mad_scotty

you would probably be surprised at the accuracy of online forums in predicting opinion trends over larger populations. you have to know how to count (and what to count) but it can be done, and i'm stating this as a professional opinion backed by research and a real world track record.

i think there's a big difference between judges helping to identify problem spots and judges being trained on a single design standard and advocating for it. that's a recipe to get boring cookie cutter shows, and it makes the judges part of the action, instead of a neutral evaluator of it. we all know of plenty of instances of corps being "punished" in the ge category because judges didn't like the design, when the designs were actually very successful at laying the groundwork for performers to create an intense emotional experience for the audience. and isn't creating a great shared experience for the audience and marching members what the performance aspect of this activity should be about? what genius came up with the theory that pleasing the judges version of good design should be the main goal? after all, the judges are only a single viewpoint, made homogenous by training on design standards. do they really make shows better, or just make them conform better? i think the second is the case, and i see plenty of evidence of it on the field. judges don't score what is better, they score what they prefer. this whole idea that a panel of experts can identify better design and that designers should conform to a single set of rules on design is ridiculous. the people who advocate it are mirroring the same arguments used over 100 years ago to deny the french impressionists entry to the paris salon. the impressionists toiled in poverty for 20 years because they didn't conform to accepted parameters of design. i'm glad they didn't cave to the "judges are always right" nits of their day. now, i'm not saying drum corps is likely to produce the next great art movement like the impressionists. i'm just saying that, as long as a judging panel is allowed to control design we are guaranteed drum corps won't produce much innovation at all.

...or will they go for a stunning visual package with a very mediocre (or typical, for a top 3) musical package? hmmmmmm....you sir, have managed to bring this thread squarely on topic. that surely makes you the rarest of internet oddities.

honestly, i wasn't trying to debate the value of 93 star, i think they were one of the truly great hornlines in dci history. in their own way they deserve mention alongside any of the other legendary hornlines. but most legendary hornlines had something they didn't do particularly well. 95 scouts for example, were so incredibly overpowering that in a couple of places in their show they sound sort of boxy and awkward. like trying to light a cigarette with a flame thrower. there have been less than 1/2 dozen lines all time who could have even played their book, but they weren't sweet light and agile, they were 100% full tilt in everything they did, even the ballad. as for 93 star, well, they seem to get louder with each passing year. everyone knew they were amazingly tight in 93, people were already comparing them to the 91 devs by late july but it was more than a decade before i heard anyone talk about them being loud for that year, much less one of the loudest hornlines of all time. dcp in particular, and the internet in general have a weird dynamic sometimes: if you make even a small passing comment someone disagrees with, or if you apply any critical comment to something someone loves theres a tendency for people to jump on it and obsess it into the dirt. silly, i love 93 star, its one of the shows i most frequently listen to, and one of only 3 i posted on my myspace page (80 devs and 95 scouts being the other 2). but since i don't love them blindly, obediently and unquestioningly i'm the guy who hates on star in an internet forum. like i said, silly. but thats the drum corps disease, people get incredibly angry if you deviate from company line, and dci seems to instill a don't question my authoritar attitude in an unfortunately high percentage of its alums. i still don't think star was that loud in 93. pr was loud, but so were the cavs and scouts. star was sort of close to the devs and cadets, maybe-ish. i still think most of their power in the big hits was generated by the percussion, though. great line, but not a powerhouse. who cares, really though. loud is only one quality. i've heard some ear splittingly loud hornlines that were crappy in every other respect to the point of being offensive (93 phantom in june, for instance, they are one of the few hornlines i've ever heard be genuinely bad out the gate and then excel down the stretch). anyways, i know you tried to rescue your thread, but keeping an internet forum on topic is like herding cats, futile to attempt, and probably not going to give you the result you want even if you have success. for what it's worth, i hope there is a spartacus effect in show design. i hope that effect has nothing to do with storyline shows, and everything to do with corps trying to connect emotionally to a large audience instead of connecting intellectually to a small judging panel. i want to see more shows that have to be experienced, and can't be described in terms of a judging sheet. less paint by numbers, more expressiveness, that gets my vote.

i think people from outside the activity pick a corps based on what they look and sound like during their show, but my advice to anyone wanting to march and trying to pick a corps has always been to pick them based on what they look and sound like in the parking lot after a show. corps have personalities, you can pick them up a little from the shows but its the other 23 hours and 45 minutes a day that make your experience. i think some people will move to a new corps to try for a ring, and that isn't surprising, dci is a youth activity so you'll always have people making juvenile decisions, but most people who switch corps do it because once they are on tour and more of an insider they realize that another corps is a lot better fit for their personality and outlook.

really? i always thought they wore them till they were rags!!

i caught them from around the 35 and from right outside the 40 after 1/4's and semis, and i got a lot of drums and a little brass in those big hits. there were a lot of other corps people around, and a couple of people were just blown away and exclaiming at how loud they were in the hits (they were realy into the show) but a lot of other people, who had just seen madison, cavs (best cavs hornline in a LONG time at that point) devs then phantom (LOUD LOUD) were impressed at the cleanliness and rolling there eyes when people said the hits were super loud. i'm in that second group, i liked everything about them live except the sound production, it just wasn't there for me, particularly not right after phantom who really smacked the stands during that 93 show.

entire corps, yeah. but are you sure you aren't giving them too much ful ensemble credit for what the percussion did. still to this day thats one of the loudest drumlines i've ever heard, and in a couple of big pushes they carried the ensemble sound. but the horns, by themselves, they didn't really feel like they were able to generate as much raw power as anyone else in the top 6 that year, even when they cut loose. and remember, this is in an era when a lot of people still equated volume with skill in drum coprs, so star was leaving people a little confused and unimpressed as much as they were leaving them intentionally angered, at least by august when most everyone had seen them and gotten over their original response (i gotta admit though, in june and early july they had a few people fuming)

try saying something constructive. it works better than just finger pointing. and i'll grant you, throwing out a direct correlation between 93 star losing and dci suddenly shifting away from anything that appeals to fans geting approval from the judges is a huge stretch, but the two events did happen at roughly the same time.

i saw star live several times in 93, including finals week where i wgot to see them from right downtown at 1/4's and semis. they were the quietest hornline in the top 6 by an order of magnitude, really the only weakness of that amazingly tight line, unless you want to harp over the lack of higher faster louder type stuff in the book. and phantom was popular in 96, but really, really clean too. and still tied with a corps and show that was leading the charge towards, well, the shows we saw win almost everything for the last 10 years.

actually, if you saw me in a nice restaurant on a date you'd see me wearing a sports jacket, nice open necked shirt, pants and dress shoes. the colors are a little different, and the cuffs of my sleeves and pant legs narrow cut instead of flaring, but basically an updated leisure suit. and i'm no fan of the jonas brothers, but when i hear them i'm impressed with the professionalism that goes into their material. i don't watch american idol, but why are you assuming the second best person beat the best person in finals? it seems the general consensus of the voters was that kris was the superior talent. the point is selling albums and tickets still, isn't it? seems like american idol has a decent formula for figuring that out, at least. when you're in the entertainment industry, like american idol and drum corps are, you should worry about selling tickets. tickets keep the busses rolling, and lord knows drum corps could stand some extra revenues right now.

there was a fan response caption, once. actually a caption designed to take those "wow moments" that impacted the stands into account when scoring corps. they called it ge and it worked wonders throughout the 80's, where the top shows were well designed, well executed, and generally speaking crowd pleasers. then in 93 star came in second place with an unlikebale show performed by a hornline that couldn't project (most of the people i talked too on tour in 93 thought they sounded like a slightly cleaner version of the 93 blue knights) and an enormous pit. then the vids showed up in everyones mailbox, and apparently that corps projected very well into the mic's because now the show was a challenging show performed by a pristine hornline that usddenly sounded like a slightly cleaner version of the 91 blue devils (same enormous pit). dci has suffered from a 15 year hangover from that offseason of people trying to figure out how the cadets won. aparently ge got the blame, because that category hasn't really been judged according to dci's own criteria since (unless someone can think of an instance where the more popular corps beat the cleaner corps between 1994 and 2007).

this may seem like an obviously true assumption, the idea that a very small pool of more educated, better trained experts will be much better at evaluating something, and a large pool of less educated and trained generalists will be worse. the only problem is that it doesn't stack up against real world metrics. crowds tend to be pretty smart. and when you look at real world examples they tend to be smarter than the so-called experts in some surprising ways. there have been some pretty interesting studies on this recently, real groundbreaking work. i've seen studies that show that large pools of small individual gamblers will more accurately predict outcomes in athletic events than the pros who set the lines in vegas, and that large pols of individual small investors will generally beat the average returns of wall street money managers. the wisdom of crowds, it sounds like a completely ridiculous idea, but in the end you have to rely on what the metrics are telling you: experts are well educated in a narrowly defined scope, but in the end a crowd has a larger aggregate iq and can process more information from more sources more quickly than individuals can. and they are a more accurate barometer of real world events as a result.

maybe, but what about an activity like dci where the judges stopped judging according to the sheets over a decade ago? have you ever read the ge criteria, one that essentially describes crowd pleasing as a key criteria? i've seen interviews with judges who are pretty open about what they are looking for, and it isn't audience response. you also quickly assumed that in my example the corps who is pleasing the crowd is doing something bad, not just failing to meet the judges preconceived notions on proper design. why assume that anything popular will be wrong? i ask because in terms of their being a spartacus effect this seems to be pretty much the heart of the argument. can't you play to the crowd and be sophisticated and competitive?

try this one on for size. 2 corps at a show. the judge tells corps A that part of their show isn't working from a design standpoint. it's clunky, awkward, and overdone. the staff says wow, we really need to work on that. the judge goes to corps B and gives them virtually identical advice about a section of their show. the corps says all due respect, but the audience loves that hit, and we would rather work on cleaning it and keep it in. a month later the same judge sees the same two corps at a different show. corps A has made changes per the judges recomendations, and their new show, while still a little dirty, matches the judges notion of what proper design should be. corps B is still running the same stuff, very clean by now, and the crowd is into it, but they are clearly using designs the judge has staked their professional reputation on deriding a month previously. and you think there is no conflict at all for this judge in this show? they can remove themselves from the situation emotionally and give both corps a fair shake? in all the staff meetings you have sat through, all the designers you have collaborated with, have you really not noticed how emotionally attached people get to their notion of what the proper way to do something is? how easily they shift from thinking something is a cool idea to becoming an evangelist for that technique to thinking anyone who doesn't do things that way is lost in the desert? i'm not saying a judge will be as bad as a staffer who spent a year planning, teaching, and cleaning, but if they have even a shadow of that emotional atachment to the use of certain ideas in design then they are clearly not objective. i see this in my line of work all the time. one of my companies main products is a line of consulting services we market primarily to fortune 1000 companies, entertainment and athletic brands, etc. our consultants are truly gifted individuals with serious track records of producing for some of the worlds most recognizable brands, and they are well worth the six figure salaries they pull down. they are well educated, curious, open minded, and eager to learn. and occasionally i will tell one to do a strategic appraisal, and make a list of recomended changes and next steps for the client with targeted benchmarks, metrics and methodology to assess achievement. pretty simple. they go away for 1-3 weeks, come up with a plan, i review it and approve them to go live with the client. and every once in a while these bright, commited, open minded eager to learn people will get off the phone with the client and come at me looking like a burning eyed prophet of doom and tell me they want to quit, or fire the client, or burn the office down, or whatever, because their advice was shot down. these guys are real a listers, always thinking, learning, and growing, and aren't naturally inclined to be pushy and arrogant at all. but they work very, very hard at what they do (to the point i have to monitor their days off to make sure they actually take them and recharge) and they are so invested in working to give the client the very best advice they can give that when a client basically blows them off they sometimes flip. i have to bring them back down to earth and calm them down (i really am the calming influence at my company, of course i can't express my opinions very freely theirceither, though) and i get them to give the client what they want. in the end, the client pays our bills, and their salary, so we try to educate clients on best practices and give our best advice but we always come around to delivering what they are paying for. but my people, who do what dci judges do: observe, evaluate, and make recomendations, spend so much time working on defining what is best so they can give the most professional, well refined advice that through the process they become emotionally invested in the advice itself, and sometimes lose perspective as a result. i find it hard to believe that my people are less professional, talented, educated, or ethical than dci judges. and i also find it hard to believe that dci judges are immune to the issues my colleagues have to work through. of course, i doubt any of this will really resonate with you. the real issue here is that you feel the judging system works, and as long as you are happy with the systems end product it will be easy for you to rationalize its culture and methodology. it will be just as easy for you to ignore the serious concerns of people who see problems where you believe none exist. if the results are so good, then the process HAS to work, right? but i ask you, dci fans seem to me a fairly intelligent and educated group as a whole. if the judging works, why are so many educated and intelligent people so convinced that it is massively flawed, and that results are far too often skewed as a result?

can be suspended, not will. what does happen is a board review if they get caught, and the board determines the punishment. most dr.'s will do anything to avoid spending a couple of hours explaining their ethical or procedural lapses to a group of colleagues though. and i have been in a room with a dr. who called a colleague and asked them to call a scrip into a pharmacy for antibiotics for one of their kids because they didn't want it in their own name, just to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

It's a conflict anywhere. A doctor who writes a prescription for themselves or a family member can lose thier license or be suspended in all 50 states. In most states high school refs are required to drive out of their region so they don't see teams they live near or grew up near, and in all levels of amateur athletics it's customary to make sure refs are not alumni of the teams they are refereeing. You know those CSI shows that are so popular, where the techs are always interacting with suspects? Completely ludicrous, I dated a forensic tech for a while and they were never allowed to see a suspect, or even know their name (unless they were coroners and had to id a body). They were required to recuse themselves if they had any relationship of any kind, no matter how casual, with someone who even lived on the same street as the crime scene, just to avoid conflicts of interest. Cops, DA's and Judges are all under the same general guidelines. The fact is, if someone is invested in either the product or the people generating it they can't be objective, no matter how noble, disciplined or well intentioned they may be. Saying that it isn't a conflict just because it's alien to figure skating people (who have struggled with many of the same issues) is just a cop out. You may not like figure skating (can't say as I'm a fan myself) but as an activity it bears many striking parallels to drum coprs. Just look at the skating world, blending artistry and athleticism into a highly structured and competitive performance viewed and judged by a rabid niche audience? Sounds a hell of a lot like drum corps. And the combination of reputations and careers on the line in a small and hyper competitive community that grows ever more incestuous over the years as interpersonal relationships forced by constant contact at a limited pool of events grow on the one hand and personal jealosies and gripes fester on the other? Drum corps would do well to pay attention to what happens in other activities that face very similar community pressures. Saying it's ok in drum corps because people are used to it, it's traditional doesn't carry water with me either. People were used to apartheid, weren't they? You think we should stop researching cancer and aids treatments ebcause people are used to dying from them? Not all traditions are good, and not all innovations are good either. We should be more concerned with what works and what doesn't than with what we are used to or what is new and exciting.

i'm going to try this one more time and quit because frankly it seems you are pretty invested in your portrayal of me, to the point you don't care what i actually think. i should have phrased one part of that more carefully, the dci community wasn't in agreement on madison getting bumped (the entire dci community has never been agreement on anything, has it?) this was one of those cliches though, and was very, very widely passed around and discussed, true or not, and thats what i was alluding to. i see, because of my poor word choice, that my intent there wasn't clear at all. as to the rest, you're willfully misrepresenting my thoughts and statements, and thats really not very cool of you at all. i don't think the judges intentionally cheat anyone, i have never stated or in any way implied that. in referring to what other people used to call the 2 place madison bump i was pretty clear that i saw no evidence of it more often than not, though in some years i can see why p[eople scratched theuir heads at madisons slotting. what i have said, repeatedly, is that judges feel that part of their job is to steer corps staffs to designs they approve of. this is something you seem to agree on, having said you seek out judges opinions and use them to shape your own show design. i think it's bad, because it does affect fair play (judges shouldn't be invested in product, only in adjudicating performance), and becauise it limits the pool of minds who can influence design, and thus limits creativity. i attribute this not too cheating, but too a culture that stifles creativity. oh, and there is no "IMO" in attendance figures. there are less corps, with less total members, performing at less shows, in front of an aggregate sum of less people over the course of a season now than there were ten years ago, and the numbers have declined steadily over that time. period. not opinion, fact, using dci's own numbers (numbers they have taken to padding lately).

i don't see how you can take one phrase in a sentence, repeat it out of context and wilfully claim it has that meaning when the full sentence 1) doesn't attribute it as my personal thought (this was one of those early-mid 90's dci community cliches, that madison would thumb their noses at the judges and the judges would thumb right back on the score sheets) and 2) the last phrase of the sentence in question clearly states that i didn't see any consistent evidence of this. you should be ashamed of yourself for even posting this, lance, i normally repsect your opinions (even if i disagree with them) but to say that i'm trying to get out of anything here when you are so clearly misrepresenting both my words and intent is ridiculous.

reread my statement, my full statement, where i say people used to say that, and follow up by saying that while i could see where they got that in some years, in over half the years in the 90's i didn't think madisons scores were lower than they should have been. i'd dig it out myself but i've been wrangling with my marketing people all night editing their newest output and i can't spend 15 minutes reviewing 17 pages of posts. but i do recall what i said, and you pulled a single phrase out of context and changed its meaning completely. and reread the numbers dci releases again. less corps, performing at less shows, and attendance was down every year from its peak in the mid-late 90's until 2007, when they "turned it around" by counting full attendance, including staffs, which was slightly higher than 2006's paid attendance only number.

At no point have I blatantly described judges as dishonest cheats and it has not been my intention to imply that. I hope you will review my posts and have the decency to apologize for that accusation. I don't think the judges cheat, I think they have set preconceptions for what design should be and corps who fail to meet their expectations are downgraded merely for not lining up to the status quo. And I do think this is very unhealthy, creativity works best when a wide pool of people try to invent on multiple tracks, when you have a very small group guiding "invention" to a limited track then creativity is stifled. As to the metrics, we don't have an alternate universe to compare dci to so we can't really know that the activity would have shrunk much more with a different creative culture, this is true. but we do have the metrics we have, and they say the activity has shrunken, and we have enough common sense to see that in the same period of retraction show design has not only changed, but changed in ways that a large segment of the fan base is unhappy with. so we can infer a bit from the numbers, even though they are only a single source data stream. And as you said, "if something continuously does not 'work', I would not be doing my job to stubbornly refuse to consider some sort of modification"

I'm really looking at shows from the 2000's, I think fan friendly would be the best description for the activity as a whole in 95. I do question the Cavaliers beating any of the next 3 corps though. I can see an argument for Cadets or Devs ahead of Madison but a corps with a middle of the pack hornline who doesn't hit a single drill set in the last 90 seconds of their show? I think serious drum corps fans can go back and watch finals that year and recognize a dirty show when they see one.

i think it's real easy to call someone bitter who you disagree with. i'm not sure i think theres any value in my commenting further on that point. basically, what you're saying here is that you think judges, through their aggregate comments, should be a de facto part of your design team, while still reserving the right to disregard an individual judges comments when you don't like either them or their comments. personally, i don't think this is a healthy attitude, though it is clearly the attitude adopted by dci in an era that has produced shows a lot of people feel are sophisticated and satisfying, but in terms of measurables has seen a consistent shrinkage in the totals of marching members, number of active jr. corps, number oif shows, and paid attendance at shows. i own and manage three businesses, and if one of them was showing a ten plus year slide like this, well, that just wouldn't happen, i'd make changes after a few straight quarters of nonperformance and if the changes wouldn't work i'd get out of the business. i'm not bitter, but i am highly critical of an organization that has failed to produce consistently for a long time, and has failed to generate the type of cultural change it takes to shift business into a succesful mode again after so many years of stark failure. sine dci is an entertainment company i tie failure to generate numbers with a product problem, i.e. an on field problem, and i feel the heart of the product problem is linked to a culture that strives to please 7-9 green shirts and not the wider, paying audience. my hope is that there will be a spartacus effect, and that the effect will be that corps see that a show aimed at the stands as much as the press box was able to succeed in both realms, and designers won't feel as fettered by their desire and professional need to meet the judges expectations. doc, it hurts every time i do this is one thing, doc, every time i d this you hit me and it hurts is quite another.

When I was a marching member, going back 15 years now, Madison's staff very publicly announced that we felt DCI had presented us with a choice to play to the crowd or play to the judges, but not to do both. This was a huge shift in the culture of DCI, one that from the beginning had been based on essentially 3 ideas: self determination, freedom of expression, and crowd appeal. We had decided to play to the crowd and not gear our shows towards scoring. This was the period where the GE heavy scoring system, which had replaced the tick system a decade before, was morphing from the "score the wow/crowd appeal factor" system still described in the books to the "score the edgy design/dci insider/judge appeal" factor that has never been written in the rule book or voted on but has been the standard for the current era. This was where the Madison-2 thing started, whether it was true or not virtually the entire DCI community was in agreement that Madisons placements were bumped down 2 slots at finals by the judges as revenge for thumbing our collective noses at them during the 90's. Some years I see it (91, 92, 94, 95, 96), others I don't (90, 93, 97-99). Staffs from other corps, and the DCI community as a whole were completely polarized by Scott Stewarts stance on this, and several other issues relating to corps financials and priorities, but never did I hear anyone question the idea that many corps geared their shows purely towards the judges and I had conversations with staffers and members of a lot of the judging oriented design corps and they were all unoffended and completely open and honest about what they were doing. They didn't get offended, they looked at this as an honest philisophical difference, not a dirty little secret. I guess that since these corps were in the majority and have been the stewards of a long era of shrinking audiences and increasing costs maybe that has changed a bit. Or maybe you just came in late enough in the conversation that people had stopped talking about it in these terms. But in the early to mid 90's, when all of this was shaking out, no one was designing shows for judging appeal and then going around in a huff claiming they were playing to the stands. It was really the opposite, they were playing to the green shirts and telling anyone who would listen that corps like the Scouts were cheesy losers who would never win as long as they refused to "play the game".