"Our Favorite Things" was The Cadets' present to drum corps fans, inspired by past hits from corps that pushed the envelope in sophistication and entertainment over the years, including Santa Clara Vanguard, the Madison Scouts and The Cadets themselves. It also helped the corps mark its 70th anniversary.
The opening of the show was based on the popular hit, "My Favorite Things," from "The Sound of Music." Visually, quite a bit of curvilinear drill moved into a traditional left side entrance from a front built along a yard line, much like in the very early years of Drum Corps International and before.
This maneuvering set up Clifton Williams' "Fanfare and Allegro," performed by Santa Clara Vanguard in 1972, 1984 and the corps’ DCI Championship-winning year of 1973.
When Williams first wrote the work in 1954, it was generally regarded as being too difficult for many bands to perform. But when the composition won the first American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Award for best original band literature in 1956, Williams' career took off and elementary school band director and Vanguard founder Gail Royer decided one day it would be the perfect piece for Santa Clara Vanguard to prove what was musically possible on the football field. Sometimes dissonant, sometimes martial in character, mostly modern and individualistic in nature, the piece forever changed contemporary wind literature in the concert hall and in drum corps.
The Cadets’ rendition was publicized as “piercing the air like a stiletto, with brass ripping apart the sky over the stadium.” The corps also added its own brand of flex drill and quick-paced evolutions, updating the visual nature of the piece.
Malagueña was already an established trademark of the Madison Scouts, who played the piece in 1963, 1965, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1996 and the year the Wisconsin corps won the DCI title in 1988. The Cadets' version combined traditional elements of the piece with versions by the Stan Kenton Band, a symphonic rendition by Morton Gould and Percy Faith's dance-tinged version.
For their rendition visually, The Cadets borrowed the Scouts' huge rotating company front while heading into the main melody. This was followed by members of the corps having fun and letting off some steam, even drummers and horn players performing while lying on the ground. An ensuing "park-and-blow" segment showed that The Cadets' horn line could blast with the best.
Perhaps no work better defined the surge The Cadets took on the way to several DCI World Championship titles than Ron Nelson's "Rocky Point Holiday." It was first performed by East Coast corps in 1982 and again for the corps' Championship-winning year of 1983. Originally scored by Nelson to emphasize the brightness of the concert band timbre, the blazing yellow and orange flags helped convey the brightness of The Cadets' own horns and the glimmering mallet keyboard instruments that Nelson exploited in the original.
It was during this closing number that the Cadets brought out their trademark "G" drill form, which, as in the early 1980s, employed the use of an arrow to point toward a new era of Cadets supremacy and fearless artistic innovation.
Ending with the late Hall of Fame member George Zingali's famous "Z-pull" from those earliest DCI Championship years, the show capped off a smorgasbord of musical and visual quotes from DCI's past.
The Cadets captured the bronze medal at the 2003 DCI World Championship Finals in Orlando, just a tenth and a half of a point behind the second-place Cavaliers. The Cadets’ percussion section in particular put up strong numbers on the judges’ sheets, ultimately winning the Fred Sanford Award for Best Percussion Performance.
2003 DCI World Championship Finals Awards Ceremony
Michael Boo was a member of the Cavaliers from 1975-1977. He wrote about the drum corps activity for more than 35 years while serving as a staff writer for various Drum Corps International projects. During his lifetime Boo wrote for numerous other publications including an honors-winning book on the history of figure skating. He also was an accomplished composer. Boo passed away in 2020 and was inducted into the DCI Hall of Fame posthumously in 2021.