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Happy 30 Year Anniversary to Star of Indiana's 1993 Show


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I had a couple of students march Star 93 and lived about 30 miles south. I went to several spring rehearsals and could tell right away this was something special. I remember watching the hornline work on body movement under the stands at IU stadium. It was truly a stunning musical and visual program

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like many at the time, i wasn't a fan. but when i got the recordings and started digging in, it started to grow on me. as i matured in the activity and all of the visual and musical pieces of the puzzle started coming together in my brain...like 5/6 years later....i realized it was a game changer. i'm still very ok with Cadets winning, but the design in Star was easily 15 years ahead of its time.

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I was on Troopers brass staff in '93, and got to see Cadets several times that summer.

They were incredible.  The drum corps politics of the time played heavily into the criticism of the show and performance.  But there is no way to deny what was accomplished.

At the time I was most impressed by the masterful use of silence and pianissimo.

Edited by troopers1
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3 hours ago, troopers1 said:

At the time I was most impressed by the masterful use of silence and pianissimo.

When I presented the show to my kiddo for the first time (DCI DM), I specifically called their attention to the "weaponized silence," and how the arrangers used it as much as they did the notes on the page.  They said that's the part that stuck with them.

I think it's obviously an amazingly cleanly performed show.  Star would have played the hell out of anything that summer.  But it's also an extremely sophisticated design, more than what I think anyone had ever seen to that point.  Had they been allowed the percussive freedom that we see from modern pits, it would have been even further afield from convention, I think.  

The lasting musical influence to me is that if a corps came out and played it mostly note for note, it would sound perfectly appropriate for what we see these days.  

Visually, they started pushing the boundaries of big unison body movement and capturing the full-field guard moment into the drill, I think.  Wasn't quite the full on dance moveset we see now, but if you look at what Vanguard was doing in '98 and '99, you can recognize the influence straight off.  

I still listen to this show every so often - it holds up very well.

Mike

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On 3/16/2023 at 8:31 PM, musicteacher said:

Particularly the Bartok.

I think this is a great point.

While Medea was wild, numerous corps have used it since. 

But Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste was so wild that it was dumb. It's still a ridiculous idea to program that piece, and the 30 years since have shown it. 

Nevertheless, it was magical. 

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On 3/14/2023 at 3:23 PM, Terri Schehr said:

It’s not the equipment.  It’s the operator.  You had some master operators in that horn line. 

It still amazes me that we had piano, saxophone and bassoon players in that line. I have taught and still teach the best horn lines in DCI and, these days, kids have to practically be masters on their brass instrument to have a chance to make the line.

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I didn’t see this show live on the field. However, it was what they did with it in 1994 while touring with The Canadian Brass that I did get to see it live. Both in its standstill version at Wolf Trap, and in the indoor drill version. Wolf Traps’ show will always be remembered, because I had front row to the show. Percussion played Marimba Spiritual, followed by Star coming out in uniform to perform a shortened but no less incredible version of their 91 and 93 show. 
 

The CD from their initial year with Canadian Brass is unfortunately one I lost somewhere in my travels and moves over the years. It has the recording of Marimba Spiritual, Medea, Pines of Rome / Villa Borghese, Pictures at an Exhibition, and a very good Everyone Loves the Blues (similar arrangement to early 80’s Blue Devils). I’d love find it and own it again, if anyone knows where to find it. The first CD of Brass Theater, if I remember correctly, had a light blue cover with a maple leaf in blue and orange, noting “ Brass Theater”. It also had a write up about Star of Indiana on the insert, explaining how they were discovered by the Canadian Brass and how Brass Theater evolved. 

Edited by Dmlkmen
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1994 Brass Theater version, ( with drill),  of Medea/ Strings for Percussion and Celeste. 
….And yes, even in this version, the crowd is heard screaming “ Do it! “ after the FFF ( triple forte) chord in Medea, and into the the accelerando. 

As a side note….as someone who appreciates demand in drill and music equals movement, both 1993 Star and Cadets have to be all time champions of drill speed and demand. It was as if each was pushing the other to raise doctor beat a bit more in practice and just turn on the after burners in tempo on the field that year. 

This video, I think, shows that demand that was present in the drill extremely well. We get to see, close up, what an individual needed to do in movement and playing. 

 

 

Edited by Dmlkmen
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On 3/26/2023 at 7:54 AM, Dmlkmen said:

As a side note….as someone who appreciates demand in drill and music equals movement, both 1993 Star and Cadets have to be all time champions of drill speed and demand. It was as if each was pushing the other to raise doctor beat a bit more in practice and just turn on the after burners in tempo on the field that year. 

This was right in the middle of what I call the "Whiplash Era" or the "Run & Gun" era. I generally refer to this era as being 1987 - 1997. Star and Cadets in 1993 really pushed velocity and some crazy difficult drill moves and did so while playing some difficult music books. You can only move so fast and for so long until it just becomes chaos and at times completely uncleanable.

By 1998 it was clear even The Cadets pulled back some and designed the drill more reasonably. There are still some big and demanding moves, but they were able to clean and they filled in the gaps with smarter design. This is especially true when you compare it to their 1997 design. I think the level of smart design and ability to clean that we saw in the Blue Devils show in 1997 (Casablanca) was one of the factors that made corps look at the effectiveness of cleanliness vs craziness. Phantom's brilliant design in 1996 also helped. The Cadets drill design in 2000, while still hard, was way more clean and smart. The quality of the Cavaliers' drill designs in 1995 and then again in 1998, 1999 also helped to back things off of the "whiplash" era and would ultimately help Cavaliers dominate the early 2000s with their smart use of sequential design and kaleidoscopic movies. 

I tend to think of 1998 - 2007 as the era of "Drill Moderation & Effectiveness with Pit Exploration."  This was an era where drill seemed to be smarter and in some ways more effective and the pit went through drastic changes with electronics/narration/singing, etc. This is not to say speed is gone. In fact some of the shows during this era have some serious speed, but it's how you handle it. It comes down to the types of movies you do and how you handle that speed. 

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