Spring 2024

B&O Report Spring 2024

Thank you to everyone who made festival work!

• All DX hosts for all the work that goes into hosting - we literally could not do this without you!

• Mitch for all his work getting adjudicators - more than normal with the pilot and reschedule.

• Roger & Whitney for building the pilot script and survey.

• Kelli for making the rescheduled day work.

• Rebecca and Spencer for much help and guidance.

• Jamie DeVoe & Linda Blakemore for hosting even though they are not currently MSBOA members.

• All member workers for fulfilling your assignments, even if rescheduled. Thank you all!

Adjustments for next year:

• I will ask for updates on work assignment preferences after performance schedules go out. This optional google form will allow the B&O chair to have more up to date information when building work schedules. 

• As we have have more sites than we used to in order to accommodate increased requests to perform in the middle of the day, our pool of workers quickly thins out. Members should expect full day work assignments for B&O going forward. The first people to get half day work assignments when possible should be hosts.

• If you have issues with your recordings, immediately contact UDP as below.

• I'll include reminders that electric bass is not an allowed instrument unless specified in the score. See Yearbook, page 62, point 9.

• Reminder that you need to finish your performance within the specified time. You can be cut off if you go too long. This is why it is traditional to perform the required piece second. Not required, but suggested.

  • Purchase extra time if you want to spend time more than a minute or two playing onstage before you begin your performance.

• Accommodations

  • Please check accommodations with the B&O chair (and probably site chair) weeks before you arrive at Festival. Be specific. In order for us to make accommodations, we need documentation that a specific accommodation is needed. General notes about a particular condition don't specify what accommodation is to be given, and then make approving accommodations challenging.

• If we repeat the pilot project, we should make one or more of these adjustments:

  • Option 1 - Suggested - Make all pilot sites 4 adjudicators/clinicians and schedule more time between each group at the pilot project sites so that groups get maximum benefit from the clinic and clinician/adjudicators are not rushing to get everything done.

  • Option 2 - Hire enough clinicians that each site has 3 judges and 2 clinicians. This will get expensive and may cause us to have to limit the number of pilot sites.

  • Option 3 - If Option 2, we may also want to charge a higher price for groups participating in the pilot to offset the higher cost of running these sites. An extra $25 -$30 per ensemble would roughly cover the cost of the additional adjudicator. (This is difficult to estimate because mileage is different for every adjudicator.)

  • Consider making the recording adjudicators the clinicians to help with the time crunch?

• To be discussed at new business: I am suggesting that we raids the price of B&O registration by $10 this year. This would partially address the current deficit that B&O runs every year. It would not be enough to offset the cost of a 5 person panel in the pilot project.

• It would also help our B&O finances if we went back to DX managing the judge's recordings. We have the recording devices. With full day work assignments, this would be easy to manage.

Issues with recordings from festival? 

(Static, recordings cut short, missing recordings, unusable volume, unsatisfactory quality, etc)

• Immediately email Bob Nixon at bob.udprecording@gmail.com 

• Check your recordings the day of. If you wait until the next day to plug in your USB drive, you may not get a fix in time to play your recordings the day after festival.

• If anything at all is wrong with your recordings from Festival, please contact UDP (our recording company) ASAP. The sooner you contact them, the more likely they are to be able to fix the issue.

• If you are getting static or skips, double check. Sometimes our computers cause issues and a second play back will be better.

• New survey will go here.

• We are working to improve the system for communicating number of recordings to judges and recording techs. The state office is checking to see if this can be added to the program since we put it into the website. 

  • Consider going to one recording judge per site - this is what most districts do. With full day work assignments, we could manage the judge's recordings again.

  •  Best practice for this right now appears to be putting a sticky note on your scores indicating how many are to record.

Results of DX Recording Survey 2024

Festival Deadlines for 2025:

• October 14 B&O registration will open

• December 6 Deadline for 2024 festival registration

• December 13 Late deadline with $50 fee is one week after regular deadline. 

  • Registrations sent after the late deadline will not be accepted. 

    • See Page 57 of the Yearbook for District X's late policy, which mirrors the state policy.

• January 31 Deadline for having information in for program

Host sites confirmed for 2025. 

These are the dates I have confirmed for B&O Festival for 2025:

2/25 Hastings Band 

2/26 EGR Band

2/26 Jenison Orch

2/27 Jenison Band

2/27 GRCS 3-9pm Band AFTERNOON & EVENING

2/28 GRCS 8-4 Band

2/28 Allegan Band

2/28 Jenison Orch 2 

3/4 Grandville Band 1

3/4 Lakewood Band

3/5 WO Band

3/6 Grandville Band 2

3/6 WO Orch

3/7 GRPS City Middle/High Band 

3/7 Calvin Orch

If the Pilot Project will continue next year.

• Scheduling additional time between groups may help with this, but it will mean fewer groups get their preferred time.

• Survey will go out in September asking for interest in participating in the pilot project. If we go with the higher number of clinicians, we either charge a higher cost for pilot site participation or limit the number of pilot sites to 2-4 based on what we can afford.

  • The main feedback from directors and clinicians was that the sites with two clinicians and three adjudicators was preferred over the sites with two rotating clinicians/adjudicators and two permanent adjudicators.