What is the best show you’ve ever seen?

[Guest]

 

I completely forgot SFA 2016! That one used to be one of my favorites

Its very overlooked due to their abscence from BOA that year, but I feel like they could have placed VERY well at SA!

[Gogogo]

I feel that I personally WAY under appreciated Ronald Reagan’s show this year. That thing is truly spectacular and lately I have found myself watching it over and over so I can catch parts I missed before. It’s just a phenomenal show. Stunning even. They surely could have done extraordinarily well with that at GN if they had gone.

Check out YouTube “not Ronald Reagan Band 2018” you can see the formations - I didn’t know they were doing half the things until I saw this bird’s eye view

[LeanderMomma]

Check out YouTube “not Ronald Reagan Band 2018” you can see the formations - I didn’t know they were doing half the things until I saw this bird’s eye view

Wow, you weren’t kidding! So cool. Thank you!

 

We miss so many things sitting down in the bottom sections of the dome. I need to sit up high at least once a season.

[TWHSParent]

Wow, you weren’t kidding! So cool. Thank you!

 

We miss so many things sitting down in the bottom sections of the dome. I need to sit up high at least once a season.

 

Yeah, you pretty much miss 3/4 of the visual aspects by sitting low. But you do get musical impact (sometimes too much, so you lose some of the details). I always try to sit high up if I can to try to balance the visual with the musical.

[TWHSParent]

It is interesting the relative lack of high quality videos this year from San Antonio (BOA and/or UIL - and by this I mean by professional/high level amateur video/audio from above the press box, so no slight meant to Doge from San Antonio's videos or others that I've seen). I have one for us which the band boosters sent out, and there is one for Reagan, Hebron, and Vista Ridge. I assume others are floating around but maybe aren't public or I just plain missed.

[SpartanBandAlum]

There was one for FloMo, but it was taken down, unfortunately

[Rudedog34]

FloMo was cracking down this year. The past few years I saw everyone recording, this year it seamed like fans were more hesitant to pull out any devise for recording.

As the videographer for our school I ended up parking on the high cam platform for the majority of BOA Finals and all of State. I only recorded our show, but seeing the top programs from up high gave me way more appreciation for the show designs.

[LeanderMomma]

It is interesting the relative lack of high quality videos this year from San Antonio (BOA and/or UIL - and by this I mean by professional/high level amateur video/audio from above the press box, so no slight meant to Doge from San Antonio's videos or others that I've seen). I have one for us which the band boosters sent out, and there is one for Reagan, Hebron, and Vista Ridge. I assume others are floating around but maybe aren't public or I just plain missed.

 

There was a Leander one up as well from up high.  It was so interesting to watch from a different angle!

 

it just says Leander Band 2018 on daTube and is posted by a Scotty Ballard.  If anyone cares besides me.  

[LeanderMomma]

FloMo was cracking down this year. The past few years I saw everyone recording, this year it seamed like fans were more hesitant to pull out any devise for recording.

As the videographer for our school I ended up parking on the high cam platform for the majority of BOA Finals and all of State. I only recorded our show, but seeing the top programs from up high gave me way more appreciation for the show designs.

 

it's a shame because there's no way to go back and watch some of the most phenomenal shows.  I'm glad Leander isn't as picky, though they don't actually "condone" it. 

[zoomer]

Tarpon Springs 2010

Hebron 2015

Avon 2009

[principalagent]

It was so interesting to watch from a different angle!

 

Yes, Blue Springs did have an interesting show this year!

[josephbandfan]

Yes, Blue Springs did have an interesting show this year!

Hahaha good one 

[LeanderMomma]

Yes, Blue Springs did have an interesting show this year!

[principalagent]

What’s the title of their show this year?

[LeanderMomma]

What’s the title of their show this year?

Oh duh.

[Magma31651]

 

Oh duh.

[Vidal28]

One of many topics that have a great variety of opinion which is cool to see, my eyes were opened to some shows that I wouldn’t have even considered making me think like “oh yeah I did really like that show a lot!!” Makes this harder to pick for me, some shows stick out for because of how musically astounding they were, Hebron 2017, 2015, FloMo 2016, Woodlands 2013. Marcus’ sustained reign of Texas in terms of cleanliness, 2007, 2012 and 2014 being the headliners. Vandegrift(2017) Leander(2014,2018) and now Vista with their tremendous pace and power their shows have. I’m a Texas homer, believing that we have the best of the best performing in this activity despite the limitations placed on us that most of the country really doesn’t have, the tonality and power that a lot groups project being on a different level imo which is really the most important thing for me, and the show that did for me was Hebron 2017, it warmed me up on the cold cold night I got to hear it near the end of that season and it’s one of my favorites for sure as well. 

[SpartanBandAlum]

After a rewatch I’d like to add Leander 2018 to my list. We never performed Love Theme anywhere near the level they did haha

[SomeBandNerd]

One of many topics that have a great variety of opinion which is cool to see, my eyes were opened to some shows that I wouldn’t have even considered making me think like “oh yeah I did really like that show a lot!!” Makes this harder to pick for me, some shows stick out for because of how musically astounding they were, Hebron 2017, 2015, FloMo 2016, Woodlands 2013. Marcus’ sustained reign of Texas in terms of cleanliness, 2007, 2012 and 2014 being the headliners. Vandegrift(2017) Leander(2014,2018) and now Vista with their tremendous pace and power their shows have. I’m a Texas homer, believing that we have the best of the best performing in this activity despite the limitations placed on us that most of the country really doesn’t have, the tonality and power that a lot groups project being on a different level imo which is really the most important thing for me, and the show that did for me was Hebron 2017, it warmed me up on the cold cold night I got to hear it near the end of that season and it’s one of my favorites for sure as well.

Was the cold cold night the Ducanville Invational? Because that was a cold contest. I remember having hand warmers in my gloves for that performance. Hebron 2017 will always be my one of my favorites.

[Vidal28]

Was the cold cold night the Ducanville Invational? Because that was a cold contest. I remember having hand warmers in my gloves for that performance. Hebron 2017 will always be my one of my favorites.

That it was that it was. Coldest contest I’ve ever been to for sure, I thought I had enough layers, boy was I wrong

[josephbandfan]

Was the cold cold night the Ducanville Invational? Because that was a cold contest. I remember having hand warmers in my gloves for that performance. Hebron 2017 will always be my one of my favorites.

I was not prepared that night. Wearing a light jacket over a t-shirt, I was violently shivering in the stands. 

[Majellan]

Current bands Hebron 2017, CTJ 2017 and multiple LD Bell shows in the 2000's.

 

However, the all time great for me is Spring 1993.  They broke new ground, and of course brought home the first Texas grand nats gold medal.

 

The Houston contest of 1993 was outstanding Spring, Phillip Geiger's Westfield and Duncanville.  

 

One of the best contests I've seen, one of those where you know you saw something very special unfolding.

 

Spring and Westfield were setting trends for the future of high school marching band, 

 

Duncanville was it's usual powerhouse self and somehow Klein came in 3rd.......

 

The next year Boa started hosting the regional in San Antonio, and so boa began to explode in Texas and it had alot to do with those three marching bands.

 

Okay, have to add Vista Ridge from this year.  I love that show!

[Rubisco]

Westfield 1996! Westfield 1996!

 

Nah. I wish. Great show for its time. I'm going to be honest and say that no show from the 90s belongs on top, unless we're placing a heavy emphasis on influence, in which case I suppose an argument could be made for shows like Spring '93 or Plymouth-Canton Educational Park '99.

 

I don't think I could name a single best show. If you held a gun to my head, I guess I would say Lassiter 2002, but even then, it depends on my mood. I've definitely got a top 10, and it consists of my favorite shows from 10 of the best high school marching bands ever. I place a lot of emphasis on being well-rounded. A show can be amazing, but if the performance isn't strong, I won't give it another watch. Similarly, if a performance is amazing, but the show itself is uninspiring, it won't make my list. I place A LOT of emphasis on originality, because I've seen so many shows over the years. These days a great performance is a dime a dozen, but a truly sublime show? That's still rare. Anyway, I've had the good fortune of seeing most of these shows live. Part 1, in alpha order:

 

Avon 2009 - So difficult to choose a best show for this group, since they've been so ridiculously consistent. Along with groups like Carmel and Marian Catholic, you could make an argument that Avon is the most successful marching group in history. Top three placements every year at Nationals since 2007, several state championships, and a crap-ton of regional wins. That's a crazy amount of consistency, especially as the field gets deeper and deeper each year. I believe Avon made National finals for the first time in 2001, missed finals in 2002 (when all those first-time Texas finalists came), and then made it again in 2003, and have never missed it since. Their 2004 show, Are You Ready for Some Football?, was among my early favorites from them. Very fun and clever show concept, despite how obvious it seems. I loved the coin-flip with the football drill formations and the school song with the mascot and the theatrical pep speech for the guard, who were dressed up in football uniforms. A real crowd-pleaser. They didn't sound all that great, but I enjoyed the show nevertheless. The high velocity drill probably started around 2005 with Now and Zen. That was the year they were popped a 19.9 in individual visual performance. Not hard to see why. They were FLYING across the field. Absolutely crazy difficult program. Avon started to sound like a National Champion in 2007, which is when they placed in the top three for the first time. They won three years in a row 2008-2010. I think 2009's CommUNIFORMity combines all of the best Avon qualities into a single show. A strong theme about breaking out of the chains of conformity, a music performance with great clarity, and that absolutely amazing, DCI-ish drill, which only they can pull off. The ending is particularly exhilarating, as the drill spirals inward to this dense singularity with incredible velocity. The amazing guard throws their flags in a ripple out of the center, and a single guard girl, nearly suffocated by the drill, bursts free as an individual. It is absolutely thrilling. There have been difficult drill programs in the past, but Avon just achieves like none of those other groups have. It's unique to them. Another favorite of mine is the 2010 program, Iconoclash. I love the schadenfreude section, where they play Adagio for Strings and the Ode to Joy at the same time. I just thought that was very clever. And they sounded and looked great. Still going strong to this day.

 

Broken Arrow 2014 - This is a group that has been making National finals since at least the 90s. They fell off the map briefly, but came roaring back in 2006 with Aqua, when they surprised just about everyone by winning Nationals with the highest GE score of all time. I don't think they even made finals the year before. In 2006, they were 4th in semis, and didn't win any captions in semis, and weren't really on the short list of groups capable of winning nationals that year, so that GE announcement in finals was SHOCKING. Aqua is a classic Cartwright show. Lots of beautiful flags and beautiful dresses. The drill is simple, but elegant and musical. The music program, which was arranged by Aaron Guidry, shows his trademark originality, and is sentimental in a really crowd-pleasing sort of way. Although I didn't agree with the result, I could at least see where the judges were coming from. The following years seemed like highly experimental years for Cartwright, including shows about supermodels and velociraptors. I especially liked the end of RUNaWAY, the show about models. Poking fun at the narcissism of the industry, the band played Chuck Henson's Broken Arrow announcement over and over again until it started to become distorted, and the guard lost its mind. Broken Arrow surged back into the top three at Nationals with Zo, the brilliant homage to The Wizard of Oz. The red bicycles that they rode around the field were a really clever touch, and it presaged the vehicles in later Broken Arrow shows. Lots of people lost their minds when Carmel beat Broken Arrow in 2012, but Broken Arrow's Surrender to Hope show, while containing lots of interesting things like smoke and gas masks and girls in giant dresses, never really escaped the shadow of LD Bell's 2006 production. It was pretty much a sequel, and like most sequels, not as cool as the first one. 2013 was a pleasant Copland show, and maybe contained the first instance of the spiral dresses that the guard would use to great effect in 2015, but ultimately, it was so gentle that it was forgettable. Then came 2014. FaceMe. What in the world. It was immediately obvious to me that this was one of Broken Arrow's best-performed shows, but it was married to a show that just didn't make a whole lot of sense. Early in the season, I thought the odd concept might hurt them. But by the end of the season, I found the whole thing weirdly poetic. Was it about facing your fears in a relationship? What was that initial conversation like with Cartwright? "Oh, I want to have a bunch of creepy looking faces on the field, and the guard members are going to start off kind of like tongues coming out of the mouths of these faces, and then they're going to wear some creepy looking masks, and it'll be cool, trust me." This was really the year that Broken Arrow performed a show that was both off-the-wall unlike anything I had seen, but also difficult and accomplished. The Khachaturian Adagio from Spartacus is just absolutely luscious. The Saint-Saens Organ Symphony with that fugue at the end and the pulsing circles in the drill. That is not easy. But they did such a wonderful job with it. 2014 marked the first year of the three years that I think Broken Arrow had the best band in the country. I wish they had taken their 2016 show to Nationals. I think with a little bit more polish, it would challenge the 2014 show as one of the best ever. 2016 was the Age of Discovery show. When the brass members ride those pedal karts and play their horns at the same time, riding across the field triumphantly, you just want to throw babies onto the field. So brilliant. In 2017, I heard their music early in the season without seeing the visual, and declared that they would be the best in the country again. (In my defense, one of the music GE judges at National finals did in fact have them in first place.) Then I saw the visual, and it was a bit of a disappointing rehash. Broken Arrow hasn't reached the heights of the 2016 program recently, but you know they'll be back soon.

 

Carmel 2017 - My favorite memory of Carmel is when they came down to San Antonio in 2002 with their show Metal and beat all of the Texas bands, and everyone flipped out. That show features one of my absolute favorite Richard Saucedo original compositions. And the Michael Gaines drill that accompanies it is out of this world. I especially love the drill during the saxophone ensemble, when the band is arranged in a line that collapses inward from the periphery. Some of the band members are sort of left behind, leaving a sort of drill wasteland. It's so cool, and perfectly matches the music. Anyway, Carmel has been making National finals since the 90s and has won Nationals 5 times now. FIVE TIMES. Their success is really a testament to the commitment of the Carmel community and the band's incomparable design staff, which includes previous director Richard Saucedo as composer and arranger and Michael Gaines as the visual designer. This is the same team that helped lead the Cavaliers to their DCI wins in the early 2000s. Gaines currently designs for the reigning DCI champion, Santa Clara Vanguard. He has won a crap-ton of WGI titles with the Pride of Cincinnati and Carmel. At this point, he's probably the best visual designer of all-time. Certainly, he's the most successful. (Lots of great videos on his YouTube channel, by the way!) In recent years, I think there's a tendency to view Carmel as a sort of judges' favorite, because they don't really blare like the TX bands do, and their shows are not very sentimental. But I think if you look back to previous years, you'll find plenty of crowd-pleasers, like the Metal show from 2002 and This Just In, the show about the TV news cycle, in 2004. "Bush was victorious in Tuesday's Presidential Election!" "Democrats responded in a dissonant tone!" beeduhbuhduhbuhduhbuhduh. Carmel hit its stride in 2001, when the band was widely predicted to win with The Danse, but lost to Lawrence Central's Metamorphosis by a fraction of a point. Their first win wouldn't come until 2005, when they shockingly full-pointed Reagan in finals, after Reagan had been in first the previous two rounds. Suspended Symbols was classic, jazzy Richard Saucedo music with beautiful Gaines drill and really cool props that suspended the guard above the band on cables. Besides that, I honestly don't remember that much about it. Frankly, I wasn't a big fan of the sound that Carmel was producing at the time. In 2002, for instance, the brass starts off with mutes in their horns, and you can barely tell a difference when the mutes are removed. It's just very, very tinny sounding. I think this has largely been fixed in recent years. I'd like to attribute that to the influx of Texas bands, but who knows. 2017's Serenity makes the best-ever list because it is Carmel's best all-around performance, and it is a visual masterpiece. I just watched it again to confirm. The drill is so exquisitely beautiful, and so musical. There's never a dull moment. And you know what? The band also sounds really good. I think Carmel has always done a pretty decent job blending their ensemble sound, and in 2017 there was also a lot of dynamic tension that a lot of the other groups (including very loud groups like Flower Mound) didn't have as much of. Carmel might not blare, but there's a wonderful sensitivity to the shape of the musical line. Oh, and did I mention that this show is a visual masterpiece? I did? Oh, okay. Well, if you're an aspiring visual designer, watch this show, because you'll learn something.

 

Lassiter 2002 - Liturgical Sketches. The most glorious of the marching arts shows. I watched it again recently. This show is relentlessly uplifting, and I think it would still win Nationals if it competed today. Lassiter first made finals in the 90s and won with perennial fan favorite The Wind and the Lion in 1998. The 1998 show is still probably some excessively nostalgic person's favorite show. I think at the time we were all pretty dazzled by the woodwind passages, which feature some really difficult technique. My appreciation of those parts was always tempered by the fact that they never really sounded to my ears like the entire ensemble was playing them. Actually, it all sounds a lot like a single saxophone player is playing them. The brass also has a pretty raspy sound throughout the whole thing, which I'm thinking was probably intentional, but it doesn't always make it easy to listen to. Anyway, Lassiter was always criticized for performing 3-4 very similar shows in a row, culminating in a national winning show. That was the case with the 2002 Nationals-winning production, Liturgical Sketches. Some people look at the shows that Lassiter did before it and notice that the previous shows feature a lot of the same Holsinger music, and are visually a bit similar as well. It's almost as though Lassiter was testing out the waters. To some, it was sort of like cheating, because a good portion of the Lassiter band was familiar with the 2002 music ahead of time. I think I'd be upset if I were competing against them, but as a spectator, when you view and hear the marvelous end result, you don't care as much. The opening Holsinger music, Ballet Exaltare, features the most powerful and uplifting brass of any high school marching band show ever. We start out with woodwind flourishes and the trumpets playing the Old 100th, and then boom: big, glorious brass hit with flags. That low brass, oh my gosh! Every section is so powerful. It's hard to pick, but if there is a best part in this masterpiece musically, it's probably the ballad. John Rutter's Requiem Aeternam. The counterpoint in the mellos gives me chills every time. The music just swells and swells into the sonorous final chord. Then, of course, the ending with the odd drumming on the cardboard cut-outs followed by that amazing concert french horn finale, which Westfield would borrow the next year when they won Nationals. I was sitting in awe of this show the entire time. I've talked a lot about the music, but the visual was beautiful as well, with long, elegant forms and church windows that regularly popped up and then dissolved. Required viewing. Unfortunately, after Alfred Watkins retired, the Lassiter band struggled to stay afloat. Alas, they are not the national finalist group they used to be.

 

LD Bell 2006 - Starting around 2000, with the UIL State Championship show, King of Kings, the kids at LD Bell got a reputation for being machines. Those shows from the early 2000s are really great viewing for marching arts purists, who like to see good old fashioned marching and playing at the same time. LD Bell did a lot of that in the early 2000s, and the shows were very flashy, and very difficult. What they were not, however, was very artistic. They made finals for the first time at Nationals in 2001 with a show that is representative of this older style. Great marching, great playing, really fast, really impressive, not much of a theme. They placed 4th. Great. People were angry when a maxed-out LD Bell show in 2002, Binary Systems, lost in finals to that annoying northern group, Carmel. Visual effect did them in. But I never really found that all that surprising. For me, those old LD Bell shows, while impressive, were also pretty dull visually, and the original compositions they performed were not particularly interesting. I found myself impressed by what was accomplished, but a lot of the drill seemed flashy for flashiness' sake, and not very musical. It also lacked variety. Lots of rotating blocks and jazz-run pass-throughs. La-dee-da. Anyway, when Cartwright started designing for them, it was a like breath of fresh air. I know he was on the staff by 2003, but I didn't really notice the influence until 2004. Lots of flags and whatnot. From 2005-2007, LD Bell performed a trilogy about the apocalypse that would solidify the band's place in marching arts history. First, Ascension, about those people taken up to heaven. It featured some seriously difficult drill. Early on the season, LD Bell struggled with this show, and a lot of people predicted that they would have a weak season. As early as their first contest, I accurately predicted they would place in the top 3 at nationals. (Yes, I am bragging.) Even though it was rough around the edges, you could see the beauty of the show immediately. By the end of the season, we were all lavishing LD Bell with praise, and every other band kid's favorite piece of music became Eric Whitacre's Lux Aurumque. Here was an LD Bell show with a truly strong theme, with some real artistry. But the real beast of a show came the next year, in 2006. The Remaining. About those unvirtuous ones left behind. There were rumblings on these forums before the first contest that LD Bell was going to be great. A kid from SFA (Skippy?) had seen the show in advance, and declared that LD Bell would be unbeatable. Essentially, he made it sound like it was going to be one of the greatest shows ever. Well, he ended up being correct. It's hard to explain the shock to the system that this show caused at the time. It was so theatrical. It opened with those shivering guard girls in the blood-red one-pieces wandering around the field. Soon the synthesizer pitch did that awful, downward bend and the propulsive percussion started up, and the drill folded quickly, marvelously inward. The energy was unreal. During the end of the opener, they played that awful, dissonant chord and then collapsed onto the ground. This was the part of the show that caused the most controversy. The kids all started to crawl on the ground, toward a guard girl in the center who tried to help those she could help. It. was. so. weird! I had never seen anything quite like it. Nobody had, besides maybe hints of it in The Star of Indiana 1993 or Blast!. The woman sitting next to me complained that the show was marked by the devil. Well, hon, that was sort of the point, no? "This is marching band, not crawling band!" others would complain. The ballad, taken from A Beautiful Mind, allowed a little glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark, twisted show. Long, elegant lines with beautiful purple flags. The backfield conclusion of the ballad, with the red flag feature up front, was eerily beautiful. It was quiet enough that you could hear the sound of the flags in the air. Then, the guard girls impaled themselves on the flags, and the stomach-turning downward pitch bend returned. The band started to wander around theatrically. In the video from Nationals, you can see one band member run forward and collapse. Soon, the entire band made a mad-dash for the front sideline, and for a moment, I thought they might actually come up into the stands, but they backed off at the last minute. It was very exciting. The drill at this point was very interesting, because some of the kids were left behind, intentionally out of place and left scrambling to find their spots. It was rather clever. At the end of the show at Nationals, the band collapsed at the end zones as the guard pulled out an enormous white sheet over themselves, some of them shrieking. A guard girl in white poked up through the middle, as if she had survived and made it to heaven. But underneath the sheet, we could make out the contours, those peaks of the people who were left behind. It was chilling. Was it the cleanest show in the world? No, but as I said before, that doesn't matter so much when you're being burned in the fire of something new. LD Bell won nationals the following year with Transcendents, about the return of Christ to Earth, or something like that. Lots of creepy figures in yellow spandex. It featured an amazing opening hit, with some really cool folding box drill to Reich music and the theme from Pan's Labyrinth. Otherwise, the theatricality that was so cool in 2006 became a little bit tedious by 2007. It was a little bit of an overkill for me. LD Bell remained a top three performer from 2005-2010. They probably would have placed in the top three in 2011, with the very difficult Circle's Edge show. By 2012, they had lost Cartwright and began their descent to where they are today, which actually isn't all that bad of a place to be, considering the level of competition these days. I feel like each year I'm waiting for LD Bell's return to form. They've got Cartwright back, and a director that was there when they were a top 3 national program, so I'm left wondering.

[MadisonBandMan1]

That was the biggest wall of text I’ve seen on this forum rubisco but I enjoyed reading every bit of it. I love your insight and hope you never stop posting here.

[Rubisco]

Pedal karts. Not peddle carts. Broken Arrow wasn't peddling anything. Sorry.

 

I'll post the rest later. I always have trouble choosing one show for a particular group.