Lance Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 To Tame the Perilous Skies also followed the Holsinger pretty well. Hmmm...no. Same with your comments on Crown and pretty much everything else you mentioned. There are exceptions, of course, but I didn't see any in what you said. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdaddy Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 Hmmm...no. Same with your comments on Crown and pretty much everything else you mentioned. There are exceptions, of course, but I didn't see any in what you said. You like to play the contrarian card. It's your shtick - we get it. I think the debate on arrangements shouldn't be centered around the dichotomous response "choppy/not choppy." Obviously, to make selections work, arrangers have to take some liberty with the original to make it more judge-friendly. The questions is the extent to which arrangements are chopped up, e.g., how often is there some faint semblance of a melody followed by staccato attacks. And many feel, me included, that BD has been doing this far more than any other corps. To me, it's not about how parts of different melodies are interwoven, e.g., your complaint that Phantom 2008 only used very brief phrases from different tunes, and how "musical" the overall result is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dugg Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 JUDY AND BARBRA! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lance Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 You like to play the contrarian card. It's your shtick - we get it.I think the debate on arrangements shouldn't be centered around the dichotomous response "choppy/not choppy." Obviously, to make selections work, arrangers have to take some liberty with the original to make it more judge-friendly. The questions is the extent to which arrangements are chopped up, e.g., how often is there some faint semblance of a melody followed by staccato attacks. And many feel, me included, that BD has been doing this far more than any other corps. To me, it's not about how parts of different melodies are interwoven, e.g., your complaint that Phantom 2008 only used very brief phrases from different tunes, and how "musical" the overall result is. It wasn't a complaint. Phantom 08 is my favorite music book of the past decade. However, Phantom 08 used brief phrases from lots of different pieces as much or more than any other corps this year. A "semblance of melody followed by stacatto attacks" was their entire opener and closer this year. You can believe that other corps do it "more" all you want, of course. I think we're actually saying the same thing about what we like and don't like, actually. I haven't liked a lot of BD's arrangement lately either; I just don't see it as a case of their doing something more than most other corps. And instead of opening with the dandy one-liner, let's just discuss things instead, okay? :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schickmeister Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 Looks interesting. Lots of heavily themed shows this year...should be fun. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lance Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 Yeah, we've got a lot of slices of Americana coming our way, it seems. Bluecoats 95 is still the standard for me when it comes to shows like this, mostly because the corps seemed to really buy what they were doing and enjoy it. I'm hoping BD comes out and really puts some joy into the production this year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willie85 Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 I have yet to hear Appalachian Spring, The Planets, or The Firebird on the field not hacked to death. It barely resembles the original piece in melodic stucture or orchestration by the time corps finish with it. Phantom 96 completely hacked up Shostakovich. Cadets 92 took a Holsinger piece and basically did variations on its motifs and ostinatos rather than the original composition. I could not consider what SCV did to Barber's Adagio as anything other than hacked to death. Same thing with Cavaliers 00, which is like a deconstruction of the work of McTee and Daugherty. These are just a few examples of what many find to be pretty amazing arrangements despite (or sometimes because) they are altered from the original so much. If anything, "chop and bop" only gets worse the further back in time you go, but in addition to hacking charts to death, you have pieces with no intelligible connection to one another forced together. I find it interesting that people use canned criticism and fling it at anything they happen to not like, but overlook it when they happen to actually like it. You either like it or you don't. But make no mistake, drum corps is-and has been for a very long time-all chop and bop. Again, I agree that a certain amount of cutting has always been a necessity. You don't put on a drum corps version of Wagner's Ring Cycle (Phantom '97) without a cut here and there. It's the "to death" part that we seem to disagree on. It's convenient to insist that the slightest alteration of the composer's original score constitutes "hacked to death" and "chop and bop", but that doesn't ring true to me. Certainly the likes of the Cadets' twelve minutes of Appalachian Spring in 1987 still have some musical life in them. And the term "chop and bop" has taken hold because it's a spot-on description of a particular arranging style, not the act of arranging in general. It's been a while, but I don't remember anyone complaining about the overabundance of "bops" in that '97 "Ring" show. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
littlebirdy Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 JUDY AND BARBRA! They ARE playing both of those pieces. Perhaps we will hear something like this duet for their ballad Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lance Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 Again, I agree that a certain amount of cutting has always been a necessity. You don't put on a drum corps version of Wagner's Ring Cycle (Phantom '97) without a cut here and there. It's the "to death" part that we seem to disagree on. It's convenient to insist that the slightest alteration of the composer's original score constitutes "hacked to death" and "chop and bop" , but that doesn't ring true to me. Certainly the likes of the Cadets' twelve minutes of Appalachian Spring in 1987 still have some musical life in them. And the term "chop and bop" has taken hold because it's a spot-on description of a particular arranging style, not the act of arranging in general. It's been a while, but I don't remember anyone complaining about the overabundance of "bops" in that '97 "Ring" show. It's also convenient to say that any of the examples I mentioned were "slight alterations" of the originals, especially what the Cadets did to App Spring...and I'll happily add what Phantom did in 1997, too. Somebody earlier said that Cadets 92 (one of my favorites of all time) didn't alter "To Tame" much...something about putting the beginning as the ballad. The beginning of the actual piece is 5 minutes long with a long development of a couple of short motifs. What the Cadets did with it as a ballad was create a 90-second impression of it (for lack of a better word) that barely resembled the original, and if anything, it strengthened it for their show. App Spring involved doing the same thing to several sections of the original piece and then shoving them together. And it sure worked. But I don't fool myself into thinking it wasn't something akin to drawing and quartering a piece of music and then stiching it back together again. It's what DCI is and has been for a long time. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't, and it usually depends on the arranger; so yes, I tend not to like certain corps' arrangements for spans of time. That's just a couple of examples. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tusayan Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 ???Okay, then I'll listen to the original versions of Conquistador, Spanish Fantasy and One More Time. What?? We didn't play those whole charts like they were originally written?? You mean they just took parts of these features to complete the show? It is called "arranging" music for a reason. Anyone can pull out an old jazz chart or some classical piece and play it (especially with the move from G horns to "band" instruments). The talent is putting these together to make something interesting out of them, often something different than the original composer wrote. We used to play three or four charts, stopping for applause after each one. Now, shows integrate all of the music into a continuous show (some without any breaks). The shows actually flow from beginning to end (some even starting before the official start and continuing as the corps leaves the field). Many lament the loss of the "classic BD jazz" shows, but these same people would whine and complain about the lack of creativity or complexity if they just came out and played even one of these old tunes exactly as it was done before...not that I am surprised... I think you misunderstood my post. Another poster claimer that "there isn't a single jazz show (or any show, really) in DCI history that isn't cut and pasted to death." I was pointing to the Blue Devils' 86 show as an example that proved him wrong. I believe that I read somewhere that Channel 1 Suite was in fact the longest opener in DCI history. Regardless, the arrangements of Channel 1 and Spanish Fantasy were supremely developed in that show and there is no way they can be considered "chop and bop." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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