Drum corps fans throughout the country got a peek at the 1986 Garfield Cadets in a standstill performance during televised coverage of the Statue of Liberty rededication at the 4th of July weekend, following a lengthy restoration of the iconic structure. Fans couldn’t help but notice the corps’ 84 brass players at a time when corps size was still restricted to 128, made possible by restricting the guard that year to just 12 members. At the 1986 DCI World Championships in Madison, Wis., Blue Devils became only the second corps to sweep all captions at the Finals, the first being BD’s corps from their first DCI title year in 1976, which was the first time the corps played “Channel One Suite.” The 1986 championship was the third one earned by the corps while playing the classic Buddy Rich piece. Santa Clara Vanguard’s super-fast pants change in the middle of their production was the talk of the season. Two corps earned their highest placements ever—Suncoast Sound in 5th with a searing rendition of the Kenton Band’s “Adventures in Time” and Sky Ryders in 9th with the Wicked Witch of the West riding a bicycle across the field during “The Wizard of Oz.” It was also the last time fans saw Troopers in the Top-12 until 2009. For the first time, the Cavaliers popped into the top three—barely—by a tenth of a point over the Garfield Cadets, mainly due to a one-point advantage in Performance Visual. Future DCI Hall of Fame member Steve Brubaker’s drill formations were heavy on geometric evolutions, which quickly became the corps’ visual trademark over the next several years. Musically, it was the most sophisticated show the corps had done up to that point, pointing the way to several years of contemporary music from both the orchestra and wind band repertoires. The show opened with Peter Mennin’s “Canzona,” a landmark in contemporary wind literature that was commissioned by Edwin Franko Goldman, composer and founder of the American Bandmasters Association. It was one of the first works to be premiered by the groundbreaking Eastman Wind Ensemble, founded by Frederick Fennell in the early 1950s. This work, as important as it is to the band world, was the only piece for winds the orchestral composer ever wrote. Toward the end of the piece, 16 members of the color guard played crash cymbals, running under a flurry of flags tossed across several yards.
The next piece was John Barnes Chance’s “Variations on a Korean Folk Song,” written by Chance in the mid-1960s and based on “Arirang” (literally meaning “rolling hills” and pronounced AH-dee-dong), a folk song the composer heard while stationed in Korea with the Eighth U.S. Army Band in the late 1950s. It’s a song of a woman anguishing over the forced departure of her love. Chance brilliantly took the pentatonic (Oriental five-note scale) melody and added Western harmonies to it, creating one of the best loved and most played works in band literature.
For this week only, you can save on the Legacy Collection DVD that contains this complete Cavaliers performance, along with all finalists from the 1986 DCI World Championships.
1986 Overview
Discount DVD offer ends Monday, June 10 at 8:30 a.m. ET.
Michael Boo was a member of the Cavaliers from 1975-1977. He has written about the drum corps activity for more than a quarter century and serves as a staff writer for various Drum Corps International projects. Boo has written for numerous other publications and has published an honors-winning book on the history of figure skating. As an accomplished composer, Boo holds a bachelor's degree in music education and a master's degree in music theory and composition. He resides in Chesterton, Ind.
