Carolina Crown 2025

[Zeke]

1 hour ago, AllRise99 said:

I want to see some cool drill or something…I miss the 3D geometry from 2012, 2013, and 2015 (although I thought I saw a moving flame in the closer this year)

Prop staging can also take away from that as we saw this year because it felt to me like there was less real estate on the field to work with.

Saktig's 1997 and 1998 drill with Cadets if he could give them something  along those lines I think the MM would  be more than up to the challenge

[nsxanax]

1 hour ago, ZTWright said:

One word: Evolve.

Two word(s): MORE MACKEY.

By season’s end, I was head over heels with that piece.

Unlike many DCI performed musical works over the years, I’m so hoping to hear this again soon, at the HS level.

And unless it's a BOA powerhouse, watered-down grade 3/4 renditions readily accepted.

[KVG_DC]

13 minutes ago, nsxanax said:

Two word(s): MORE MACKEY.

By season’s end, I was head over heels with that piece.

Unlike many DCI performed musical works over the years, I’m so hoping to hear this again soon, at the HS level.

And unless it's a BOA powerhouse, watered-down grade 3/4 renditions readily accepted.

Well...There's always the Avon connection.  

[c.l.]

Heard they had a lot of Cadets alumni that aged out, along with BD. Purely speculation, but would there be a difference in learning methodologies with large groupings over the course of the season? Genuinely asking — was never a brass performer so I don’t know.

[nsxanax]

3 hours ago, NewArpege said:

A concept that is more abstract or a story that doesn’t require an over-abundance of literal imagery to derive understanding.  The past two years Crown has needed to develop the storytelling in a ton of detail in order for the concept to work.  That’s creatively difficult and takes a long time to put a broadway-style production on the field.  The end result is beautiful, but the 2 month time window is a disadvantage unless they go less literal or put more on the field earlier. 

Agreed; doesn't have to be a binary dynamic.

Perhaps some hybrid of sorts.

Also, it seems that there’s lots of grumbling among the faithful each year, that Crown never gets the proper adjudication consideration, for playing tough books on the move.

I didn't put a stop watch on it, and it’s mostly a supposition on my part, but that tends to be the consensus, more years than not. 

But let's say it is correct. 

Part of my affinity for Crown, is at least by contemporary standards, they eschew park & blow. 

But does it place them at a competitive disadvantage? 

[nsxanax]

5 minutes ago, KVG_DC said:

Well...There's always the Avon connection.  

…and not lost on moi. But that's hella trip to justify for HS band. Cuts into my DCI slush fund.

But BOA’s got livestreams🌈

[KVG_DC]

40 minutes ago, karuna said:

IMHO not much.   Takes discipline to say "you're only getting X bars of percussion or brass feature here and it needs to connect to measure Y as it ends".   It may be that the design was put on the table by the Subel team but then left to "design by committee" after his "departure" (which is always a bad thing --yes you need a great creative team but you also need one designer with "the vision").     Most of the brass and percussion features are rather aimless and too long which suggests a design team stuck with someone else's vision who's completely absent.  Strangely enough I've seen this happen up close.  You're too far a long to switch out the show concept completely and not enough time to really "fix" all the problems.  Hopefully this is just a one off transitional problem. 

I agree that any future Mackey collaboration will benefit greatly from the behind the curtains view he was afforded this year.

Interesting!  

I'd probably be one of those people who would love a documentary on how a show is made 

[nsxanax]

Yo ZTW, Cap’n Nimrod’s back.

Like a bad penny…

[Flguardman]

I would love to see Tyler take a bigger role in the design process! He has been so successful in bringing crownguard back to its glory and his success with Tarpon has been wonderful. 

[NewArpege]

2 hours ago, MikeRapp said:

This to me is the biggest issue. Crown has become the home team for high school bands—but that isn’t proving to be interesting compared to the competition. They need to stop being so on the nose—totally my opinion here. 

They don’t need to abandon their strengths which are operatic music and staging. If they applied that formula to a show like BAC or Bloo this year, they’d be a top contender.