Marching music fans were treated to a unique event at West Texas A&M University’s Buffalo Stadium on July 16. Drum Corps International’s “DCI West Texas” brought a taste of marching music’s major league to the High Plains. While DCI West Texas is one of the smaller shows on the 2025 schedule, local high school and college-aged musicians, as well as music fans from many other walks of life, turned out in droves to enjoy this little slice of the world of drum and bugle corps. World Class corps Genesis, The Academy, Pacific Crest and The Boston Crusaders, as well as Open Class corps Arsenal, all competed as part of their summer tours taking them throughout the United States.
The competing corps traveled from all over the United States and performed in a diverse array of shows:
- Arsenal:
- Show title: Equilibrium
- The show explores the concept of balance and features music from composers like Jules Massenet, Béla Bartók, and James Horner.
- Score: Gold
- Hometown: El Paso, TX
- Genesis
- Show title: Kaleidoscope Heart
- The straight-forward and colorful program was inspired by and features selections from Sara Bareilles, Chappell Roan and Ariana Grande.
- Score:71.65
- Hometown: Austin, TX
- The Academy
- Show title: London Fog
- The show included selections by Edward Elgar and music from the TV series Loki, it aimed to evoke images of the foggy, eerie atmosphere of life in Victorian London
- Score: 74.85
- Hometown: Tempe, AZ
- Pacific Crest
- Show title: It Sin Our Nature
- Pacific Crest blended the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden with an examination of the morality of the decisions that all people make throughout day-to-day life, featuring musical selections by Rihanna, Oskar Schuster, Dimitri Shostakovich, and Hans Zimmer
- Score: 76.10
- Hometown: City of Industry, CA
- Boston Crusaders
- Show title: BOOM
- A retro-futuristic exploration of “the conflict between ‘innovative’ optimism and ‘atomic-age’ fear”, with musical selections including the works of Les Baxter, Sara Bareilles, and Hans Zimmer
- Score: 89.30
- Hometown: Boston, MA
Pacific Crest closed out the evening festivities with an encore musical performance.
Drum corps are a long-standing American tradition with a rich history. Over the course of The Great War as radio communications became an integral part of modern militaries, a unique slice of the armed forces were rendered obsolete. The drums and bugles once used to command troops on the battlefield in centuries past were pulled from service and sold off to organizations such as Veterans of Foreign Wars and The American Legion who gathered groups of musicians from within those organizations to participate in parades. Out of that sea change in military communications came civilian drum and bugle corps.
Much like a high school marching band, World Class corps are judged based on a rubric including six captions: visual analysis (quality of the overall visual design of the show and how well it works with the musical content), visual proficiency (execution of the marching maneuvers), color guard (proficiency of execution and design of all aspects of the color guard), music analysis (broad analysis of the music, including arrangement, and how the chosen selections engage with the show’s concept), brass and percussion (the content of the music on a sectional basis, and how well the musicians performed said content), and general effect (how well the visual and musical elements of the show coalesce to form an engaging performance).
The final composite scores, ranging from zero to 100, are calculated after all corps have performed and announced at the end of the night with one of the corps then performing a musical encore to close out the event. The smaller Open Class corps are judged under different criteria, and final scores for those performances are given using a “bronze-silver-gold” rating system.
Drum corps differentiate themselves from marching bands via the complete lack of woodwind instruments (such as flutes and saxophones) in drum corps as well as the use of one (and eventually two and three) valve G bugles instead of Bb brass instruments. These differences were slowly erased as the activity evolved. In 1991, DCI began to allow three valve G bugles in competitions. In 1999, the requirement to use G bugles was dropped from the rulebook entirely.
Just this year, another rule change allowed corps to feature woodwind performers in a soloist capacity. In the current era, the main factors separating drum corps from high school marching bands are the rigorous auditioning requirements and a higher degree of difficulty in both the musical selections and visual execution of the shows, as well as the intense touring schedule spanning roughly from Memorial Day to Labor Day every summer.
Beginning in the early 1930s, organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America, local fire fighters’ organizations, Catholic youth organizations, police athletic leagues, Elk Lodges, and community churches began their own groups modeled on those started by the veterans organizations. As the number of groups grew, the VFW and American Legion founded national competitions featuring veterans’ corps. By 1937, both organizations began hosting competitions for the new junior corps as well.
Interest in drum corps peaked in the early 1960s, when an estimated 1,400 corps were active throughout the United States. During this traditional era, drum corps carried a strong military association, reflected in the regimented marching style and distinctly old-fashioned musical selections; however, in the late 1960s, a fundamental change was initiated within the activity. Show designers and directors began to feel the traditional judgment criteria at contests stifled musical and theatrical creativity, and as the strong economy of the ‘60s gave way to the comparatively weak economy of the ‘70s, many organizations either folded completely or saw a drop in revenue.
Out of this period of change, a new organization was formed. Drum Corps International sought to build a framework for drum corps to compete under that allowed more stable financial compensation as well as a greater degree of freedom in artistic expression. This new paradigm persists to this day, opening up new avenues of creative expression on the marching field and fostering an overall more artistic foundation for the activity and largely leaving the overtly militaristic elements as fixtures of the past.
DCI’s 2026 schedule has yet to be announced, but it seems more than likely that next summer will bring a new set of high-octane shows to Buffalo Stadium and give fans another evening of unforgettable performances.
If you have an upcoming event you would like the public to be aware of, we encourage you to check out our community calendar! It's the place to visit for up-to-date information on what's coming up all across the High Plains!
Special thanks to Casey Stavenhagen for assisting in the creation of this story.
