Define General Effect

[lawdn]

17 minutes ago, scheherazadesghost said:

I get it. And it's okay to disagree with paradigms, right? I simply don't think competition drives creative excellence, and never have. Everyone here that disagrees with me would be wasting their breath attempting to convince me otherwise. In fact, I think it held back the shows during the years I marched. Staff were too constantly driven by the numbers to recall that we were young, fragile humans with reasonable limitations.

I've listened to a current corps director reflect on the covid year season quite lovingly, for the fact that there was no competition. Wish I could've been there. Genuine freedom from the shackles of competition. Surely a sight to behold in the drum corps world.

I don't know that competition is necessary to drive excellence in DCI. I didn't march DCI and have not been involved with any show productions. I only meant to say that competition is integral to DCI as currently structured by the corps. I did march in college and we were very motivated to excel, albeit not nearly at the level of DCI but with the constraints of much less time and concurrently being full-time students in fall term. There we were driven by esprit de corps, a drive to uphold tradition, and a director who was a genius motivator. So I can definitely understand the argument that competition, and GE scores, aren't necessary for artistic excellence. 
 

And thank you as always for sharing your views. I learn so much from you and others who marched DCI. 

Edited July 7, 2023 by lawdn
Addition

[scheherazadesghost]

5 minutes ago, lawdn said:

I don't know that competition is necessary to drive excellence in DCI. I didn't march DCI and have not been involved with any show productions. I only meant to say that competition is integral to DCI as currently structured by the corps. I did march in college and we were very motivated to excel, albeit not nearly at the level of DCI but with the constraints of much less time and concurrently being full-time students in fall term. There we were driven by esprit de corps, a drive to uphold tradition, and a director who was a genius motivator. So I can definitely understand the argument that competition, and GE scores, aren't necessary for artistic excellence. 
 

And thank you as always for sharing your views. I learn so much from you and others who marched DCI. 

Ah, ty for explaining further. Love hearing about your college experience too. Wish there was more, direct interplay between the two worlds honestly.

I'm mainly challenging a paradigm, as I'm wont to do.

I also appreciate the respectful exchange. 👏🏽

[resipsaloquitur]

5 hours ago, scheherazadesghost said:

GE is the strangest thing to assign a number to in the whole judging paradigm IMHO because it's so delightfully intangible. It's all strange, but especially GE.

That said, I'm always down for an impossible task for the fun of it. I just don't take it that seriously.

To take concrete examples. How did SCV win GE in 18, Bluecoats in 16, BD in 15. Were these particularly intellectual, emotional, delightfully aesthetic, and if so to what extent did the music and prop (and in 15 a unique story book ending) come together to win GE for each of these shows? 

[scheherazadesghost]

5 hours ago, resipsaloquitur said:

To take concrete examples. How did SCV win GE in 18, Bluecoats in 16, BD in 15. Were these particularly intellectual, emotional, delightfully aesthetic, and if so to what extent did the music and prop (and in 15 a unique story book ending) come together to win GE for each of these shows? 

An excellent exercise, which I will happily leave to folks who were there and/or who care to dissect such things. I'd love to know!

[Onionhead2]

ITS THE CONNECTIVE TISSUE BETWEEN THE ADJUCATER AND THE SHOW, HOW WELL UNDERSTOOD, AND HOW WELL TRANSLATED THRU MUSIC AND MOVEMENT, AND SOMETIMES HOW WELL CONNECTED A ADJUCATOR MAY BE TO A CORPS.

[MikeN]

I'm on the extreme against GE - I think it's a word salad made up to reward a judge's favorite show.  So much of it is nebulous and undefined, simply because it cannot be quantified.  Yet we try to assign achievement to what is essentially artistic merit.  I'd be perfectly fine if we removed it as a variable altogether - we already have content and achievement for the musicians and visual - let's expand their impact.

And get off my lawn, you hooligans.

Mike

[Phantom56]

Spartacus 2008. That defines General Effect. And should have a bigger impact on scoring. 

[jwillis35]

27 minutes ago, MikeN said:

I'm on the extreme against GE - I think it's a word salad made up to reward a judge's favorite show.  So much of it is nebulous and undefined, simply because it cannot be quantified.  Yet we try to assign achievement to what is essentially artistic merit.  I'd be perfectly fine if we removed it as a variable altogether - we already have content and achievement for the musicians and visual - let's expand their impact.

And get off my lawn, you hooligans.

Mike

There is truth here. I know the judges try to do their best with GE. A lot of it is subjective. But there are things in GE that are not subjective.

One judge takes a music based approach and how the visual is impacting that. The other takes a visual approach and how the music impacts that. The one aspect of GE that becomes a little more objective is in the area of cleanliness. GE judges do not judge cleanliness or performance captions, but they have eyes and ears and when they can tell a visual program is not clean there is no way they will give full credit. Same with music. If the corps still cannot play the show well then clearly they can't give as much credit. 

One of the things the Blue Devils figured out a long time ago is that if you don't CLEAN your show there is no chance of popping a nice GE number even if your show has all kinds of crazy moves and props and color and staging. The cleaner a show gets the more we can read the forms and visual or the music. 

But it would be interesting to see GE tossed out for something else or an expanded set of sub captions under music and visual. 

[scheherazadesghost]

I'm gathering the real rift here is between folks who 1) think mood and feelings can be concretely objectified, and 2) think mood and feelings are subjective and in the eye of the beholder and therefore impossible to quantify.

Not a novel observation, but what I'm gathering nonetheless.

How would we know who "won" without scoring? Again, anyone who was positively affected by the art process or product technically won.

[BlueStainGlass]

2 minutes ago, scheherazadesghost said:

I'm gathering the real rift here is between folks who 1) think mood and feelings can be concretely objectified, and 2) think mood and feelings are subjective and in the eye of the beholder and therefore impossible to quantify.

Not a novel observation, but what I'm gathering nonetheless.

How would we know who "won" without scoring? Again, anyone who was positively affected by the art process or product technically won.

people want crowd reaction over quality of performance.  Its been something argued back to when Madison was a top 10 group that they wanted higher because the crowd always loved them.

 

And if that was true judgement BD would never win because some people literally hate them for being good.

Edited July 7, 2023 by BlueStainGlass