why corps change costumes every year now... and the not-quite-uniform 'uniforms'. It all makes sense now.