Rubisco

Just a heads up, I watched both The Woodlands and CTJ perform on the webcast, and they were both incredible! It seems like the Lucas Oil Stadium has made both of them sound even better than they did at San Antonio. (Well, that and maybe a week of practice.) It looks like The Woodlands may have cleaned up their closer drill a little bit, too. It was hard to tell on the webcast because the view kept shifting. You could definitely hear those mellos!

There were some pretty big disconnects between the individual and ensemble performance judges in prelims for some reason. There was also some pretty bad numbers management, either that or flat-out indecisiveness. (In individual visual alone, I caught several regular ties and a three-way tie.) I don't completely blame the judges for all the ties, though, as there were a TON of groups to keep track of, several of which were very close in ability level.

But I think the problem is that if the individual judges focus too much on a handful of kids not doing a good job and judge a band harshly based on that small group, they're not taking a good sample. The issue of not playing is big. An individual music judge does not like to hear (or not hear, I suppose) that.

I'm actually going to have to disagree here. Great individual performances will usually translate into great ensemble performances. If you have a few great players and an ocean of other players that are not so good, those few good players will NOT compensate for the rest of the band and produce a great ensemble sound. You'll likely hear those strong players sticking out of the ensemble, and thus the band will not be producing a balanced sound. Unfortunately in this case, we don't know if the ensemble score or the individual score is anomalous, since Westlake did not perform again in finals with a completely different set of judges. Again, many of the individual scores in prelims have me scratching my head. I think maybe these judges did a poor job sampling some of the bands. Either that, or they see/hear things very differently from other judges. I would like to clarify that I don't think the individual and ensemble scores/rankings should be identical, but I do think they should generally be around the same area-- particularly in music and to a lesser extent in visual. In visual, maybe there are cases where forms will hit nicely, but people are marching completely out of time. I feel, though, that even that would be a little bit apparent from up high. Maybe just not as apparent as down on the field.

Yes, I think there were some pretty strange things going on in prelims (well, throughout the entire thing, really). It's beyond me, for instance, how The Woodlands can score in the 19's in both ensemble performance subcaptions while scoring in the 16's in the individual performance subcaptions. I know they're not the same thing, but really? As I said before, The Woodlands was scoring in the 16's in the individual subcaptions at the Conroe regional a month ago.

I just determined the rankings in each subcaption and caption for the three TX bands going to Grand Nats this year for both prelims and finals of BOA SA. I've attached the rankings as a word document, for those interested.

For those who are interested, here are the Indy regional finals recaps, courtesy of Dan Balash from ILMarching.com!

My favorite shows were from Marcus and The Woodlands. I can see why L.D. Bell won, though. They performed the heck out of their show. I just didn't like the show itself as much as I have in previous years.

I'm shocked by Marcus' lower than expected placements in music performance. Just... I don't get that. At all. I'm also shocked that The Woodlands only scored in the 16's in both individual performance captions in prelims. That's what they scored at Conroe! Have they really not gotten any better? They scored comfortably in box 5 (18.6's) in both of those subcaptions in finals. The thing that worries me for nats is that one of those judges from prelims is going to be judging at nats. Hope he's not judging visual GE at national finals! The Woodlands (and other TX groups) may end up with a 17! I'm pleased to note, though, that the scores stayed around the same level from prelims to finals with completely different panels of judges. It makes a little bit of a case against the scores being inflated. I personally do not think that they were inflated.

Unfortunately for music educators in Texas, athletics (i.e. football) reign supreme here. It doesn't matter if music education demonstrates a greater academic benefit than athletics, or if music programs bring schools more prestige than their athletics programs. The truth is that sports like football probably generate more revenue for the school district, and thus they are more important to school districts than music programs. It's pretty clear which activity takes priority whenever a band program is prevented from going to a single competition because of a football game on the same day. It happens all the time. The counterargument is that something like marching band was devised to entertain football crowds, and so football is where the band's priorities should lie. This argument is, of course, completely false.

I don't know if I view CTJ or Spring as locks, either. They're more like very strong possibilities. Then again, I think I posted on the BOA forum a while back about how I only count 6 typical locks for national finals this year (Avon, Broken Arrow, Carmel, Lawrence Central, Marian Catholic, and The Woodlands). This is one of those years that we could see several bands that are used to being on the bubble make national finals. I think of my three desires, the two TX bands in the top half of finals one is the least likely. Then again, if Spring ends up being way weaker than expected, I might have to settle for even less. At this point, I'm not too worried about CTJ.

If they end up being as good or better than they were last year (and I fully expect that they will, since it's a nationals year for them), they'll make finals at both BOA San Antonio and BOA Grand Nationals. Now, if they've taken an unexpected dip in quality or are really struggling with a difficult show, then they might have a problem.

I know that for official UIL purposes Poteet didn't make state this year, but in my book making state and then being disqualified on some technicality still constitutes having made state. Poteet can't claim it officially, but I don't think that matters to most band nerds who want to judge the quality of the program.

Yeah, not gonna lie: IndianaMarching.com is pretty badass. Pardon my French...

Back when I was in high school, there were several instances in which students were allowed to bypass signing up for the band class that took place during the school day. These students still came to after school rehearsals and marched as part of the band. If any of these students had failed, do you think it would have been okay for them to participate at a competition? The answer, as clearly stated by UIL, is no. Anyway, apparently all of this discussion is premature. We'll have to wait and see. It does suck quite a bit that a bunch of innocent band students can be penalized for the mistake of a single band student.

Has it really happened a lot? I know that Hawaii was superior to Alaska at semistate, but I wasn't aware that it has happened more than that. To be fair, this year is not the strongest Avon show I've seen, but it's also not the strongest nationals lineup I've seen. I figure that when I watch national finals on the webcast, I'll still be reasonably impressed by Avon. Of course, what I really want is for all 3 Texas bands to make finals, at least 2 to place in the upper half of finals, and for one of them to place in the top 3. Is that asking too much? Heh... I'm pretty greedy...

Get these heathen Indiana results off our Texas forums!1!1!!! Hahaha... It should be interesting to see how nationals plays out. I'm excited to see how far Avon and Carmel have come from those early season videos. Those two will probably be some stiff competition, along with Ben Davis and Lawrence Central. Even though all of the perennial Texas finalists won't be there this year, I think the bands from Texas that are going should do reasonably well.

Well, then all the previously posted hearsay about Poteet moving on is premature. That said, I'm hoping my response does turn out to be a valid one, because that will mean that Poteet will get to move on.

I'm glad that Poteet will get to continue on, but if I were from some of the other organizations that were not as lucky, I'd be pretty pissed off at UIL. To quote a TEA question and answer about No Pass, No Play: "Are ineligible students permitted to travel to competitive events with the school group? No. Students must be eligible to travel to competitive events." Failing student = ineligible student = should not have even been at the competition. This is unequivocal. A student operating the sound board for the band is part of the band, whether or not the student participates in band classes, etc. Might I remind people here that band is an EXTRACURRICULAR activity. Technically speaking, all band members are students who throw in time to help out the band after school lets out. I would also like to add that a discussion of precedent here is rather silly. UIL is not a court of law. Rulings of the past do not supplant the existing legislation.

"Uninvited" featuring Symphony No. 7 Mvmnt. 2 by Beethoven, Uninvited by Alanis Morissette, Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! by Avner Dorman, Symphony No. 5 Mvmnt. 2 by Prokofiev, and Piano Sonata No. 1 Mvmnt. 1 by Avner Dorman. Coincidentally, both Avon and The Woodlands are doing the same Beethoven and Prokofiev pieces this year (although a little bit differently) and will go face to face in national finals. Based on the Oct. 8th Conroe videos and the Oct. 15th ISSMA regional videos, I'd say that The Woodlands has the music performance edge. But then, things have probably changed quite a bit for both bands since then. Here's a video of 3-time national champion Avon, if anyone is interested: The show starts around the 5 minute mark.

I'd say that I'm about 90% certain that the top 4 will be some combination of James Bowie, L.D. Bell, Marcus, and The Woodlands. Those 4 will be hard to crack. I think the real question is which band will round out the top 5. Cedar Park? SFA? CTJ? Spring, who virtually nobody has seen? Who knows, maybe Spring will be incredible.

This isn't entirely accurate. It's true that we shouldn't view GE as being purely about how entertaining a show is to a general football crowd, but to say that it has nothing to do with excitement is false. The issue is that while BOA judges are supposed to take audience reaction into consideration, they're also encouraged to act on their own tastes and preferences. You can guess whose preference (Judge vs. Crowd) takes the front seat in the scoring. (This is spelled out in the adjudication handbook, which I'm surprised hasn't been posted.) Music accounts for 60% of a band's score at BOA, while Visual accounts for 40%. I think you're making a mistake when you take the amount devoted to Music Performance and compare it to the amount devoted to both Visual Performance and Visual GE. This ignores the fact that Music GE is strongly connected to performance considerations. In fact, half of all Music GE is in what is called the "performance subcaption", while the other half is in "repertoire", which would be related to design aspects. Critics of the BOA scoring system generally overlook this fact and say that GE is all about show design, which is patently false. Really, in the big scheme of things, performance considerations make up 70% of a band's score, while design ones make up 30%. Whoever said earlier that one must perform a show at a high level before one can expect a high GE score was simply reiterating something every BOA judge has been taught. There are of course significant differences between BOA and UIL. I find that in UIL I can accurately predict all state finalists based purely on fine-line music performance, whereas I can't do the same in BOA. I find that the bands that make finals at UIL state generally are the ones that sound closest to concert ensembles. There are things to be commended about this style of judging, and I find myself sometimes wishing that BOA would recruit some UIL judges for their Music Performance caption judging, since I feel that UIL judges pay more attention to proper tone concepts than BOA judges do. That said, BOA does focus on a lot of important things that UIL judges don't, and on the whole I prefer the BOA system to the UIL system. Anyway, I just signed up because I'm bored and wanted to look at predictions. This was a little bit discursive. I'm off to post my predictions!