In Which Ryan Makes A Mixtape
June 2023 | 4:6
Koopa and Goomba think maybe THAT car is the one bringing me back to fill their food dish.
What's Been Happening
This month has been somehow calmer and busier at the same time, best exemplified by the fact that I’m writing this while at home for a day after starting drum corps pretour and before I get on a plane to London just in case I don’t get time while I’m over there <Narrator: He did not have time while he was over there>. Mixed in with that, full drafts of 12 separate projects are all out in the ether awaiting rehearsals or revisions and fall scheduling is well under way before I truly hit the road for DCI. I guess it’s a good thing I ate that elephant.
May your masks smell pleasant and your packages arrive without incident,
Ryan
Chart O' The Month
One of my favorite things about writing for the marching arts groups I do is the variety of music that comes up in design discussions. There’s always another cool artist doing something and no way to really keep up, so the extremely wide net that gets cast by so many friends and colleagues is such a blessing. Add in the opportunity to transcribe and really get inside some of these pieces and it becomes some of my best annual opportunities to really expand my listening and my repertoire of ideas.
The above track is from last year’s SCVC show, which I’ve already shared before but I want to again just to highlight the importance of being open to ideas. The title for the show and the overall premise is “Somewhere New”, and comes from the opening lyrics to “Between 1st and A” by the Punch Brothers… which was something we considered using for the second movement before we decided to do a weird version of Mozart’s “Magic Flute”. TL;DR - sometimes the right answer is right where you left it but nowhere near where you thought.
All that to say; here’s some of my favorite tracks that came up in the last couple months. Reach out if you want to know more about them because as discussed, I’m a big ol’ nerd and love talking about these things:
PATAX - “Man in the Mirror” (Michael Jackson)
Anna Meredith - “Paramour”
Isfar Sarabski - “Novruz”
Snarky Puppy - “Skate U”
Snarky Puppy - “Outlier”
Ramin Djawadi - “Paint it Black” (Rolling Stones, from “Westworld”)
Marshall Gilkes - “Puddle Jumping”
Look, Nature!
This is a phlox divaricata from a recent hiking trip to Bluff Spring Fen in Wisconsin. It is also not a dendrobium.
Education Notes
I was recently asked to make a short video for the DCI judges training talking about a couple areas of the DCI brass judging sheet that I thought were important to consider (#gigbrag). As I considered this and eventually made the video, I landed on two specific things that I think can be helpful regardless of the idiom or context:
Style is an indicator of musical maturity. We (correctly) spend a lot of time discussing, developing, and evaluating musical fundamentals. That said, playing with good style on top of those fundamentals is perhaps the best indicator that a musician has spent enough time listening and playing music. See also “playing the correct notes and rhythms from the source material is not the same as playing the style”.
Consider the environment as you make judgements. As educators we have built in reactions to sounds, but we also have the unique scenario of being in environments the audience will never experience. Therefore, it’s always worth taking the second to consider the environment we’re hearing those sounds and asking ourselves if the player is in fact doing the correct or incorrect thing to make the audience experience the music.