Hardest show music

[2000Cadet]

Bflat: Crown 08 BY FAR. The musicality, the pure difficulty of runs and ranges and sustains. Amazing

Wow! If you think their book was hard, I'd really like to know what was the hardest music you've played.

Seriously, Crown's shows have been EXCELLENT, but hard? I'd have to disagree passionately.

[cavies79]

Garfield Cadets 1985- entire show. The technical difficulty of "Jeremiah" and "Candide", plus the musical expressiveness of "Make Our Garden Grow".

Star of Indiana- 1991. Not only was the music wicked, but Zingali's drill was rediculously difficult.

[musclebud]

Brass would be cadets 92 and 97... Drums for me is SCV 80 and 2004..... Stone Ground in 1980 still blows me away almost 30 yrs later.

[twofoot]

BD '91, '93, '95

[twofoot]

Star '91

[Drumcorpsfan471]

Bflat: Crown 08 BY FAR. The musicality, the pure difficulty of runs and ranges and sustains. Amazing

Ummmmmmm.....no. Ok show, but nowhere close to the hardest.

[Perry S]

1980 Spirit Sweet Georgia Brown 'nuff said!

WOW No props to that horn book huh? Ok then.

[stickman882002]

2001 Cadets was insane. Especially the mello runs at the start that just never seem to end.

I've got to give some love to the brass book of Cadets 2001. I nearly had an accident in my pants the first time I heard the woodwind fugue, not to mention the mello book at the end.

I'll take this as one that sticks out in my mind.

For the new millennium, I like '01 Cadets. Every element of that show is taken to the musical limit as far as difficulty. Young Person's Guide had the complex rhythm, Vide Cor Meum requires such control to keep the emotion pushing like they pulled it off, and Farandole at the tempo they took it was insanity. Moondance was fun, not nearly as technical as the others, but the whole package was fantastic in terms of difficulty.

[mfrontz]

seriously man, bd's hornlines didn't play that many notes in 93. have you heard the phantom sops and mellos in 93? more impressive than anything bd's full sop line did that year, i thought. and listen to madison's book. i know we played in an absolute downpour and it was a crappy recording from finals, but our opener was the most musically challenging chart any drum corps tried that year, everyone was just flying the whole way through, and i'll put our soup against bd's any time. they had better soloists and great small ensemble work, but the hornline as a whole spent too much time playing long tones behind the solo/ensemble work and not enough swinging. all in all, a square chart. seriously, listen to the shows again back to back, bd had a clean hornline, but for sheer difficulty of book? no, not there, not for the whole line, outside of the small ensembles there just wasn't all that much meat in the 93 show. a couple of cool licks in the hornline (after all, its bd we're talking) but not one of their best books for the full ensemble. i always think of that show as bd's small big band show, after the top dozen or so guys who did all the work the rest of the hornline might as well have been the blue knights for all they got to hang it out and really play.

Your memory is selective. Great Divide and Chain Reaction were insanely difficult and most of it was done by the whole ensemble at a flat-out run. On the flip side, I listened to 93 Scouts for the first time in ages and there was some really tasty stuff in there indeed. I always thought that the closer was the miss in 93 Scouts. There was a whole minute of that show that the writers forgot to give you.

[mad_scotty]

Your memory is selective. Great Divide and Chain Reaction were insanely difficult and most of it was done by the whole ensemble at a flat-out run. On the flip side, I listened to 93 Scouts for the first time in ages and there was some really tasty stuff in there indeed. I always thought that the closer was the miss in 93 Scouts. There was a whole minute of that show that the writers forgot to give you.

I agree with you on the closer. In the first camp we stopped referring to it as "encore" and started calling it "color by numbers". the hornline hated playing it, but we loved playing numero uno. it didn't get the crowd response the cheesy ballad closer got, but in 4 minutes we articulated more styles and played in more tempos than any other corps did in their entire show that year, and our ears were aggressively challenged through the whole piece, it was really hard to pick up the chords and stay in tune on the fly. not a crowd pleaser but a technical feast for the players, i just hate that the only recording anyone ever gets to hear was in a torrential downpour with everyone phasing in and out of tune.

as far as the bd show, you're right, there are some wicked full hornline and sectional runs, typical wayne downey stuff, but they are pretty few and far between, to me. my selective memory thinks that about 45% of that show is carried by the hornline, the rest by soloists and small ensembles, and those runs are in between. great stuff, but the hornline might as well have been tacet for the other 55% of the show. and thats just the brass book, throw in percussion and the full hornline was doing something really interesting for about 1/3 of the time. not a bad show or bad hornline, but comparing it in difficulty for the full ensemble with a 91 or 02 bd show? i'm not seeing it, still.