Pete Freedman

Are you saying it will be FloMarching for sure? Their site says nothing about it, and nothing is listed on their upcoming events tab. Also, is DCI requiring a higher interframe compression bitrate guarantee? All of the youtube clips I saw matched my own live experience, which was well toward the lower end of the scale in the linked video.

Are you guys sure Richard Saucedo and Robert W. Smith composed those works for free? I would think they would be more expensive, not less. Play/Arrange/Perform rights are statutory and fairly low, I thought. Commissioned works would be more. Wouldn't it be an insult to ask your arranger to compose works for free? I wouldn't think of it. In fact, aren't arrangers fees generally more than license fees for a given work (not counting negotiated media fees by DCI). Wouldn't any responsible director offer more than the normal arrangement fee? And as far as DCI negotiating media fees, I would expect the composer/arranger to get fairly standard rates there as well.

It has been said many times that higher placing lines have better instruction on average. Certainly there are master instructors at the top of the activity. Of course, all things are rarely equal, and the strength of talent showing up at auditions must be a big factor in the scores. We could hypothesize that better instructional staff should be reflected in a steeper caption score curve during the season, particularly achievement scores. However, most of them seem to improve at about the same rate, so I'm not sure about that. For an individual, though, I would think being in a line with roughly your same skill level would maximize improvement. Jumping to a better corps when you've outgrown the lower corps would make sense (if that's the goal) even if their instructors are no better. The music will definitely be harder.

Um, KathyG, By any chance did you pull Trumps head out of that shako? :) Interesting idea, anyway... I mean about the sorting thing ...

You make some good points, but I'm only talking about the morality aspect raised by the OP. Regardless of how many or few people transfer to Harvard from state schools, I don't think there's a moral problem to feel guilty about in doing so. Nor does anyone associated with such institutions, to my knowledge. And I still say that it would take a pair of brass ones (ovaries, perhaps) for a director to preach about the disloyalty of transfers while routinely accepting members he/she must presumably consider morally deficient. Of course they don't really. But it can work. I don't know if anyone in the activity still preaches loyalty of this sort, but if they do it's just a guilt trip to get mms to stay. Young people are impressionable and easily conned, I'm afraid. Their judgement is still forming in their prefrontal cortices, poor dears. Until 25 or so. Instructors themselves leap around DCI with gay abandon; each year we await with baited breath the latest announcements of instructors we've heard good things about moving to our favorite corps. Directors too. All of whom will get fired the second it turns out the results don't match the hype. Loyalty! All of this is not to say a member shouldn't listen to their own inner voice on the matter. They may feel loyalty and wish to honor that. In such a case it comes from within. Such loyalty is perfectly normal and I'm not saying they should ignore it. But then it's part of why they actually want to stay, not a part of why they should stay anyway. Does that make sense?

Now for perhaps a more controversial answer: Today these units are essentially summer music schools on wheels, and operate that way. I never heard of a college student feeling guilty because they transferred to another school. Think drum corps are different because of the history and tradition and pride? Then why do they audition the kids again each year, with no explicit guarantee of acceptance? I've never heard of a corps doing this. There is no guarantee they will accept you again, so why on Earth should the students feel guilty for not going back? The corps themselves have created the current environment of constant upward mobility, and I guarantee the OP's son's corps will take top talent from corps 13 - 45 in a heartbeat and often does. He should feel no more guilt than his director does when he feeds off all those lower corps.

Is your son planning to be a professional musician, dancer, or performing arts educator? If that's the case then he should go where the most admired instructor is. If he is already at that corps but wants to experiment, then he should go to the corps with a renowned instructor that has a different approach. This is his chance to experience a diversity of great instruction. I would put loyalty second in such a case, because of the transformative difference a particular instructor can make in the career of a pro (or a budding teacher). In any event, it sounds like your son has been pretty loyal for several years. Whatever he chooses, he shouldn't feel guilty about it. On the other hand, unless he goes to BD there is always the risk of being beaten by his old corps!

The rest of time will be called the Insufferably Patronizing Era, as our phones express the solution to the Hodge Conjecture in the form of a Sestina while telling us how valid our opinions are too.

The problem with this isn't that people will go to see concerts like this; they won't. It's impressive technology, but it's only impressive once, as a novelty. It won't have fans. At least not until AI has evolved to the point that there's an actual person in there. However, it may undermine people's interest in live human events. Once it's cheap enough (don't blink) we'll start seeing this kind of thing in coffee shops, grocery stores, or just on the street. Well played live music will no longer be a special event. It will be a freebie. A giveaway. An annoyance, even. How much will people pay to see humans performing almost as well as the robots at Olive Garden? This will not merely compete for the live music market as we know it, it will destroy it.

Here's my breakdown of why these arguments are not persuasive, imo: The fraternity argument: Gender-based fraternities and Sororities are terrible. Fraternities are old boy networks that exist to party and pass power down through the network to the next generation. Sororities exist to allow rich girls to associate with rich boys in the old boy network. Academic 'fraternities' that have actual value are generally gender neutral. It's not healthy to discourage association with the opposite sex. It's far better for young people to associate in an integrated way early and often. (Granted, they have the rest of the year to do so.) "We are all male and we always will be ... ", a restatement of the issue, and a declaration of intent to continue. " ... and our 'mindset' is not anti-woman ... ". Agreed. The Cavaliers are great people who are not trying to hurt anyone. The question is whether the practice in fact does hurt people, not whether it's intentional. " ... develop young men for life ... ". Why not women too? "There were MANY MORE all-girl corps ... ". Back in the day the reasons were different. Parents didn't want their kids having sex. If a parent wants their kid to be in the Cavaliers in order to keep them from having sex on tour, it may be logically foolish in that it wouldn't work, but at least it's a cognizable argument. I think that was also the reason for places like Vassar. But they also changed as they realized it wouldn't work. And that's really the main point. At one time people thought it was good for kids to associate with their own gender to develop them as men and women. But now that's not widely believed. Optionally, a girl should have several boys as friends and a boy should have several girls as friends in the mix. "I'm not into this gender-bender "fluidity" movement ... ". This issue has nothing to do with gender fluidity. You see that, right?

False choice. There is no choice between one and the other. Forcing the top corps to regress wouldn't create new drum corps at the bottom end. It might, however, end the seven year streak of record attendance at Indy.

Regarding costs, any judged contests of educational institutions are probably going to effectively reward those institutions with the biggest budgets, biggest talent draw and highest visibility. A contest based on GRE scores would reward Harvard and Yale. That's not surprising. The 990's thread pretty much confirmed that budgets correlate highly with placements. Also unsurprising. To tour you need to pay the expenses of touring. That's not unreasonable. But most touring corps don't spend anywhere near what the top corps spend. The financial drop-off is incredibly steep, even within the top 12. The idea that you need to spend big staging bucks to tour is unfounded, I think. Top corps (i.e. rich corps) spend those bucks to get a theoretical few extra tenths in GE. Given their budgets it's not unreasonable. Often the staging is pointless, and distracting. I liked the Bluecoats stage but they may have suffered because of it. Maybe it took too much time and resources to deal with it. Who knows. In any case big staging certainly isn't mandatory, and can even backfire.

Good point. However, your avatar does kinka look like the Cadets designed a snowflake!

Thank you for this description. It had several things I didn't know. Do you think the reveal uniform is intended to be insect-like to match the butterfly wings of the guard? That's the way I took it.

It was a reminiscence about 60 years of excellence. It contained callbacks to those shows here and there, and references to diamonds (60 year anniversary is the diamond anniversary) and a recurring caterpillar-to-butterfly theme - the metamorphosis from the past to the future.

Several points are being debated here. The show is not misogynistic, and as you say they make fun of maleness. However, they should let the girls play too. While people can join any corps in theory, it is in general a regional activity in that most people seem to come from somewhere in drive-able range to their corps. And unsurprisingly they drum up (ha!) support for the activity in their area. Membership demand, in other words, is likely to be higher in areas where top corps exist. In the midwest there are three top corps, but only one allows girls to play. That means only perhaps 75 out of 450 top corps members (or less) can be girls in a region that promotes drum corps intensely. So the fact that both of the all-male corps are in the same region is a problem, in my opinion. But yes, for the girls with the airfare to all those spring camps in California or wherever, it's not a problem. And the show was a fine show. The Cavaliers take risks of this type in their shows (like last year) which I appreciate.

My thoughts go out to all those affected. Is anyone looking into the cause of the tire failure?

Howdy to you all. I've been away for awhile myself. By definition they don't need to, because they call it auto racing. Again, people shouldn't be rude in their correction. Lots of things help plumbers, but only one is a plumbers helper. If you call a wrench a plumbers helper, you're wrong. Even if you eloquently defend the ontological correctness of a wrench as something that literally helps a plumber, you're still wrong, because that's not what it's called. And I've never seen anyone get offended because they were corrected in this way. Newcomers are eager to learn about the activity. It's possible to do it with tact. Not everyone does, but that's a different issue.

Unless things have changed, people who call this activity band or marching band (except sarcastically) are smirked at behind their backs. Has that changed? And yes, they are indeed marching bands technically, but that's not what they are called. I think this is a fake issue, in the sense that nobody is offended just because somebody told them it's called a drum corps, unless the way they said it is rude as in Stu's Indy 500 example. (A bad example anyway, because they do indeed refer to it as auto racing). Newcomers expect to be learning lots of new things about any activity they are learning about, including the preferred terminology. So go ahead and tell them it's called a drum corps. Because it is. But don't be rude, and don't say, "It's not band." but rather "It's a kind of band." It's a subset with it's own name. Perfectly acceptable. Fake issue.

A drum corps is a kind of marching band, clearly. However, marching band is a poor term for a drum corps because there is a more specific preferred term: drum corps or drum and bugle corps. So when newcomers call a drum corps a marching band it makes perfect sense to advise them of the preferred term, drum corps. But instead of saying, "It's not band" they should say something like, "We don't call it a band generally, we call it a drum corps" or just "More specifically it's a drum corps." There are so many conversations comparing drum corps vs. marching band, it's important that newcomers have the generally accepted terminology.

At one time drum corps were local groups that competed with scholastic programs, and I think this is a big part of the animosity some music teachers feel toward drum corps. If you joined a drum corps, that meant you weren't going to show up at some practices and/or shows, so either it was not allowed or not encouraged. Because of this history, a lot of teachers are probably unwilling to look into the modern drum corps and realize even that it is a summertime activity held nowhere near the school zone or college. It's more like a summer camp where kids go away to train all day. I expect most drum corps kids today come back in the fall much improved from the previous spring - possibly moving up a chair or two - whereas most other kids will have backslid. Also, corps shows are not really performances of the stated works, but are more like etudes inspired by those works. They are highly unfaithful to the original works, and this offends some people. Nessun Dorma performed with a 30-person percussion battery, for example. It's not actually a performance of Nessun Dorma at all, actually. The drum corps show is a ten minute work inspired by Nessun Dorma and several other works over that ten minutes, for the purpose of maxing out the students' skills in contests. But that isn't clear to purist outside observers, who see nothing but disrespectful interpretations of these treasured works. So, different kinds of teachers have different kind of objections, at least in part due to misunderstandings, or at least not realizing what's really happening.

I'm not a lawyer, but it looks to me that money changing hands is mentioned specifically in the education exemption (Title 17 Section 110). Schools can hold a concert and charge a fee as long as the fee goes entirely to non-profits:

The law is a war, and if you're not fighting you're losing. If you're not even aware it's a war, then you're doomed. I have realized that only one side of this debate gets any serious articulation: the copyright holder's side. That's because while music educators would seem to be on the "schools don't have to pay" side, in fact teachers don't generally pay the fees personally, but they do personally collect the fees paid by other schools for their arrangements. (They teach for this school, but arrange for that school, and that other one, and that one over there ...) That may be why NAFSME's actual copyright page was written largely by copyright holder's associations, is both vague and contradictory, and ends up referring people to the Harry Fox agency. In other words, the teachers themselves have feet planted on both sides of this, and their opinions seem to reflect their interests as they see them, which is not surprising. This includes, I think, many people on DCP. That's why these copyright threads are so interesting! We have IMO never heard a clear legal argument from a qualified advocate for the taxpayers, school districts (not teachers) and parents. Such an argument might claim that educational institutions don't owe copyright fees at all for the normal practices involved in teaching music, and for holding school concerts where the fees go to a non-profit destination. Because that's what the law appears to say. Without that voice, the result is the widespread belief that the education exemptions are to be construed so narrowly as to be non-existent in practice. Obviously, if there is any negotiated right to be paid, then it will make up for whatever the exemptions took away from the copyright holders, rendering the exemptions pointless. Congress does stupid things, for sure, but I'm not sure they really did that particular stupid thing. For me, the telling quote from the OP's article, regarding Judge Wilson's decision, is the one below. If this means what it appears to mean, Tresona may drop this case if they want to keep getting the fees they get now.

Hello. I believe the $100,000 was everything they paid to that company over an unspecified period of time for music arranging. Not necessarily just those tunes. Still, it's a lot of money. The fees are said to be increasing substantially since Tresona arrived on the scene and consolidated much of the market, although that's speculative. In any event they can be several hundred dollars or more for a single tune. Multiply that by all the concerts by all the bands/choirs in a given school, and then by 98,000 public schools in the U.S. and it could well be upwards of a billion or more per year, much of which may be unpaid. That's why a court case like this one could result in the amount actually collected by copyright holders either going up or down drastically, depending on the final interpretation of the education exemptions to Title 17.

My understanding from DCI was that the corps are generally very good about informing DCI about their music and clips so that DCI can get a head start on licensing in the spring. They basically get a price quote as early as possible. But they don't know who is going to make finals or what tunes and clips they actually end up using, so they wait until after finals to finalize the sale, so to speak. At that time ESOM was no longer available as State Farm (or somebody) had acquired exclusive rights for an ad campaign. In the case of the Peanuts clips from Cadets 2012 DCI didn't find out about the use until they heard it on the field, and there wasn't time to acquire the rights. I believe that live streaming is covered by statute under the corps' performance rights, so DCI doesn't have to worry about it except to make sure the corps have actually acquired the rights. Don't quote me on this. Now, during the FN years when many shows were archived during the current season, I suspect DCI was relying on the fact that they were putting in a good faith effort to secure the rights. I mean, since there were so many lower corps in those contests and never any blackouts, I can't believe they really acquired those rights beforehand. Come to think of it, that might be part of what got them into trouble.