4 Ways to Supplement the Beginner Band Book

Beginning Band students need
supplemental exercises to develop their
playing just like we did to develop ours.

I made a lot of mistakes with my first beginner class. One of the biggest by far was not supplementing their beginner band book. It's not that I didn't want to, or didn't know how to. It was more that I was so busy in my one man gig that it ended up as one of those things that just slipped by. Determined to make the beginners at my next job vastly different, I started working over the summer to create supplements. I've always been told that if you present everything through the book, you're probably in trouble, or that it's all about how you use the book. In some recent conversations on the Yellow Board I've found that some teachers use the book itself as a supplement, and have a large list of other things that are the base. Currently I'm in the school that spends half the class out of the book, and half in the book. The first twenty minutes or so are spent on supplements. I wish I were one of those teachers who had spent years collecting various materials to incorporate into their beginner curriculum. I need more time. Until then, if you're still spending the bulk of your time in the book, hopefully this will give you a few ideas to get started:

Teach Beginners to Count Rhythms

It's easy for a young musician to get lost
without some kind of counting system.

By now counting systems have been adopted by almost everyone, but some people still avoid teaching a counting system. My thought is that most people who don't teach a counting system probably are not familiar enough with one, or perhaps they already use one and have thought about switching to another but haven't because they're not used to it. Either way, students need a schema that helps them understand how to break down rhythms, and counting systems become extremely useful the more complicated the rhythms get. Personally, I'm an Eastman Counting System guy. I wanted to provide links to pages explaining the counting systems, but after the first 3 pages of google search I gave up on finding them. So here I'll briefly explain the two most widely used systems for band, traditional and Eastman, and then tell you why I recommend A) Using a counting system and B) Using Eastman.

Simple Procedures to Develop Literacy & Technique

Wait... is he the only one reading music???

Two of the biggest goals we work towards with beginners, after tone quality, is music literacy and playing technique. When I was in college I had the chance to observe a great beginning band teacher, and made notes of the procedures he used to teach new music to his students. Later on, attending workshops and reading posts on the YellowBoard reaffirmed that this was indeed a widely used practice by great beginning band teachers. The procedures are simple, easy to teach, and quickly become a routine to learn new lines of music. In the process it teaches music literacy, technique, and teach students how to break down and learn new music independently. If you're an experienced teacher, you probably already do this or something like it. But if you're struggling with your beginners, or if you're a pre-service teacher, then I hope this article will help shed some light on how to help your beginners with what can be a daunting task when presented all at once - learning and playing new music.

Building Beginners Through Sound Before Sight

The first several weeks of Beginner Band are crucial to the over all success of the students. These kids are often required to learn two skills at once, both of which involve multitasking - playing and instrument, and reading music. I had heard for years about the idea of Sound Before Sight, mostly as an elementary pedagogy but also by some as a beginning band method. My earliest attempt at this was missing some key components that ultimately resulted in a slower start to reading and playing, and less progress over the year. This year my friend and I worked together to develop a comprehensive curriculum that would both train the students on the basics of playing while simultaneously building them up for reading and playing. The two classes who got the full treatment are currently having better success than anything we've experienced, while the class that didn't get all of it is still struggling on the literacy end. Hopefully there's something in here that will give you ideas for your own Sound Before Sight curriculum, as having one that is effective can definitely make a big difference for your students!

RythmBee Works!

Hello again!

I've been interested in RhythmBee! since attending a workshop with, among others, Cindy Bullock. She is a nationally recognized, retired middle school band teacher who made her name working at Nemitz Jr. High School in Odessa, TX. My jaw drops every time I listen to a certain clip of one of her honor bands. She's one of those incredible music teachers that gets kids to do things that seem impossible. If she says something, you want to do it without question.

Anyway, I spent the $200 for the package that is targeted for small school and middle school bands. It has to be one of the best investments I've made for the program so far. When the website says that RhythmBee works for everyone, they're not joking. The only people it won't work for are the students who refuse to look at the screen.

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!

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. 

A New Idea for HS Summer Band Camps

I couldn't think of a good title for this one, but it's something I thought of earlier that I wanted to document somewhere.

On my first day in my second camp I spent time observing the students playing to see if I could spot anyone who was behind the curve. It was obvious that the woodwind section was very strong. I wasn't surprised to learn that the previous director was a woodwind player himself. But the brass seemed to be having a tough time in some ways. After noticing a tubist constantly second guessing himself on fingerings, I politely asked him a couple of questions.

"What's this note called?"

"Uh... I... can't remember."

"That's okay. Can you tell me what this is? (pointing to the key signature)"

"B Flat!"

"Good, but what does it mean?"

"Uh... I... They never really taught us that."

"That's okay. I can help you with that."

And I did. Yesterday I pulled the tubist from the full band rehearsal. I showed him the chromatic finger sequence, then we wrote down the open notes on staff paper, and gradually built a fingering chart using the finger sequence he had just learned. In fact, when I first introduced it to him I had him play from the F below the staff down to the Bb below the staff by following the sequence I'd written down, and when I told him he just played a chromatic scale from F down to Bb, he said he couldn't believe it.

Next I showed him now to figure out note names by going up the staff in alphabetical order, or down the staff in reverse alphabetical order. He's a Junior in High School, and it blew his mind how easy it was once I showed him this trick. It always blows their minds how easy that part is.

Anyway, we got through the fingering chart. His brain was really crunching, but he made it. Good!

Next we went to key signatures. I told him I was less concerned about knowing the names of key signatures, and more concerned that he could understand what they meant. When I pointed out that a flat sign on the B line of the staff meant that all B's were to be played flat, and then applied the same logic to other key signatures, he was once again astonished at how easy it was to figure out, and at how much less frustrated he would've been all these years if someone had just shown him these simple tricks. I told him I understood, because I was in the same boat until I took my first private lesson my sophomore year in High School.

We talked about a couple of other things as well. He asked me to explain accidentals, for example. And even though we'd built a fingering chart, I had another one printed off for him for good measure. I sent him back to band armed with a ton of new knowledge and some quick references we'd worked out together, with the promise that it would take some work at first, but that eventually all of these things would become second nature to him. He felt good, and I felt good for him.

Today in sectionals I got to do a couple of things I'd wanted to do yesterday. I had the kids make name tags to hang from their stands so I could start getting to know their names, for example. But more importantly, I gave them a couple of minutes to write music biographies.

"What's a Music Biography?"

It's an idea I picked up in an education class, Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum. The teacher had us each write a bio with our name and our reading experiences. She used these to get to know us better, in addition to helping her learn our names. In the first camp of the summer, I gave them about 2-3 minutes to write their name, grade level, bands they like (not genres), and hobbies. It worked beautifully. Where as I'm normally bad with names, I quickly got to know each of the brass players, and I could actually talk to them about common interests. I'll probably use this forever now. Even when I pushed them hard and got intense, they were sold enough on me to not get upset. I don't think they were angry with me once. With the music, perhaps, because they couldn't get it yet, but not with me. Well, there were other factors, too, like the fact that they were learning so much. But anyway...

With the group at this camp I added something. I asked them today to write down any questions they had about reading music, or playing the instrument. I gave them examples (note names, key signatures, etc.etc.) and gave them a little extra time to think and write. It didn't take much time. But when I collected those sheets I not only had the music bio, but individual player weaknesses, all with the promise that I would help each person who wrote something down before the camp was over. During full band I looked at what they'd written and prioritized students. After all, a few of them put down non-critical items. One player just wants a lesson, which is fine, but I'll get to her last.

So now part of my mission, in addition to building up the brass to the point that they're capable of blowing away the woodwinds (even though they will be discouraged from doing so), and understanding what it takes to play as a section at a high level, is to strengthen the weakest players in the group by giving them that one on one time they need to get caught up to their peers. Or at the very least, I can arm them with the tools to get there. Yesterday it was a tubist

Fortunately there weren't as many students critically behind as I initially anticipated in the brass. Actually, they're picking up quickly on sectional playing, and generate a good sound, which I hope I can turn into a wall of sound by camp's end. But by working individually with the players that either need or requested individual time, I'll be getting everyone up to par. I've heard that a band gets better one player at a time, and I'm predicting that this time investment will greatly boost the performance of the total brass section, and thus the band, throughout the season and the year.

Not to mention that it just feels good to show students who got lost at some point what the need to know to be on par with the people they sit next to. They're always excited, grateful, and you know that you've probably just drastically improved their music experience for however much time they have left in high school.

So on my way home I thought about the potential of something like this if it were implemented camp wide. After all, I'm toying with the idea of a camp that not only sets the foundation for the marching band, but truly for the year through methods which I've never seen employed before (at least not like I'm debating). That may be for another blog, but here is a new idea which I'm considering now. I'd love your thoughts on this.

Every good camp has technicians. Some have more or less techs than others. The last camp I worked basically managed a brass, woodwind and percussion tech. Larger schools have one tech per individual section, and in some cases, assistants to the techs. I'm already planning on using Music Bios in my programs to get to know my students better, and thus gain their trust faster. If I add the "Problem Inventory" to the Bio, then I can have techs, regardless of how many of them there are, prioritize the students with problems in the group they're responsible for, and then work with them during a larger ensemble rehearsal time. Funding could be a factor, of course. If my techs are professional symphony players, as was my high school experience, then they'd probably want an increase in pay for the week for their additional 1/2 hour to 1 hour of work each day. Of course, if it's a small school and I hire university students as techs to come out for the week (as is the case in these parts), then I can probably ask them to do anything for the same cost. Either way, imagine the possibilities for a band program in which all of its members understand everything they need to know about reading music and the basics of playing the horn, even if they have always previously been behind or got lost as some point. Not only for the marching band, but for the year as well. I'm a big fan of the notion that you should invest time to save time, and this has that written all over it. I'll sacrifice a player in each section during full band for them to get caught up like this - gladly. I can always put the responsibility on the section members to catch their peer up afterwards.

So any thoughts? Personally, I think this could be a great addition to summer camps. I'll be interested to see if I can tell whether or not it's having an impact as the camp progresses, especially into next week.

Until next time, thanks for reading, and take care!

Musically yours,
Mr. Cooper