Musicality for Beginners: Basic Phrase Shaping

Hello again!

On the last post in this series I talked about teaching students about implied note emphasis. That is a good first step that is easy for them to grasp and gets them making musical decisions. Once they get the hang of that, the next step is to teach them about basic phrase shaping. Keep in mind with what you're about to read, that the key indicator is basic. This is meant to be understood by beginning band students who are in the last leg of their end of the year concert preparation.

To be successful in this new skill, students will need to understand how to identify phrases (or at least know where all of the phrases in the music happen), and they'll need to be proficient in crescendos and decrescendos.

I Found a Job!

Hello friends!

Special Thanks to my cooperating teacher and his great
students for this awesome name plate they gave me at
the spring concert.

This is strictly a journal entry. I just wanted to talk a little about the past few months. I didn't want to write a journal blog of despair, but really that's what the past couple of months have mostly been.

I started my job search in February, before the TMEA Convention. I remember being so excited for TMEA (after all, 2010 TMEA was life changing for me), and then being progressively more bummed out when I didn't get a call to meet a principal who had said he would like to meet me while he was there. Of course I did eventually meet him. I knocked the interview out of the park, and went back a couple of weeks later to meet the other principal. I was the favorite for the position of Band Director at this district for weeks, but in the end I didn't get it. It was the first major missed opportunity of many in the job hunt season. You see, normally this small school district didn't get any good applicants, but this time they had several good applicants, and one outstanding applicant. He showed just as much enthusiasm and imagination as I did, but the big difference was that he had several years of experience as an assistant at an incredible small school program in the East.

The Music of W. Francis McBeth

Greetings!

Considering that I've been reading and rereading W. Francis McBeth's book, "Effective Performance of Band Music", I figured I couldn't move on from talking about it without bringing some of his music to this blog. I mean, the man came up with the Pyramid of Sound schema, after all!

In looking around for music to feature on this blog, I discovered that he wrote "Daniel in the Lion's Den", a tuba solo with band accompaniment written for Daniel Perantoni and featured on Perantoni's solo album, "Daniel in the Lion's Den". This is a cool thing to me, because as I've mentioned before, Daniel Perantoni's was the first truly incredible tuba sound I ever heard, and it was a constant inspiration to me as a tubist, especially in high school. It was one of, if not my favorite track on the album. What a cool way to have been impacted by McBeth!

Musicality for Beginners: Emphasizing Notes

Greetings!

From what I gather, one of the aspects of playing that many teachers struggle to teach is musicality. Here is what I mean by that - How do you get students to develop good enough musical instincts that they can make independent decisions regarding musical nuance?

I remembered having pretty good instincts in this regard as I entered college, but my later college experience trashed these skills in favor of something radically different, and I might add, much less exciting. I struggled to remember how we were taught those valuable skills. As the section leader, if we were not given details of nuance for a given phrase, I would make those decisions and pass it along to my section members so that we could immediately start practicing doing it with a unified sound on the next playing (sometimes one of the other guys would make good recommendations we would run with).

Considering that my senior year we had an All-State player in every section (except the euphonium section), I have to imagine that this happened throughout the band. Did it happen in our second band? I'm not sure. They did have a different teacher, so who knows.

What I do know is this - we promise creativity, and I feel like we don't always deliver. There are times when the conductor must give instruction as to nuance (emphasized notes, shaping, phrasing, style, etc) to unify the band. However, often students either don't have the tools to make those decisions on their own, or they don't even understand that they're supposed to. In my educational opinion, there is nothing creative about doing exactly what is written on the page, and/or exactly what you're told to do. The creativity can only come when the student takes that music and uses what they know to give it inflection and life. The end result will be unique based on their personal musical decisions. Not only does this give them the chance for creativity, but it makes each piece more musical as we simply don't have time to cover the nuance of every phrase for every part.

So having defined what I mean by musicality in this instance, and having defended why this is important, we can get into how it is taught. I've researched this topic in multiple texts, and plan to do a series of posts outlining various steps you can take with them. This is the first step, and the greatest part of this step is that you can do it with beginners.

A Survey of Authorities on Articulation (Composers and Conductors)

Greetings!

A few weeks ago I published a blog outlining my schema (or model) for teaching basic articulations to beginners based on their prior knowledge (dynamics and note length). One of the comments that showed up from my friend John at Music Dreams was that, of course, there are many ways to interpret articulations and that this will vary from one composer and situation to the next.

And of course, he's right. I admitted that this schema was for the basics, and the handout I attached says that this is simply a default, and the conductor may ask for something different on a given piece.

But as I was helping to organize a music library a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled onto a jewel - W. Francis McBeth's "Effective Performance of Band Music". Published in 1972 by Southwestern Music Company, it contains some of the best and most straight forward information I have yet to find regarding techniques for improving the band.

It also has an entire section devoted to the interpretation of articulation markings. In it, McBeth surveyed the premier wind band composers and conductors of the day as to their understanding of the five most common articulation markings. If you can find this book, you need to buy it. It should be cheap, and the information from those conductors and composers is worth it alone (although the in depth discussion on achieving the pyramid of sound really seals it, considering this book was the source of that schema).

So for your pleasure and edification, here is a summary of their comments. The conductors and composers who responded include: John Barnes Chance, Frank Erickson, Howard Hanson, Martin Mailman, Vaclav Nelhybel, Vincent Persichetti, Richard Willis, Harold Arnoldi, Frederick Fennell, Joe Barry Mullins, James Neilson, John Paynter, William D. Revelli and Clarence Sawhill. Enjoy!

How to Organize a Music Library

Hello again!

You're probably not looking for a summer project, but if your music library isn't well organized, it would be a project well worth your time. Last time I talked about the four steps to organize any space, and in this blog we're going to apply those steps to the music library.

Have you ever needed or wanted to find a piece of music and found you had to go digging around in cabinets where pieces were not kept in a particular order, or that you had to go digging around in piles of music that were not yet organized? I have even seen libraries and offices where sheet music lay strewn about on the floor!

Hey, I'm not making any judgments here. What I am saying is that your time is valuable, and our goal is always to push ourselves to accomplish more for the program in the same amount of time. If your library isn't well organized, then this is something that is no doubt eating up your time. Perhaps you've even had to pause class because someone was missing a part, and then you either had to go find it or send a student to go find it (while other teachers have procedures to do these things outside of class, in either case somebody isn't playing for a while).

The bottom line is this - having a well organized music library will save you time. Not only that, but it will contribute to a clutter free environment, which not only helps your students to have more respect for the program, but it also reduces your stress level!

Four Steps to Organize Any Space

Hello again!

Do you need to organize?

One of the great challenges of managing any program, like a band for example, is keepings things organized. One of the gentlemen I met this past semester, who goes around and sees many band halls, said to me, "The only time your office will be organized is on the first day, and after that...."

Indeed, particularly when you walk into a situation where things are a giant mess, it is difficult and time consuming to sort through it all and get it organized. Even after it's organized comes the challenge of keeping it organized. I understand.

My wife and I live in a small apartment, and at one point we had way more things than we had space for. We still do. But at a certain point I was getting stressed from the clutter. So I went out and bought a book, as I always do. This one was called Organizing for Dummies. This book will tell you how to organize everything, from your work desk to your desk top to your time, to any space you can imagine. I got to work, and one space at a time, day by day, the apartment transformed.

Hindemith, Copland and Stravinsky Conducting Their Work

Greetings!

YouTube has become an incredible resource for us musicians, as well as fans of music. Every time I go digging around for stuff, I find new things to get pumped about. Today's blog is a few selections of famous composers conducting their own works, all of which have transcriptions for band. The last one not only has audio, but actually includes video as well! Enjoy!

Paper Percussion?

Hello again!

Can paper percussion instruments help us keep an army
of percussionists engaged when there are more players
than parts?

Several months ago I wrote a series on how procedures maximize learning, and on the blog specifically about classroom procedures for band, one of the comments left recommended I think about how to handle percussionists.

Schools that are large enough have negotiated this problem by scheduling a percussion class that is separate from the full band class, so that the percussionists can rehearse their parts and additional percussion ensemble music non-stop. This is obviously a great solution, as percussionists only have to risk boredom during after school rehearsals when they put their part together with the full band. But you see, while the separate class is a great solution, it doesn't avoid the problem entirely. When the percussion gets to rehearse with the full concert band, they will inevitably be bored. I did my best in rehearsals this past semester, but I, too, am guilty of allowing this to happen.

At the time I received the comment, all I knew was that you do your best to keep them busy, but thanks to Dr. Peter Boonshaft's book, "Teaching Music With Purpose", I think there may be a much better solution that actually keeps percussionists engaged.

Paper Percussion.

Articulation Markings Schema and Handout

Hello again!

This past semester, one of the things I realized is that I wished I had a visual representation for articulation markings. This led me to recently develop one myself. It is based on the system that I was "raised on", which has a couple of components to it. This components combined give you an easy way to explain how to interpret different articulations based on previously learned concepts, which I really like. Here we go!

The Three Parts of a Note

I wish I could thank whoever started explaining articulations this way. The concept is that a note has three parts. Label them as you like. I prefer to use 1. Attack/Start of the Note, 2. The Body/Sustain of the Note, 3. The Release/End of the Note. 

If you simply explain this idea to students, they can probably come up with an image in their head, especially if you tell them to imagine it this way. Once this idea is established, you can more easily move on to explaining any articulation they'll come across.