Bobby L. Collins

Marching woodwinds. May as well just deliver the coup-de-grace and get it over with. I mean, that's all that's left, innit?

Stop over-romanticizing. They poached big-name instructors with dollar signs, end of story. If it makes you feel better to call it strong leadership, knock yourself out. But at the end of the day, it's just spending a disproportionate amount of money to be competitive. Just because I don't join in on the CJ here doesn't mean I'm miserable. Higher standards and expectations, certainly. But I'm not going to call a spade a club just to make you feel warm and fuzzy.

Eristic From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In philosophy and rhetoric, eristic (from Eris, the ancient Greek goddess of chaos, strife, and discord) refers to argument that aims to successfully dispute another's argument, rather than searching for truth. According to T.H. Irwin, "It is characteristic of the eristic to think of some arguments as a way of defeating the other side, by showing that an opponent must assent to the negation of what he initially took himself to believe."[1]Eristic is arguing for the sake of conflict, as opposed to resolving conflict.[2] Use in education Eristic was a type of "question-and-answer"[3] teaching method popularized by the Sophists, such as Euthydemos and Dionysodoros. Students learned eristic arguments to "refute their opponent, no matter whether he [said] yes or no in answer to their initial question".[4] Plato contrasted this type of argument with dialectic and other more reasonable and logical methods (e.g., at Republic 454a). In the dialogue Euthydemus, Plato satirizes eristic. It is more than persuasion, and it is more than discourse. It is a combination that wins an argument without regard to truth. Plato believed that the eristic style "did not constitute a method of argument" because to argue eristically is to consciously use fallacious arguments, which therefore weakens one's position.[5] Unlike Plato, Isocrates (often considered a Sophist) did not distinguish eristic from dialectic.[6] He held that both lacked a "'useful application' ... that created responsible citizens",[7] which unscrupulous teachers used for "enriching themselves at the expense of the youth."[8] Philosophical eristic Schopenhauer considers that only logic pursues truth. For him, dialectic, sophistry and eristic have no objective truth in view, but only the appearance of it, and pay no regard to truth itself because it aims at victory. He names these three last methods as "eristic dialectic (contentious argument)."[9] According to Schopenhauer, Eristic Dialectic is mainly concerned to tabulate and analyze dishonest stratagems,[10] so that they may at once be recognized and defeated, in order to continue with a productive dialectic debate. It is for this very reason that Eristic Dialectic must admittedly take victory, and not objective truth, for its selfish aim and purpose.

Sound leadership didn't lure half of Crown and Cadets' staff to BAC. That was absolutely the magic of cold hard cash.

Without doctoring the scores, that's really all he COULD do. He can't exactly make them put their horns up to their faces so he can score them higher, now can he?

I would say he's a man that doesn't want the rock the boat and be sent home by DCI. I would also say that he's going to do whatever George Hopkins bloody well tells him to do, up to and including ignoring electronic shenanigans. I will go on to say that probably no brass judge on the field today is oblivious to the wool that's being pulled over their eyes and ears. And if they are, well, then those are most likely the go-to judges in the activity for years to come. After all, it looks far more impressive on a resume and bio to say "Served as an adjudicator for Drum Corps International" than it does to say "Took a stand against the corruption and subversion of the drum corps activity into summertime color guard with electronic accompaniment".

It's indicative and demonstrative of what happens when you throw all the rules out the window in the manner DCI has. The point of any game, be it a board game, or a card game, or a video game, or a sports game, is to play within the rules of the game. When you start changing the rules, bending the rules, making up the rules as you go along, and flat-out ignoring the rules to encourage participation....that's when the game ceases to be a game, and becomes subjective, high-concept performance art. I'm reminded of those Game Genie cartridges kids used to attach to their Nintendo games so they could cheat. That's no longer a game, and you didn't win anything. Such it is in this activity today. People keep saying "Corps today would blow every single corps from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s out of the water". Well no they wouldn't....corps today would all be instantly disqualified from competition. Why? Because there were rules in place to disallow artificial trickery on the field......artificial trickery which is tantamount to cheating.

Of course I can. Just about any trained musician with a background in marching can. To be entirely blunt, it's simply common sense. I'm sorry you can't hear it. Let me rephrase; I'm sorry you refuse to open your ears and listen. Like I said, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if judges haven't already approached those individuals and said to them "We can't tell what's real and what's electronic anymore", and they were most likely met with the response "Don't worry about it, just treat it like it's all real, and don't rock the boat; otherwise we can find other judges who won't". There's not a soul in the activity with a shred of sense in his/her brain that can honestly say that hornlines are getting a fair shake at adjudication with all the other extraneous noises bouncing around the stadiums through those speakers...noises designed to sound exactly like the tones that should be emanating from the horns laying on the field while the the brass players are sashaying from one scatterdrill to the next, screaming DUT DUT DUT DUT because they can't find the beat among all the amplified swill.

Buddy, I disagree with ALL of the standings, because they are no longer being objectively adjudicated on their own merits. Far as I'm concerned, every single corps on the field should be automatically disqualified from competition the second the horns are drowned out by the front ensemble playing BrassSynth2 on Casio keyboards. It's a disingenuous, egregious trick that you lot are trying to use to define the sound of modern-day hornlines, and you are gravely mistaken if you believe that's what they really sound like.

That's what he does.

You're just not getting it. The trickery is blurring the lines between what THE LISTENER can discern as coming from either the horns or the speakers. And the "listener" includes the judges. What judge can make a legitimate assessment of a hornline when he is hearing said hornline both in front of him AND behind him at the same time? A judge simply cannot objectively critique a live hornline when it's being purposefully obfuscated and/or manipulated by the audio engineers and iPads in the stands. That crap does a splendid job of fooling the audience, and by and large it's doing a magnificent job of fooling the judges as well. Or so it seems. Then again, perhaps the judges have the very same concerns, and have expressed those concerns upon deaf ears (after all, they serve at the pleasure of the corps directors, who are bound and determined to knock themselves right out of business with this pointless arms race). It's the same boat as the marching members; either tolerate it and embrace it, or take a hike and go home, complain about it on the internet, and get slapped around by sunshine pumping trolls on sites like this. Too many of you can't see the forest for the trees. It's escalated to the point where the hornlines are superfluous and redundant. There's nothing they can do out there anymore that the color guard and an ARIA plugin can't do just as well, at a fraction of the cost. THAT is where this activity is headed. Is that what you want? Because that's what you're going to get if you don't start being a little more objective.

They still call their DCI unit a drum corps on their website. But I totally get what you're saying here. And I can allow some level of respect levied towards OC for dropping the pretense. I think by and large the organizations within DCI know calling it 'drum corps' is a sham, but they otherwise don't really know what to call themselves, which is telling.

FTFY

Always excuses to refute common sense. The quality of the camera is irrelevant when there is a full hornline sound coming out of the speakers and 90% of the horns are laying on the ground while their players are staring at their hands.

Well let's make one thing clear right up front; I never said they were using tuners during performance. But they certainly have access to them during practice. Otherwise, regarding trickery, all one has to do is watch gopro head cam vidoes and compare them to audience cams. You can clearly hear notes (and I'm not just talking partials, but actual rhythms) out of the speakers that simply are not being played on the field. And no, I don't mean go run and watch one single video and claim it's not true. Listen to all that are available. Use that musical acumen that so many on here claim to possess, and you can hear some staggering discrepancies. Much of what the audience is hearing is not emanating from a single horn on the field. Just watch how very little a horn is even on their faces today. You're so dazzled by their movement and choreography, you're not even noticing it.....and that's precisely why they're doing it; because they can. And if rules aren't put in place to penalize that crap, rather than reward it....it's simply going to get worse.

That's just more equipment with the potential to fail. Redundancies for tech that makes the kids on the field redundant.

Yeah I'm going to disagree with you there until doomsday, and I've already explained why all over the 1st two pages of threads here. Jim Ott's hornlines didn't need amps, nor did they need 9 minutes of dancing in order to perform with technique and musicality for 3.

You're definitely not in the minority, it's just that most vets and fans who value music over interpretive dance no longer follow or support the activity. They still value their memories of what it once was, however. And a few of them continue to fight for sanity and reason, whether there's any chance of those things returning or not. And I do hope you're wrong about electronics not going away. Because one of these days, if the power goes out at a regional, and it's cancelled without refund because no one is confident in performing their show WITHOUT electronics....that'll send a very powerful message to the mms, vets, fans and supporters....far more powerful than speakers and mixing boards.

They're just trying to stir trouble. That's all they do on here. They don't have a message, or even an ethos. They just want to gainsay and countermand anything posted by people they have decided they don't like. And they always show up in groups of three, it seems.....

How about instead you find me a judge that magically cannot hear the overbearing noise coming out of the speakers (which are dialed up so loud they can hear them in the press boxes with the windows shut) AND the monitors facing the corps (which are loud enough to hear clearly in the stands on the back sideline). They've got them turned up so loud that the judges (as well as the audience) can no longer discern the live from the amplified and/or enhanced. And yes, that includes the judges ON the field. People sitting in the front rows have figured that out already. How many times this year did people post how put off they were hearing horns on the left side of the field when they were all dancing on the right side? The whole thing is deceptive, it's disingenuous, and it's the exact opposite of everything Jim Ott worked to bring to drum corps. Those audio engineers are there to play both the judges and the audience like a fiddle. And they're doing that pretty darned well, when they're not forgetting to put batteries in their mic packs. Eventually, enough critical failures will occur during performances that the brighter light bulbs in the community will start to figure it out. But when that finally happens, I can guarantee the same ones on here regurgitating "well there's nothing you can do about it" will be saying the exact same thing....

I wish I were. Some corps do it more (a lot more) than others, but they're the ones winning medals today, prompting everyone else to either sell out and jump on the bandwagon, or go home two days early. Caption awards are meaningless when they are now based upon who has the best sound system. Jim Ott would have never wanted that.

It already has begun to make a difference. We're talking about it, despite your best efforts to prevent that.

I genuinely do wish them well....I just hope they don't continue to emulate the medalists. That's not the way forward for ANYONE, much less the home team.

Some call it a fever. Others call it a disease.

I could certainly do that. I could post a video of me dancing like a four year-old for 9 minutes and then playing lip slurs into a vocoder for 3 minutes. That's essentially a drum corps show today. A point I made in another thread is that the overwhelming amount of talent required to secure a spot in a corps hornline is no longer even addressed during a performance. Any amount of virtuosity or chops is neglected or totally eschewed in favor of laying their horns down on the ground and performing ballet in skintight leotards while synthesizers play pre-recorded samples. That crap doesn't require a music education. It's like being a first round draft pick for an NFL team, but getting put on the cheerleader squad instead. It makes absolutely no sense to waste horn players' talent by making them color guard members who occasionally play a few notes.