Drum Corps International, or DCI for short, regulates and scores the drum corps activity. As with any company, there will be people who disagree with its intentions. Although they bring up good arguments as to why DCI might be ruining drum corps, I think these arguments aren’t 100% true and are just made up so people can complain about DCI. Here are their arguments and why I disagree with them.
The 2015 DCI logo
Most people who march/have marched corps pride themselves on not being marching bands. Although they essentially do the same thing in marching and playing music at the same time, corps and bands are different in terms of instrumentation, show style, and rehearsal etiquette. Many of the people who think that DCI is killing drum corps also think that drum corps is slowly turning into marching band because of big instrument companies’ influence on DCI. They think that DCI profits off of allowing more instruments into shows, but I disagree with this. These people are essentially insulting DCI, and therefore using a rhetorical fallacy. Each new rule change allows corps to implement creative ideas into their show. For example, the rule to allow electronics into DCI made it possible to use narrations to explain concepts that music alone couldn’t. This allowed the corps Carolina Crown to perform a show based on physics, having the narration explain the concept. Overall, I think that DCI allows new instruments for use because they want to give corps new creative opportunities rather than profit.
The biggest accusation of DCI is that they don’t give corps a fair shot at winning, but instead make it about politics. Although this may seem true at some points, there are 1 minimum of 12 different judges at every show, For every single judge to throw the scores is impossible, so I think these people are wrong. If DCI were to do this, it would have been exposed by now, and I think these people are just making things up so they can stay angry at DCI.
Overall, I disagree with the people who think DCI is ruining drum corps. DCI has regulated the activity for so long that ruining it by accident or on purpose would be impossible. In my opinion, these people use rhetorical fallacies to explain their conspiracy theory, which gives them no merit whatsoever.
The 2014 DCI World Championships