Five Ways to Teach or Clean Articulation

It's never safe to assume that students are articulating correctly. Students get by through their beginner year with ways of faking it, and of course we as teachers can only spend so much time on one given thing. It's understandable. Articulation has to be retaught and reinforced every year, throughout the year. Sometimes I forget this, and yet I'm always surprised by how much things clean up after addressing articulation. It's as if the band was slurring it's speech, and suddenly they remember how to enunciate. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to teach it, or word it, but here are a few of the things I've used with some success.

5 Ways to Keep Scales Interesting

Simple modifications to scales can
help your band grow by leaps and
bounds!

Good to see you today!

One of the things I like to do in rehearsal is experiment with the warm up time. A while back I blogged about  how to make your warm up time relevant for students, and today's post is closely related to that. There are plenty of ways to structure a good warm up, but I'm a believer that technique building should be included in there somewhere. I also believe scales are a fundamental building block for musicianship, not only for the music literacy and fluency, but for the technical aspects of playing. So we play scales every day. The problem with scales is that they can be very mundane. Fortunately, it can be remedied by adding in some variety. So, submitted for your consideration, here are a few ways to mix up your scales (both basic and advanced) to make them more interesting, fun (hopefully), and more relevant for students. 

Six Wind Pattern Applications in Rehearsal

Greetings!

Sam Pilafian leads a band in
breathing exercises.

Back in January I wrote a post titled, "The Transformational Power of The Breathing Gym". If somehow you're unfamiliar with this awesome product, please click on the link to learn about what it is and its effectiveness. I shared some of my stories about individual student breakthroughs or small groups successes. There was a reflective post later on where I briefly mentioned a few other things I had found success dealing with using wind patterns, but until now I haven't written a post that puts it all together in a way you can easily use in rehearsal.

A Wind Pattern is where you isolate the breathing and fix that before going back to the instrument. I also have students finger the instrument while breathing. Playing a wind instrument is almost entirely about the wind. We know that air support causes probably 90% of the problems we have, and Wind Patterns are a good way to isolate that aspect of playing. So here are six situations where you can tell students to Wind Pattern:

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!