Inside the Arc 7

[kevingamin]

Frank Dorritte has submitted the 7th edition (no, it's not Renegades related ) of his Inside the Arc column for DCP. I just finished reading it and think Frank has yet again written a very thought-provoking article which will ensure that no reader sits on the fence when it comes to their opinion of the subject matter.

Here's a little teaser to get you interested:

“Vocals, Narration, and the Trouble with Amps”

To begin with, full disclosure: some of this is my fault.

In 1977, Rich DeCola and I heard Joel Kaye’s New York Neophonic Orchestra (a kind of Kenton-meets-Maynard group) perform “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, the signature ballad from Jesus Christ Superstar. It rocked, and seemed a natural for Garfield’s book as we sought to elevate the corps’ musical style to a hipper place.

Kaye’s version ends with the entire band singing a full-out plagal cadence “A-men”. This made perfect sense to us, and we tagged it to the finale, debuting this at a contest in upstate New York before a panel that included two of the most progressive and open-minded judges, Jerry Kelsey and Shirlee Whitcomb. Their reactions, and that of the audience, were overwhelmingly positive, bordering on the chaotic. Those adjudication tapes are among my most cherished possessions. We were all ecstatic and quite full of ourselves for being so very clever and cutting edge. And then the trouble began.

Check out the article here.

[JerseyBoy_]

EXCELLENT ARTICLE.

CHEZ

[DKracing]

Frank's the man!

[skajerk]

Like it or not, this genie is out of the lamp and won't be going back in any time soon. I'll pass over the rather sad fact that drum corps is the single most intense acoustic experience one is likely to have on this planet. Why in the name of Bill Ludwig would anyone want to clutter it up with cheesy amplification? The answer seems to be. "because they can", and since they're going to anyway, I should like to point out that there are objective professional standards for sound reinforcement, just as there are for brass playing, drumming and movement.

In drum corps, the latter 3 have reached a level that fairly approximates professional accomplishment; not so for audio mixing. If you played your mellophone the way some use their amps, someone would call the cops.

Uh oh. hehhehheh.

Since this is coming from someone very accomplished in this field, I can't wait to see the responses to this one.

Edited December 7, 2007 by skajerk

[TerriTroop]

"And the musical justification is flat-out bogus to begin with. “We can’t hear the pit instruments over the brass and battery without amps.” Rubbish. That’s what acoustic balance is all about. Real musicians achieve it on a regular basis. Here’s a radical idea: Try arranging the music better and playing it with a semblance of relative dynamics. If you wish something to be clarified, get the other stuff out of the way. I really think you’ll hear those 9 marimbas when you tacet the hornline and battery. And having that up-front army playing constantly throughout the show, filling every possible 16th note space, is just poor ensemble scoring. There are too many players in the pit, the parts are often grossly over-written, we position them downstage from everybody else, and then we amplify them. It’s bad music…but played with such incredible skill."

YES. I basically said this last year during one of the amp discussions. I would much rather hear/see effective pit parts without amplification than 14 people playing a zillion notes, most of which don't contribute much of value to the texture - even WITH amplification. If the battery can go tacet for 1-2 minutes for a horn ballad, the pit can do the same thing at appropriate times and go march some drill!

The only corps that did the pit texture/amp thing well in 2007 IMO is Blue Knights. The pit, for the most part, played parts that were actually part of the original score. They weren't playing parts composed to add a bogus layer to the demand caption. Having done some work with this in the past, I know it's easy to fall into the "I have to keep all 8-14 of my pitsters moving because I need the demand on the sheets" mentality. Maybe it's time to get less pit equipment on the field and get those bodies moving in the drill. And arrangers could again look at harmony and doubling to reinforce sound rather than amplification. Even if amplification continues, you could scale back the numbers in the pit - and the amount of visual distraction in the front of the field - if the writing was more effective.

[HOOKEDBYLEGEND78]

EXCELLENT ARTICLE.

CHEZ

Ditto that. I am interested in hearing the next article in this series to see if it continues to go the same direction. The "tossing out the baby with the bathwater" comment makes me wonder...

[Bob J]

I agree with Frank 100%. Of course I'm biased, since Frank was one of our instructors during my final year of marching with the Freelancers in 1984, where we sang a few bars, on the field, before the gun, without getting penalized. Things had evolved some by that point, but we didn't need amps, just proper arranging.

[skajerk]

And what a great show that was!

[Top Cat]

Frank's insights and thoughts are so much on the mark that this article should be REQUIRED reading for ALL DCI & DCA directors and staff. Take the hint guys, doing things BETTER is the way to success, adding band aids only covers your weak programming concepts.

Hats off and major cudo's to Frank. PLEASE keep it up.

[JimF-LowBari]

Surprised there aren't more posts on this as very thought provoking. Now I'm trying to figure out why I liked Garfields "Amen" (saw heard it when the corps performed at a DCA show) but HATED when my corps sang a verse of a song in the mid 1980s.

And that makes two times in the last few weeks I've seen reference to 'The Mouse That Roared". Other time was a local HS had getting permission to have bows and arrows in the school. During non-rehearsal/performance times the bows had to be locked up in one place and the strings locked up in another. Ya can't make this up folks.....

And thanks for the blow up of the Frankfort Post corps. Really throws a monkey wrench in what a lot of people thought was done in the past.