truher

I for one am looking forward to the future of DCI. When we will have grown beyond shows consisting of whole notes and Arban exercises played with cleverly bent legs. I'm looking forward to the return of melody and swing, of a complete, engaging musical idea that takes more than 4 bars to express. I'm looking forward to the day when the tuba section is allowed to do more than quietly play along with the synthesizer. I'm looking forward to the day when a mellophone player could aspire to play more than 8-count sustains and occasional runs ending in sustains. I'm looking forward to the day when the main audible difference between corps is not the quality of their sound reinforcement systems. That will be a glorious day indeed. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think the "unplugged" aspect of solo adagio work, whether exemplified by cadets 1984 or phantom 2008, is a more intimate kind of awesomeness that it would be nice to hear more of. One last word on 2009. I think one of the issues may be just that the theme is a little too small an idea to wrap an entire show around. Also, it's not just that the 2009 show doesn't tell the WSS story, it directly conflicts with the story. For example, I thought the boy-like-that/i-have-a-love section was really interesting, coherent bit, until the odd "resolution" at the end of that section. The music is hardly about resolution, it's about tragedy. Love and murder. Maybe I'm not postmodern enough to view the music as mere decoration to be remixed, context-free. Or maybe I'm just completely missing the point. And, just so you know, I think 2009 had a ton of awesome bits in it, and they're both good shows in their own ways.

I hadn't heard the Cadets show until finals this year, and I was surprised to hear West Side Story, which I remember fondly from 1984. I was even more surprised that the 2009 version left me cold, musically. The drill in 2009 is, of course, spectacular, otherworldly compared to what would have seemed possible in 1984, but the music isn't. 1984 was more nuanced: the musical expression of the drama, Barbara Maroney's solos, the focus on dynamics, the patience to include whole quiet passages, the whole arc of the show. In 2009, it's just the fast songs, sometimes mixed together incongruously: all Allegro, no Adagio. Am I off base here? What's the conventional wisdom on this topic? (And, yes, I know, WSS is vastly overplayed, I'm more interested in the state of music in DCI than WSS itself.)