WGI spells wedgie

Tough crowd, but that's expected. Insults before inquiry is par for the course with most posters. The point was to offer feedback BEFORE any major design decisions were made. I've seen this - and other - corps get so far into a concept there's no escaping it, and the show suffers for it, which ultimately it means the members are limited by it, which I always hate to see. Show concepts can be so arbitrary and so abstract they obscure the emotional and narrative content of the music. This concept for the Shostakovich show appears to be exactly that, which is a problem. The Cadets will doubtless have the personnel, and surely have the music, to win gold. What has hampered them more than anything else, more often than not in the last 15 years, has been an uneven and sometimes slapdash approach to design. The Blue Devils more than anyone else in the last decade have developed show designs that reveal meaning and display an aesthetic unity that the judges have rewarded well. I cited WGI because it is a visually driven medium. DCI design is most effective when the visual reveals the narrative of the music, even if doing so abstractly. I cannot recall in 30 years of following DCI, though, when a show concept was based on a number of a piece of music. Does that mean this concept is innovative, or just missing the point? The "X" concept is just so arbitrary and abstract it seems to declare from the outset that the concept will have little to do with the music. Concept for concept's sake. It would be like PR featuring a show of the music to Spartacus, but instead of calling it "Spartacus" and basing the visual on the narrative, they title the show "8", have a drumlins of 8 snares, etc., because the score was the 8th film score composed by Alex North.

"The tyranny and folly of abstraction - an open letter to the Cadets design team" Bravo on a brilliant choice of music for next year in Shostakovich’s 10th symphony! Truly inspiring choice. With the right choice of concept, this could be a championship caliber program. And bravo for (I think) trying to tell the story without spelling it out through clumsy narration. I have serious reservations about the choice of concept, and the tyrannical reign of WGI "inspired" abstractions and design in recent years of DCI. In sum - The concept should arise from the music if the show will work for judges and audiences. As described on the YEA website, the initial concept for this music is the number 10, or X. So the Cadets are considering sections in multiples of 10, and other permutations of the number as the core of the show concept. When I read the Cadets' choice of music, I cheered. But when I read the concept, I cringed. The number of a symphony, or most any piece of classical music, is arbitrary, just like an opus number, and has no connection with the music at all. It follows that this "X" show concept itself is arbitrary. I’ve not yet heard of a more abstract, more arbitrary, and less connected to the music show concept since I began following DCI in the early 80s. Imagine making the theme of a show featuring Copland’s 3rd symphony the number three. Nine snares, three quads, (or maybe quads with one drum removed), 27 guard members, and drill written featuring blocks of three, with the field divided into thirds, and a double Z-pull, I mean, 3-pull, resolving into the numbers 1, 2, and 3 to correspond to the rising opening G - C - G phrase of the "Fanfare for the Common Man" theme in movement 4. etc. Or Appalachian Spring’s show concept being based on whatever the heck the opus number is. I thought spelling it out with narration could be bad. But now we're counting it out for the audience? “Ten” is a meaningless number: meaningless to Shostakovich, meaningless in terms of the music, and will be meaningless to the audience and the judges. Thinking of sections of the corps in multiples of ten, for example, is a gesture reaching for a concept, but not itself a concept. It’s confusing actually. “10” isn’t a story or a concept. It’s a Bo Derek movie and Pearl Jam album and a volume setting on a guitar amp that’s one notch too low for Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel. Why such a desperate reach into meaningless abstraction? The alternative: The music itself is so profoundly full of narrative, emotion, and meaning, why muddle it with abstraction and arbitrary "concepts"? In fact, choosing "X" to be the initial idea of what this show is "about" might be unwittingly revelatory of why the concept as such cannot succeed and become art, like all of the most successful Cadets shows actually did become by season's end. "X" is not a Roman numeral. It's an empty variable, and it will make Shostakovich's heart-wrenchingly, furious music become all sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing. Instead of "X", tell a story. Tell a story, like Shostakovich was doing with his symphony. Do it with the emotion of Dudamel and the SBYO, since they are mentioned on your website. They’re not playing “ten”, but they’re channeling the oppression, fury, fear, tragedy, and courage of Shostakovich, who was telling the story of the Soviet people living (and millions dying, and many millions more, freezing and starving in the Gulag) under Stalin’s totalitarian rule. Ultimately, Shostakovich is a human being and artist trying to tell the truth in a regime full of lies, terror, fear, and brutal oppression. Want inspiration for this show? Read “The Gulag Archipelago”. Read Shostakovich’s biographies. Read Vaclav Havel. There’s SO much emotional and historical content to work into a stunningly true and innovative show concept. Sure, abstraction is possible to tell this story - visual forms are most always abstractions - but like George Zingali was able to accomplish, that abstraction reveals narrative. What’s the true show concept that this music is begging to have explored by The Cadets? I think of drab grey oppressive Soviet ‘colors’ vs. bright individualistic colors of expressive freedom. I think of harsh shapes and angles vs. freeform curvilinear shapes. I think of the battery as a military force (like in his Leningrad symphony, with the incessant snare representing the Nazi army besieging the city), and the many solo voices in the symphonies versus the merciless and faceless collective state. I think of ONE versus the faceless COLLECTIVE. Solo versus oppressive tutti. That one versus many motif is found throughout Shostakovich’s music, and is all over the 10th symphony. It is, in fact, the story of the man’s life, the life of an artistic genius, versus the arbitrary whims of Stalin and his totalitarian state. In the symphony, I hear and imagine: 1. individual versus the collective 2. freedom versus totalitarianism 3. truth versus distortion 4. emotion versus oppression 5. expression versus abstraction These are all abstract concepts that make little sense if ungrounded in the emotion of the music, but when a drill, or choreography, is written to narrate these oppositions, as in a ballet, great art is created. The narrative in this symphony is also absolutely relevant today, and would resonate with the judges, and any audience – without having to spell it out for everyone through narration. If Shostakovich did what he did without narration, the Cadets can too. Right now, people in Ukraine, the Baltic States, and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, are protesting against and fighting the very real forces that threaten their precarious and extremely hard-won freedom. The Russian military continues to invade Ukraine. Russians themselves are protesting the autocratic state, and journalists are facing prison, and even assassination, for criticizing the regime. Thousands have died this year in Ukraine defending themselves against the same brutal oppression that people in the Soviet Bloc suffered from during Shostakovich’s lifetime. The summer of 2014, the Cadets tried to communicate with freedom means through the voice of Lincoln and other leaders. It was "American Politics" on parade. If you do it right, next year’s show can much more powerfully, and artistically, communicate what freedom is, and what threatens freedom, than any propaganda-tainted wartime composition Copland wrote. Shostakovich was the opposite of propaganda. Shostakovich communicated “The Power of the Powerless” (to quote Vaclav Havel’s famous essay) so much more powerfully than anyone I can think of. What did Havel advocate as an antidote to oppression? "Living in Truth" How amazing this show concept and show can be if you stay true to Shostakovich’s music. Why slather meaningless WGI abstraction onto Shostakovich’s genius? Why not tell the story Shostakovich was telling with his music in a way no one has done before? When concept trumps narrative, when abstraction trumps emotion, you lose an audience, you eviscerate a masterpiece in the process, and you doom a show to suffer from an inarticulate concept that ultimately makes no sense, and ultimately, will suffer on the scoring sheets no matter how well executed. Trust the music. Trust the story Shostakovich tells. Drum corps is about music. Visuals must draw inspiration and communicate the meaning of the music at all times, rather than an abstraction like "X" grafted onto the music. Tell a story and give visual voice to the music, and this could be a show for the ages. HNSAB.