Belong by Washed Out

In a Treeless Place, Only Snow – John Luther Adams
American Contemporary Music Ensemble
Live at (le) Poisson Rouge
March 14th, 2010

Timo Andres – celeste
Nuiko Wadden – harp
Haruka Fujii, Chris Thompson – vibraphones
Caleb Burhans, Yuki Numata – violins
Nadia Sirota – viola
Clarice Jensen – cello

The entire show, including more John Luther Adams and Kevin Volans, is streaming on Q2 here.

This whole post is an excuse to put up a couple recently uncovered drum corps related items. Here’s some context:

Traditions have a way of sticking for years or decades in drum corps, be they emotional or borderline psychotic. For one, there’s a lot of tradition related to the way the corps moves around before and after the show; 128 people need to get from place to place and on/off the field without breaking character. Stay in step in this situation, walk casually focused in that situation, don’t let people break the ranks, don’t run in uniform, hold your hat this way not that way, it can get pretty military-ish (blah). But the post show playoff is a cool moment of charming simplicity. Drumlines have been playing parade-ey cadences for ever and ever (some are so great), but I’m not exactly sure when the post-show playoff became the specific responsibility of the bass drum line. Here is the most famous one, if only because of its weirdly ominous simplicity. But here is the classic Santa Clara Vanguard playoff, which has walked the corps off the field for no less than 35 years straight in one form or another, and is referred to by the line as simply “SCV.”

I wanted to post this because I finally got around to uploading a video I’ve been hanging onto for a while: the 1995 bass line, who loved to grab attention in any way they possibly could (it was a long, difficult summer), used to park in front of the stands and extend that cadence into a little post-show. This is the last half of it:

SCV Bass Drum Line 1995 play “Strange Purple Orangoutans” by Ryan Stohs after an early season show in California.

Apologies about embarrassing over-excited drunk guy superfan. That tends to happen. After that summer I had an inspired moment and wrote a playoff of my own, also set up with the classic “SCV” riff, but for the whole drumline. I’m sure nobody ever saw it. I threw it into a box, which I just discovered the other day, omg 15 years later? Crazy. I remember the feeling of writing drumline music back then; it was so exciting to be creating music of my own (I knew next to nothing at that point about writing for pitched instruments, only drums) but also frustrating because I just had to imagine what it might have sounded like. Because of the time involved in learning music and getting 20 kids to play it well enough to be even just recognizable, there just weren’t opportunities for “readings” back then.

Playoff (1995, after “SCV”)
Chris Thompson

But NOW! My computer is full of tiny magical robots that can read music and also play the drums! So all I have to do is put the notes in to the lefty software Sibelius (also crucial here is Tapspace’s “Virtual Drumline,” sample library, which every composer should know about because in addition to having the only library of realistic marching percussion samples, it also has some of the best orchestral percussion samples as well), and I can hear just what that piece of music would sound like, played by a live drumline. And so can you!

(audio file above! If you are using google reader, you have to click through to listen)

If you want to see how this all works on the score, here it is!

I plan to write more drumline music but need to figure out a possible scenario in which that might be appropriate in my life today. I’m open to suggestions.