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How Should We Improve Drum Corps


What is DCI’s biggest problem? (Relative to future growth)  

106 members have voted

  1. 1. What is DCI?s biggest problem? (Relative to future growth)

    • General program content and ?artistic? direction
      24
    • Musical content and appeal
      35
    • Drill design and appeal
      5
    • All the new school stuff (Synth, Vocals, Etc).
      28
    • Competitive balance (Increased parity)
      17
    • Judging criteria
      27
    • DCI Leadership
      17
    • Old school drum corps neophytes
      10
    • Lack of really expanding the format and moving further out of the box
      8
    • DCI is fine and I like the direction it's heading
      19
    • Other (Please clarify in your post)
      5


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Voted other., How about volunteering time and teaching? How about composing and creating? Unfortunately, what we generally have hear is recreational whining. And that will not improve anything. Now, if you are actually doing any of these things, then my hat's off to you!

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Speaking music, how about if not every corps plays strictly classical music? This year happens

to be better but many times I feel like I'm attending a pop classical marathon rather than

getting cultural variety.

Check out the list I have pinned in the WC forum directory - it's dominated this year by classical, wind ensemble and movie music. (Honestly, it's like that most years, I think.)

Mike

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My take on it: lots of those could be called the "problem," but that's only my singular opinion. However, I think we can change the activity for the good of all involved if DCI would create an environment where we can get away from judging that encourages corps to "keep up with the Joneses" or to adopt universal design mechanisms. (as an aside, I think we do have many corps who are "different" from others in certain ways, but certain types of distinguishing characteristics seem to have been abandoned out of fear of losing competitive edge. IMO of course.)

I honestly don't think you're ever going to get rid of the attitude of "keeping up with the Joneses", though. Whenever you assign value, you create a market. Like any agent in a market, individual drum corps are incentivized to act in a way that is going to bring them the most value. Any judging system worth a bit of good is going to require some consistency in the way that it hands out points - and consistency means that whenever any corps finds a better way of earning points from the sheets, the remaining corps will be sure to follow that trend.

The only real solution I see to "keeping up with the Joneses" seems to be to eliminate judging at all. Let the corps compete in exhibition. I use the term "compete" intentionally. Even if no judging were to occur, the corps would still be competing with each other, just on terms of their own making. If fan support were no longer influenced in any way by competitive placement, the only criteria left would be the entertainment of the show and the performance level as perceived by the hoi polloi. Imagine if instead of being motivated by a tenth of a point here or there in the fight to move up a spot in the standings, corps were instead motivated solely by the desire to engage as many fans as possible. Imagine the sort of shows the top 3 or 7 or 12 could produce if points and placement were of no concern whatsoever. I think the attitude of "keeping up with the Joneses would still exist, but imagine if instead of saying "wow, the Blue Devils did X and got huge points for it. We should do X too" corps instead said "wow, the Blue Devils did X and the crowd loved it, their souvenir stand is always packed. We should do X too".

I used to be completely in favor of keeping the activity competitive. I got a thrill out of competitive marching band, and I couldn't understand why anyone wouldn't want to win. I still think that competition is a great motivator for kids working to perfect a single show, and I think competition both gives structure to and helps to keep people interested in the season as it goes along. Yet as each year passes, I start to view the entire judging system as arbitrary and unnecessary. Consider the reaction toward the Blue Devils this year. Would this board have been filled with so much hate if a show like that weren't crushing all competitors by nearly two points? If there were no points or placements, the optimist in me is starting to think that maybe we'd have more people on this board celebrating the shows they like, rather than flaming the shows that are beating the shows they like.

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The key portion of any corps routine is the music. Very few fans would go to a contest to watch 11 minutes of just the percussion section, color guard, or the whole corps competing without the brass section playing. For years now, most CD's are nothing without the ability to watch the drill. Stop these snipets of brass music and play the majority of a song and you'll make fans happy and DCI's cash cow increases with more CD sales.

Edited by Ghost
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Please, please, please, for the love of the English language, change "parody" (which is a form of humor by making light of something more serious - see VK) to "parity" (which is about equality).

I generally avoid stepping into the annoying role of internet police when it comes to spelling and grammar, but this one keeps happening and it's driving me CRAZY. (yeah yeah, short drive and all that :tongue: )

Anyway, please change it? Thank you.

And now I'll go back and think about my response to the question at hand.

Just fro you

PARODY

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Check out the list I have pinned in the WC forum directory - it's dominated this year by classical, wind ensemble and movie music. (Honestly, it's like that most years, I think.)

Mike

Yeah, I haven't heard enough Jason Derulo and Justin Beiber lately. MORE POP MUSIC!!!!!

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