Competition Vs. Art

Competition and art are antagonists. Art is a statement best understood with simplicity. It minimizes energy. Energy costs. Competition is a comparison of skill best stated with complexity that maximizes energy. When drums were silenced for “visual design”, corps lost its energy and marketability – its very identity.

            In art, less is more. The ability to transfer an idea with greater simplicity is efficient in numerous ways:  cost, weight, size, understanding, etc.  Simplicity – a limited palette - is less confusing and more direct. When creating art, you start large, jumbled and complex, then simplify.  The skill is in the many rough drafts and changes that occur before presentation, working large retails, then small.

            In competition, more is more.  The ability to perform what your opponent cannot involves complexity.  Comparisons between performers  determine physical, coordinative or mental differences.  When competing, simplicity sets up complexity, working small details into a larger presentation. The skill is immediate, the drama of live performance without an eraser.

Artistic Limitations and Compositional Problems

The artistic immaturity of 1950’s band “theme shows” came to drum corps because drill writers concluded precision marching did not produce enough “effect” as music programs gained sophistication. Precision in anything creates attention.  The visual caption convinced DCI directors that flat two-dimensional “field patterns”, were more effective than execution uniformity or music.  Football fields became Area 51, drummers skittering with 27 pounds of equipment like silent little unidentified flying objects  – seen but never heard - pushed backfield, out of the way, like they are in orchestra.  Drummers did mime, held props and grounded their instruments facing away from the audience, their drum solos and chance to compete ruined. 

The “visual” has width and length but is missing height, inferior to sound as a creative vehicle.  In reaction, guards changed uniforms multiple times promoting “drama” to distant audiences sitting in heavy Roman Legion open architecture pretending chalk lines were a frame. This destroyed show continuity.  It is hard to sell artistic insecurity on such a limited grass platform.

Great art works exist within a set of limits; limits create rules and order. Order is needed to conduct a contest with rules. Order allows understandability, important in selling competition. Rules define required skills and training regimen. Uniformity and its derivatives are a most attractive platform, visually pleasing, artistically understandable yet comparable, even in stadium seats requiring binoculars. 

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The 160 x 300 foot area of a football field is poor canvas.  You can’t blend colors on it nor use complex contrasts of lights and darks. Shade and shadow is what artists use to create “depth” via perspective using methods of plane geometry.  To have some pageantry judge tell you they see this is a hoax. There is no perspective or shade and shadow! Realize that the quest for props was an attempt to introduce “perspective” and “forced perspective”, something not possible on a flat football field using poles and wood planks as “sculpture”.  Students as dots can’t form perspective, nor color gradations necessary to support it. (televisions use millions of dots projected on a screen.)  A good fine artist understands randomness in nature, depicting  foliage, clouds, light, the effects of wind, moving water and their interaction - impossible to achieve with two dimensional dots. The Universe also contains the opposite of randomness – structure - something we call science.  Structure, order and a small degree of randomness allows for creativity and marketing.  Spastic velocity is hard to structure, reducing understandability and focus. Painting and other artistic media have the advantage of complex painterly relationships between colors to create contrast via pattern and gradation of line.  Moving human dots create weak contrast unless in massive forms, especially with distance.  Visual designers can’t achieve the effects of pencil, paint or pen on their distant, weak, 2-D grass canvas.  It is an improper medium to explore “art and design.”  Stick figures, simple geometric shapes and drill chart dot books do not produce much “communication”. Without height, they are limited to very simple flat patterns without perspective. Their mistake was using complexity in a venue that requires simplicity. Visual designers are two-dimensional “patternists”- not artists.  They create routines.  The pinnacle of these mistakes is over-complex transition.  Good artists know the limits of their medium.  Drum corps “genius” designers disrespected this most basic art lesson at the cost of the music and continuity.

Color guards have always been peripheral.  Designers made modern color guard narcistic - a detriment to transition, a disjointed side-show having little to do with the corps proper - running through formations, as if they were the show - music a secondary accompaniment, interestingly accepted by school band directors paid to teach music.  Guards disperse after their features, completely disorganizing forms - bad transition - the work of people who do not believe the idiom has limits.  “I don’t know what to do - so my guard will throw their equipment away, run right through the corps proper, change costumes and no one will see them. Don’t look at us for the next ten seconds.  WE ARE INVISABLE!”  Running to and from opaque cloth screens to hide uniform and equipment changes caused even more visual confusion. Modern drum corps arrangements follow this trend, failing to climax, phrases leading nowhere as the guard changes flags, props and uniforms to no understandable statement, all sounding and looking the same – a "mezzo-jumble" of unoriginality - reflecting  confused emotion-based judging criteria.  Judges have reduced themselves into modern art critics with the artistic vision of the Grand Poobah at Fred Flinstone’s lodge. 

Art and competition can coexist with thoughtful score sheet criteria.  Youth competition – DCI’s “Summer Music Games” and WGI’s “Sport of the Arts” –  demands design be tertiary, especially for bands when tax money is involved.  Modern band directors believe it is their right to “create”.  That is not their job. Let them create on their own time. Any band director that disagrees should be fired.  Music students receive no “art” testing or “art” grade. The author has never observed band or corps members discuss or care about “art concepts”. 

The visual caption has always been in denial of their limited artistic arena. Their only gallery has been young people not experienced at life enough to realize a hoax, band and corps directors trying to manipulate score sheets and well-meaning band parents coerced into buying their children first place. These judges are not world-class design educators. They merely use the idiom to build an image and a cash flow into their pockets at the expense of music education, destroying the lessons youth discovers competing fairly with peers.  The result is band directors who know nothing about design, hiring writers that know nothing about design, who then are reviewed by judges that know nothing about design who dispense opinion and scores to school children who design nothing and learn nothing. As one Plymouth High School parent said to this author while watching their band surround a stock market ticker on the field: “You really need to see our show from up top.  You can understand it from the box.”  The Plymouth booster club has been hoaxed.  Lady, you need a stiff double-chocolate latte.

Ephemeral sightings of perspective, color theory and fine art concepts mixed with kindergarten storylines picked by band directors to produce “high art.”  Drummers making pseudo-warrior faces playing 8th notes with lipstick on while “body sculpting” on a 15 foot high prop is not art.  It is the politics of weak people who cannot compete.