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. 

Journal Entry 03-24-12

Greetings! It's been a long time since I've posted to the blog, but it's also been a very busy semester (as I'm sure it has been for you as well!). UIL Concert & Sight Reading Contest is thankfully behind us, and I'm proud to report the band made a 1st Division in Concert and a 2nd Division in Sight Reading. They were talented enough to make a 1 in Sight Reading, but a few missed notes in the beginning I think led to a lack of confidence afterwards. Even so, I walked away feeling great about the day. It was the first "Superior" rating they've had on stage since 2009 (the final year of their last good director). I found a new sight reading book at TMEA that I'm very interested in, which I think will be a major improvement over what I did this year. I know that the best days are ahead of this band, and that this was a major turning point.

The Passing of W. Francis McBeth

The band world lost a giant yesterday - W. Francis McBeth.

I don't have much to say, really. Unfortunately, I didn't know him. I am a young band director, and never had the chance to.

I am also, however, a very nerdy band director. I do a lot of research....

As a product of the 5A band system, I can't recall ever getting to play his music. I occasionally, but rarely, heard about him in my college studies. But in my student teaching, as I dug around the music library of my assignment and dug around online looking for band history, and influential band figures, it didn't take long to learn about him and his incredible music, and of course, his groundbreaking pedagogy (I knew of the pyramid of sound, of course, but didn't know until then that he was responsible for it).

I didn't want to write about him, per say. You can find plenty of biographical information on these pages:

Southern Music Company's McBeth Bio

Sigma Alpha Iota's McBeth Page

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture

The closest thing I can say about him, regretfully, is that I have read his book, "Effective Performance of Band Music-Solutions to Specific Problems in the Performance of 20th Century Band Music". I've read as many books as I could get my hands on in the last few years. His was the most concise, while also being vastly more helpful and practical. I just found out he wrote another book, and I plan to read that, too. If I can find it.

I'm a band guy. And this is a band blog. It's not much, but I wanted to do something in memory of this hugely important figure. Normally that would be a post with some of his music, but I already did one of those pages after I read the aforementioned book: The Music of W. Francis McBeth.

So in lieu of that, I decided to use my modest photoshop abilities to make a memorial button. After I post this page I'm going to make it my facebook profile picture for a couple of days, and I'll leave it on the blog for a while I think. Anyway, please feel free to use it. You can save the image above, or right click it and "copy url".

Please keep his family in your thoughts in the coming days and weeks. Mr. McBeth - the band world thanks you.

Musically yours,
Chris Cooper