Time to dispel a myth...

[Lance]

My experience in London with "blast!" convinced me that what we do does translate to a mainstream audience. If an English/ European "got it"...well, that was enough proof for me.

The key is playing music, melodies...stuff that anyone can relate to emotionally. NOT orchestrated sound effects, "ambichord" ostinatos, and lydian/octotonic scale fragments. What Mr. Dorritie refers to as boop-boop, beep-beep music...

Entertainment folks.

lots of things entertain me (and lots of others) that wouldn't entertain you or mr dorritie (and lots of others), i'll bet, and vice-versa.

some might find what you find entertaining to be awesome, but also find other things etertaining.

it's called taste, and nobody holds a monopoly on it.

i love that dci can pump out star 93 and phantom 93 nearly back to back , and appeal to a wide variety of tastes.

[MikeN]

it's called taste, and nobody holds a monopoly on it.

But it is indeed possible to chart in broad strokes what an audience prefers - it's hardly rocket science.

Mike

[Lance]

But it is indeed possible to chart in broad strokes what an audience prefers - it's hardly rocket science.

Mike

as transformer 2 box office receipts show.

if it's so easy, then entertainment producers would be able to hit it out of the park every time with what they choose to fund and create.

[corpsband]

as transformer 2 box office receipts show.

if it's so easy, then entertainment producers would be able to hit it out of the park every time with what they choose to fund and create.

just to nit-pick...

making an entertaining movie and making a successful sequel are two entirely different things (the 2nd being much more difficult than the first).

additionally let's distinguish between making a movie which appeals to general audiences and a movie which appeals to a narrow segment of the movie-going public.

i'll concede tastes vary widely if you'll concede the bell-curve of audience taste exists :-) making an argument on the outliers is always fun and never very meaningful.

Edited November 16, 2010 by corpsband

[DCIHasBeen]

...that drum corps, no matter its form, was not, is not, cannot be, and never will be appealing to the mainstream public.

I don't know what you've been partaking of, but I'll have what you're having.

Drum Corps was never anything more than a fringe activity, made totally irrelevant by costs and ROI. Believing anything else is denial.

[ContraRich77]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

Drum Corps just isn't simpleton or pedestrian enough to be embraced by the masses..........it's too cerebral.

That's why symphonies need private donations just to exist, and you never see soundtracks from those same movies in the top 40.

[mobrien]

The key is playing music, melodies...stuff that anyone can relate to emotionally. NOT orchestrated sound effects, "ambichord" ostinatos, and lydian/octotonic scale fragments. What Mr. Dorritie refers to as boop-boop, beep-beep music...

Which didn't stop Blast! from using "Medea" and some mish mash thing about lemons and limes, right?

Look, I have no problem with lowest common denominator programming ONCE IN AWHILE. If Madison wants to trot out friggin Malaguena yet again, sure, fine, whatever. All you who want to listen to the same thing over and over, go for it. But I defy anyone here to tell me that they really had a hard time getting ANYTHING out of the top 8 or 9 shows last year. Cavaliers were "boop boop"? Nope. Regiment? Nope. Bluecoats? Nope. Vanguard played Bartok - well, if those musical choices make someone think that Vanguard lost their way, then they don't know anything about the corps' programming philosophy (or the definition of their very name).

Personally, I like variety. If you flipped through my iTunes library you'd see about 7,500 titles, ranging from populist fluff ("Viva Las Vegas" comes to mind) to music that most people would have no interest in hearing, but I appreciate (Mingus - and Bartok, come to think of it). I realize some here really want drum corps to embrace one aesthetic only, but if everyone takes exactly the same approach, then why have this many corps? If someone didn't like BD's show last year, oh well; there were a few dozen others that were very different.

So please excuse me if I strongly disagree with the generic "you" on the other side of this debate, who seem to think that the future of the activity requires dumbing down the product so that pop music and standards are all anyone does. There are enough very talented, very smart people who are programming and arranging right now that it'd be an insult to their talents to ask them to regurgitate a recent pop hit, since that's what "the people" want to hear. "The People" often have pretty questionable taste in the fine and performing arts; letting the taste of people who couldn't tell the difference between a bassoon and a baseball bat lead the way is a waste of energy. Better to educate them then to placate their lack of adventure.

Edited November 16, 2010 by mobrien

[corpsband]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

Drum Corps just isn't simpleton or pedestrian enough to be embraced by the masses..........it's too cerebral.

That's why symphonies need private donations just to exist, and you never see soundtracks from those same movies in the top 40.

[Lance]

i'll concede tastes vary widely if you'll concede the bell-curve of audience taste exists :-) making an argument on the outliers is always fun and never very meaningful.

indeed the bell curve does exist. hence the receipts for transformers 2. thank goodness for creative people brave enough to try to push into other standard deviations of that bell curve. great stuff that appeals to a true muliplcity of tastes is extremely rare, but it's how genres are re-invigorated, changed, and ulitmately preserved over time.

for always having been a niche activity, i happen to be thankful there's as much variety as there is out there in drum corps. of course, i'm critical of most music choices in dci now and see it becoming wgi with a few wind instruments very soon...but not quite yet.

deciding you're the authority on who "the majority" are and who "outliers" are in drum corps fandom is always fun and never very meaningful.

[Hrothgar15]

lots of things entertain me (and lots of others) that wouldn't entertain you or mr dorritie (and lots of others), i'll bet, and vice-versa.

some might find what you find entertaining to be awesome, but also find other things etertaining.

it's called taste, and nobody holds a monopoly on it.

i love that dci can pump out star 93 and phantom 93 nearly back to back , and appeal to a wide variety of tastes.

Except the point of the drum corps format is that there are elements that arouse excitement and emotion in ANY human being. From a musical standpoint, its purely mathematical, harmonics and overtones and intervals and the like. From an excitement standpoint, it's purely physiological, release of serotonin and other such chemicals.

Drum corps has been rife with examples working lock step like this. I'll name one off the top of my head: Madison Scouts, "The Way We Were." End of the intro, quarter note triplet into stratospheric soprano unison, then a delayed mid-voice climb into the held out step above. Just playing it in my head makes my heart race. In the 2006 reunion project video you can see the exact effect these five seconds have on virtually anyone who's paying attention, but it's really a simple biological response that has nothing to do with "taste." You could literally devise an algorithm that would predict amount of serotonin release by identifying features from an acoustic sampling. And that's just one of dozens of such examples.

Of course, most drum corps arranging today does nothing to exploit these elements. The example above is so characteristic and fitting for drum corps, and it's a shame moments like that are lost. (Of course, the new instrumentation makes it less realistic, but that's another topic altogether.)

Edited November 16, 2010 by Hrothgar15