At the 2013 Drum Corps International World Championships, Carolina Crown became the first new World Class champion since 1996, those 17 years being the longest time span between first-time champions in DCI history.
Crown edged the defending champion Blue Devils at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis by a quarter of a point while earning a perfect score in brass performance and also capturing top honors in the general effect and visual performance captions. For the sixth year in a row, the Blue Devils color guard took home top caption honors.
The Cadets’ Samuel Barber production took third place and the award for best percussion performance, eking past Santa Clara Vanguard’s “Les Misérables” show by a tenth of a point. In ninth place, Madison Scouts celebrated the corps’ 75 years of brotherhood and the 12th-place Blue Stars returned to the Finals competition by trading positions with the 13th-place Crossmen from the year before.
With “The re:Rite of Spring,” Blue Devils celebrated the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky’s landmark “Le Sacre du Printemps,” better known to American audiences as “The Rite of Spring.” The California corps’ production reimagined the radical work that forever changed the world of symphonic music, demonstrating that the intervening 10 decades hasn’t lessened the ballet’s ability to provoke a new generation.
Watch Blue Devils' "The re:Rite of Spring" on Blu-ray disc
The 1913 work is the third ballet famed impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned of the Russian modernist for his Ballet Russes dance company, following up on “The Firebird” and “Petroushka” in 1910 and 1911. While the work—based on rituals of ancient pagan Russia—received international praise at its first performance of the music alone in 1914, the 1913 ballet debut with the dancers of Ballet Russes spurred a near audience riot due to the unexpected primitive nature of the dancing. It was far from the prim and proper ballet steps that sophisticated audiences had come to expect.
Even before the first sound emanated from the field, Blue Devils’ production provided evidence it would be radically different from anything drum corps fans had witnessed prior to 2013. 100 tall vertical poles, representing the 100 years of “The Rite of Spring,” were spread across the field to suggest a dense forest. According to the staff, corps members manipulated the poles throughout the show as “living characters,” allowing many different interpretations of what the props really meant to each audience member.
2013 Blue Devils
The production opened with “Kiss of the Earth,” based on the opening section of “Le Sacre” that Stravinsky simply titled, “Introduction.” Red balls tossed in the air by color guard members represented droplets of blood, foreshadowing the ritual sacrifice to follow. After a brief keyboard introduction, two muted trumpets re-created the famed high-pitched bassoon solo with which Stravinsky opened his ballet, while other horn players and color guard members lowered themselves and pivoted around many of the poles.
A swirling mass of horns and drums led into Darryl Brenzel’s “The Rewrite of Spring,” a 2010 work written for the 17-piece Mobtown Modern Big Band he directs in Baltimore, Maryland. Brenzel’s work served as the basis for “Dance of the Young Girls,” a segment based around repetitive, rhythmically accented tone clusters prophetic of the sheer brutality of the ritualized sacrifices to come.
By now several of the poles were set up in a large circle, providing a round stage for the corps to perform within. Brenzel’s interpretation broke into a wild and swinging rendition of Stravinsky’s work before turning more symphonic for the third segment of the show, “The Ritual Abduction,” comprised of music mostly from the original ballet.
“Spring Rounds” consisted of Don Sebesky’s jazz rendition of the ballet, also titled “The Rite of Spring,” laid atop parts of Stravinsky’s original. Sebesky, who has received 31 Grammy nominations, wrote his version of the Stravinsky ballet for his “Three Works for Jazz Soloist and Symphony Orchestra” recording of 1999, from which drum corps got introduced to the piece “Bird and Bela in B-flat.” Blue Devils performed that work in 1991, and shorter segments of it showed up in the corps’ “Winged Victory” show of 2007 and “Café Voltaire” in 2012. More recently, “Bird and Bela” appeared in Bluecoats’ “Session 44” production of 2018.
“Spring Rounds” started with a flugelhorn solo that utilized a Conn-Selmer vintage Model 1FR flugelhorn, a specialized instrument combining an extensive amount of research into the sonority and design of classic brass instruments. A little quasi-dubstep led into a drum feature as two curved arcs were employed by color guard members, the performers posing as if shooting arrows from bows and further providing a glimpse at the ritual sacrifice to come. Powerful and tribal-sounding quarter note blasts were overlaid with a trumpet soloist improvising on top of the musical mass, played by the same soloist that a bit earlier had played the flugelhorn.
The closing “Sacrificial Dance” segment mostly came from the Stravinsky work. The awaited sacrifice took place inside a cluster of poles on the 50-yard line, arranged as if bars of an enclosure meant to prevent escape. The lone guard member chosen for sacrifice at first tried to escape, then succumbed to her fate. A long red banner inside the prison of poles and red balls tossed outside the enclosure left no doubt that the bloody sacrifice had been carried out. The banner draped the victim as other guard members lifted her high in a show of appeasement to the pagan gods.
Not that anyone in the audience needed to be told, but the sacrifice reminded all that “The re:Rite of Spring” never intended to swaddle those in the stands with comforting hugs.
2013 Overview
Michael Boo was a member of the Cavaliers from 1975-1977. He has written about the drum corps activity for more than 35 years 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, Indiana.