Building an Audience

As far as building an audience goes, I believe those with already large numbers in the band and chorus programs definitely have it easier. After all, if there are 80 kids in the band and 100 in chorus, you’re taking into account all the parents, extended family, friends, and faculty filling the seats, without any significant effort put in to get people to come to your show – they’re there almost by default.

            But what about a program with about 15-20 kids combined? Certainly there’s going to be a bit of a struggle to fill the house. As band directors, we naturally worry about how many people will attend – we want the exposure to the community and the potential to attract new members. But as frustrating as it is for the directors who play for an empty house, it’s probably a hundred times worse for the students performing.

            I remember my fifth year at UConn, when I gave a composition recital. I tried really hard to get a lot of people to attend, constantly talking about my recital, and advertising around the music building and Facebook and Twitter and so on and so forth. There were about 25 people in the audience that night, and most of them were my family. I kind of felt like a kid who invited all the kids in his class to a birthday party and no one showed up (taking the final bow was the equivalent of me sadly blowing out the birthday candles alone.)

            All right, maybe that metaphor was a little too depressing. But it was definitely KIND of like that!

            What I’m saying is, when kids play to a near-empty theater, there’s almost a feeling of, “Why am I even doing this crap? Literally nobody cares. Everyone shows up to football games… maybe I picked the wrong thing to get into.” We don’t want our students feeling this way ever. Music is such a wonderful thing in everyone’s lives – it makes the world keep turning. So what can we do?

            Here’s my take on things: put the responsibility on our students to bring in the crowd. Give them the task of getting the word out! If they want people to attend their concert and see the fruits of their hard work all semester, then they’ll care enough to get something going. If they have a social media account, or several, post a blurb about the concert. Make a Facebook event about the show and list some of the songs that are being performed that night. If they work a part-time job, post a flyer on the bulletin board and tell their co-workers. If they go to church with their families, post a flyer there and put an ad in the church bulletin. If they volunteer at a senior center, or any other community service area, tell everybody! Friends, neighbors, relatives, significant others… that’s a lot of potential seats! Of course, the band director will keep plugging away behind the scenes as well, but oftentimes this the only source of promotion for these events.

            The bottom line is that we must make our students know that they make a difference when it comes to these things. They have a huge hand in making our concerts successful, not only with their practicing and performances, but with the advertising as well. Give it a try – you’ve really got nothing to lose!

On Band Parents and Fundraising

            Should we HAVE to rely on parents and fundraisers for our band programs? In a perfect world, no – every band program would have the funding that they need, and every superintendent would recognize the power of music and give the band directors whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and we would never want for anything ever.

            Yeah, right.

            But yes, the fact of the matter is that we as band directors are extremely reliant on raising money to support the band programs, especially when there is more than one high school in your town (my town had 3) and the budget needs to be split across the schools. There just isn’t enough money to go around – you can’t create a fund out of thin air. In my mind, this isn't anything to even stress about - it's part of the job, and we have to make it work. But let us remember that there are other ways in which we as band directors can take action.

            When I was in high school, the percussion ensemble organized an event in which we brought trash cans and drumsticks and other miscellaneous noisemakers outside of the local Wal-Mart, where we played a large variety of different percussion music inspired by “Stomp.” We made donation signs as well as large, decorative posters inviting customers to our concert later on in the Spring. We were a small program that just started, but I was surprised how much we got in donations.

            There are also grants that we can apply for, which can be a lot of time and effort, but the end result makes it all worth it. Money you don’t have to pay back is always a plus! A good band director should always be resourceful and keep a lot of options open – knowing exactly where to look to apply for these grants is a significant tool at our disposal, as well as being very prompt and thorough with our submissions.

            Parents will always be a big part of any band program, whether it’s getting help loading up the pit equipment to maintaining a list of chaperones for field trips. They are so vital in distributing the word around town about the band nights, fundraisers, special events, field trips, concerts, and festivals. And why not rely on parents? After all, it helps keep everyone in the loop as far as the children are concerned. A band director should always strive to be present with the parents and to outwardly be as friendly, encouraging, and hard-working as they possibly can be, so that the parents understand exactly the type of person who is teaching their kid all day. That’s the kind of band director I want to be, at least.

On The Topic of Creating Love for Music and Performing

“How can you create a love for music and performing in your program?”

Truly, the million dollar question. And in response to all the other million dollar questions I’ve been presented with over the course of my life, I’ll start off by answering the same way: “I don’t know.” I really don’t. I don’t even have a program yet, let alone a well-developed game plan for cultivating what is arguably the human being’s most powerful and perplexing emotion: love. But, in my attempt to provide a decent answer to the question, I need to begin by talking a little bit about my experiences with music at a young age.

I didn’t always love music. Actually, I didn’t even like it, not even when I was forced to take piano lessons at age 4, nor during the 9 years of weekly lessons thereafter. No kid likes being forced to do something, I suppose – they like to choose their own adventure. I guess my parents started to see that when I became a teenager, and though they still insisted I take some sort of music lesson, they allowed me to switch to guitar. I enjoyed playing guitar about halfway through the first lesson, and then I didn’t really enjoy it anymore. My parents struggled to get me to practice. They set a strict timer every other day, reluctantly letting me go after I sat there nonchalantly and unpassionately strumming the three “Smoke On The Water” chords for 20 minutes straight.

I think about my childhood every time I hear a fellow colleague tell me about their early love affairs with the world of music, and how they knew from the start that this was their passion, their future, their dream. I thought about it as I was watching the movie, “Chops.” There were interviews with kids who were 11 and 12 years old, and they talked about how much music meant to them. They brought up names like Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Wynton Marsalis when asked who their heroes and idols were (I think my hero when I was 11 was either Mike Piazza or Pikachu.) They cared about practicing, and about honing their craft, and the thrill of performing with others, and personal success, and they were light years away from being able to buy a beer. I’ll go ahead and say it – I was jealous. I kind of still am.

Granted, over the years of taking piano lessons, I had become relatively decent. But being good at something isn’t quite enough to inspire passion towards it. I mean, I’m pretty good at riding a bike but never in my life have I aspired to become a competitive BMX rider like Dave Mirra. I remember going to high school, and how I wanted to join the marching band because my older sister was doing it and she told me how much fun they had at band competitions and whatnot. The problem was, I didn’t play anything that a marching band requires, so naturally, I was thrown into the Pit. My years of piano lessons made the xylophone seem like an old friend, and I was easily able to figure it out and start making some music. The other kids in the Pit, especially the upper classmen, were impressed that I picked up mallet percussion so quickly. After about only a week or two into the band season, word got around that I was a “Freshman Prodigy” which of course was hardly the case – I had simply taken piano lessons and they hadn’t.

I think it was the social praise and attention from my peers that first made me start to take performing music seriously. It made me want to get better, to “show them a new trick” as I started mastering more advanced percussion literature, a lot of it in my spare time. I sought out new pieces and started listening to more marching band literature, which eventually took me into the world of concert band literature, to orchestral pieces, to early classical music, and so on. By the time senior year rolled around, it was a no brainer that I wanted to go on to study music – it was one of the only things in school I got enjoyment out of.

This is where the original question gets tricky, because for me, I didn’t acquire the love for music and performing from my teacher. Truthfully, none of my music teachers growing up were anything special, and certainly none of them inspired me to develop my personal sense of musicianship or to seek out exciting musical opportunities. I didn’t go to an Arts high school like the kids in “Chops” where the faculty were recruited solely for their devotion and contribution to the field of music, art, dance, or drama. My private teachers were just elderly, retired people who knew a few tunes and could get beginners by – none of them had degrees in music or a sterling reputation for greatness. No, I didn’t get it from them – mostly, I had to find it myself.

So I can’t answer the question like others could: drawing back and thinking about what their cherished music teachers did to inspire them. I have to answer it by thinking, “What do I wish my music teachers had done to inspire me? What would have facilitated my path to music?” For me, this starts with firmly rooting your principles into your program and having a set of expectations that cannot be swayed, and most importantly, I have to believe in these principles with all of my heart. I look at the principles of Wynton Marsalis, highlighted in the movie I watched: “Try to find the best teachers. Listen to the finest players. Be true to the music.” I think how simple they sound, but how fundamentally true they are. Three simple directions that are quick to establish sincerity and suggest a solid reputation. I look at Charlie Parker’s words: “Master your instrument. Master the music. Then forget all that [stuff] and just play.” Within those words are nothing but the truth – the keys to creative thought, the genesis of what it means to be a critical thinker, to think like a musician, as author Robert Duke urges our students to do in the classroom.

I wish my music teachers introduced new music into my life. I wish they told me why they were so significant in a way that a child could understand, not in a way that a seasoned musicologist would understand. I wish I was asked how different music made me feel, and what pictures or feelings came into my mind when I listened to different artists tell intricate and inspiring stories using no words. Because that’s a way that hidden door could be opened – that door, lying dormant in young, impressionable minds, that can lead you down the road to pure creativity, to a world where the teacher doesn’t bark orders, “Sit down, shut up, stop drumming on the table, focus on your book and turn your mind off to everything but pre-calculus” and instead you can stand up and fly out the window with all of your friends to the top of the Statue of Liberty, or to Egypt, or Spain, and take in all the colors, the sounds, the smells, and think to yourself, “What a wonderful world!” Because, that’s what music has the power to do. That’s the reason behind music as entertainment value. Because it takes us somewhere else for a while, somewhere romantic, somewhere exotic, or somewhere crazy, or somewhere perfect.

I want to do all those things as a music teacher. I want my program to be one that teaches that power within music, and what it takes to fully understand and appreciate it. I want them to be able to share that power, and that knowledge, with others around them. I won’t get swayed by the older teachers who tell me that my ambitious spark will die down eventually. I know that not every student shares my love of music, and that’s okay. I know that most students I teach don’t want to listen to any music other than what’s currently playing on the radio, and that’s okay, too.

The real answer to the question is that we can’t create love from nothingness. There needs to be just a little bit in our students already, that we can identify and nurture and grow. You can’t stand over a patch of dirt for weeks and wonder why there’s no garden growing, even after all the rain and sunlight and attention you’re giving it – there needs to be seeds in the ground first, and unlike a garden, you can’t put seeds of music love into our students. You can try and try until you’re blue in the face, but you can’t make someone love something that they don’t.

Does that mean music teachers shouldn’t even try to inspire music appreciation in our students if we know fully well that there’s no prior interest? Of course not! But please keep in mind that when somebody tries anything, there is not always a 100% success rate. You can try and you can fail. I can try my first year to build an ideal music program that fits all my principles perfectly and I could fail hard. And then I can fine-tune a few things and try again the next year, and have a little bit of success. Then I try a third time and have some more. The more we try, the better “triers” we become. And that’s the only way to establish a reputation of achievement that is your own. Students will want to follow a program that has such an admirable reputation – it’s up to you to build one. Success breeds success – a student reluctantly joining a program with an established failing reputation knows he or she doesn’t need to try so hard or dedicate that much time, but a student joining an elite program that has a reputation of talent and success behind it wants to be a part of that, and will do his or her very best to meet the bar that has been set by previous groups. And the individual time that is spent making strides to meet that bar, and the knowledge that is gained in between… THAT can start to create a seed.

“It’s just like when you fall in love,” Wynton Marsalis tells us at the end of the movie. “You see, what you love about it is that ‘man, there’s another one of us, too.’ Now there’s two of us, and the two of us make one. That’s what swingin’ is – there’s 15 of us up there, and we’re one.” That’s the love between a musician and the music, and a musician and his ensemble. Everyone’s on the same page, working for the same thing, playing in harmony, playing in time, acting as one unit. It’s the love I discovered through marching band. It’s the love that can be found in all of our music programs someday. 

Lesson Reflection

            I was given the opportunity to present a small portion of my lesson plan to the class this past Monday. To prepare, I designed a PowerPoint presentation that would guide the class through learning more about folk music and specifically about Woody Guthrie. My plan was to go through slide by slide and receive student input and feedback along the way, but of course this did not work out as I had planned. I saw things working differently in my mind, and that turned out to be an important lesson for me to learn as a teacher moving forward.

            Because I had spent so long putting together a presentation, that is exactly what my lesson turned out to be – a presentation, in which I ended up doing most of the talking, leaving the students out of the learning (and creating) process. As I set up and plan and internally visualized the procedure, for some reason I thought that what I was planning was directly facilitating student participation and involvement. It didn’t. I fear what it ended up doing was leaving the students bored and indifferent about the subject.

            Here’s the huge thing I (and many others) overlooked: this was a music class, and I didn’t have anyone playing music. As soon as I finished the presentation and time was called, I knew what I had failed to do immediately. I have a few plans to remedy this, however.

            When I started listing examples of commonly known folk songs, perhaps the students should sing them, and I should accompany them on an acoustic guitar. When I put on the song, “This Land Is Your Land,” why not have students sing this as well? Perhaps the students should have copies of the lyrics so we can all sing together. Now, granted, I did have the students creating, presenting, and responding on Days 2-3 of the 3-day lesson plan, but Day 1 must also have this in order to balance the lesson and maintain interest. There certainly is a lot to think about – more than I had thought. At first, I actually felt a little dumb (how did I overlook these things?) but the reality is simple: I am learning. I’m in grad school because I didn’t fully understand all these things previously. So, I can take solace in the fact that I will continue to learn, and grow, and adapt so that I can become the teacher I see myself wanting to be.

Reflection: Choir Rehearsal

          The other week, I was fortunate to participate in a mock choir rehearsal for my Methods class. Though I did not actually take part in leading the rehearsal, it was clear what worked and what did not work as I watched several of my colleagues take the reigns.

          First and foremost, it is imperative to have confidence over the rehearsal, and to let your students witness that confidence control the classroom atmosphere. That needs to be consistent and established as soon as possible. Students will follow your lead if you give them a reason to, but if the educator seems unsure or (in Charlie Brown terms,) "wishy-washy" in their methods, then it is difficult to express all the knowledge you have acquired with the constant loom of students second-guessing you over your head.

          The notes Prof. Schneider gave us in terms of keeping time with "snaps" or though hand-conducting were extremely helpful, as I was able to clearly hear the difference in articulation from the choir. Snapping the beat subconsciously caused us to put a heavy accent on the beginnings of our solfege syllables, while hand-conducting made us naturally sing with even intonation and much more legato. The exercises we did with our hands as we sang were also useful, along the same principles - expressing the contour with more elaborate and "three-dimensional" hand motions had a notable impact on opening our voices and "singing out," resulting in a more sustained tone.

          In all, I would definitely say there is more than meets the eye when it comes to employing choir methods. There was certainly a lot that I never thought about on the subconscious level - subtle tactics that contribute on a much larger scale when it comes to getting the sound you want out of your ensemble. I hope to apply these principles in my own teaching, not only with choir but to instrumental ensembles as well.

A New Way For A New World: Why Music Educators Must Embrace Technology

                Taking into account all of my students in both private and public settings, most of them are between the ages of eight and thirteen – born directly into what scholars are currently referring to as, “The Information Age.” As far as most of them are concerned, the internet has always been there, no different from the sun and the moon, a household utility that is no more foreign than turning on a faucet or opening a refrigerator. I remember life without the internet or cell phones. I remember going to school without those things, where in music class, the best we could do in an elementary setting was sing around the music teacher’s piano and participate in the occasional school play. If we wanted to learn an instrument, we needed to take private lessons at home – there was nothing for us at the school due to a lack of resources… and of course, a lack of technology.

                It is hard to imagine a lack of technology in the classroom today, yet my “prehistoric” elementary education still exists, to a degree, in many classrooms across the country. Technology is certainly a game-changer, distinguishing the quality of education from school to school. You can argue that the genesis of its merger with public music education was Bob Moog’s development of the Mini-Moog synthesizer in 1970 – a portable music-making machine with a built-in piano keyboard. This portable device could only sound one key at a time, but its mass manufacturing opened the door for more and more companies to produce their own built-in keyboard models. Note velocity was implemented in 1975, and a few short years later, 5-voice polyphony. These keyboards became more and more like a miniature piano, and more accessible for a younger generation.

Today, an ideal general music classroom in a public setting would allow an electronic midi keyboard for each student to work on. “Technology allows us to teach students with very little musical background by having them create music and compose music,” says Barbara Freedman, the music director at Greenwich High School in Greenwich, CT. “It allows us to take them through the process of understanding music and what goes into creating music – like harmony, melody, and rhythm. It’s applied learning. They apply themselves to the practice by actually composing.” Indeed, in today’s world, we must start to abandon the aesthetic approach championed by Bennett Reimer and move closer towards David Elliott’s praxial philosophy, which states that the process of learning music must involve hands-on experience. We need not only for students to read about music, but actually, physically, do what musicians do – practice and perform. Implementing technology, such as having a keyboard for each student, allows us as educators to better realize this mission.

But technology in the eyes of the students means something much different than keyboards, or for that matter, discovering a more potent educational method. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Pinterest… what is it about these mediums that appeal to us? What is the one common thread that they all have in common?

They allow us to share.

We share pictures and videos. We share our feelings, and our fears, and our opinions. And on all of these websites, we have the ability to share music. It seems all too simple now: we’re teaching a unit on Indonesian gamelan, of course our students need to hear how this sounds! And so we type it into Google, click on one of hundreds of video links, pick the highest quality sample, and play it loudly for the class, and all of that just took less than 11 seconds. This was not possible a few measly decades ago, and what an advantage this is for us today! A world of information, a few keystrokes away… so why do we still have music educators in this very country – in this very state! – that resent this technology? I understand old-school methods, and I understand the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” But 40 years ago, if music educators were given the opportunity to make anything they want happen in a classroom happen, with little to no effort, wouldn’t they jump onto that opportunity? In other words, if the technology existed at the time, they would have used it. There’s just no way they wouldn’t – it would be a clear disservice to deny students an obvious advantage to learning the subject.

Music educators today must be on board with technology. We must embrace it fully, and we must embrace the aspect that pulls our students in in the first place – the ability to share music. Have students write and share their compositions. Have students share music relevant to that day’s lesson. Have students write about the music they hear on blogs, and share their posts with their class to get feedback. Have students record their auditions, and concerts, and recitals on video and post them so that we may all see, hear, and offer our own contributions in order to build progress within ourselves. I could go on. There’s such a plethora of opportunity to take advantage of, and a few short decades from now, those opportunities could double, triple, quadruple even. Technology may grow exponentially, and so we must always adapt and utilize whatever is available to us, so that our future generations of students may truly receive the best education they could possible receive.

Links to relevant articles:

https://thejournal.com/articles/2010/10/01/how-music-teachers-got-their-groove-back-music-instruction-goes-digital.aspx

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA90832478&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=fulltext&issn=00274321&p=AONE&sw=w&authCount=1&isAnonymousEntry=true

http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hruismak/julkaisut_files/The_new_horizonts_for_music_technology.pdf

Rubrics, Assessment, and The Art of Original Thought

            If we’re talking about grades and rubrics and assessment, let’s make one thing clear: there is no perfect setup for all of this. One may never even come to exist in any of our lifetimes. Unless we had a device that allowed us to peer into our students’ brains and see, in clear and precise terms, just how much critical thinking and motivation went into their assignments, and how much effort they honestly put into their work, and their desire to engage the topic at hand and learn more about it, and their passion for all learning, and their drive to succeed in the world, etcetera, etcetera, then a “perfect” result simply won’t happen. Period.

            And that’s because we’re always going to run into problems with assessing accurately what students really know. Most hard-working students who normally receive excellent marks in school serve only to please the opinions (and therefore, the rubrics and grading systems) of their teachers, and of course therein lies a crucial dilemma: if students are just “saying what we want to hear,” then how on Earth can we ever know for sure what their OWN opinions on our assignment was? Think about it like this: we can create an “assignment” telling a student to write how sorry they were that they punched another student in the face, and then we create a nice little rubric explaining what a “4” is (Insightful ideas! Impeccable grammar! Compelling prose!) and what a “2” is (Slightly generic! Missed a bunch of commas! Formatting needs work!) which is all neat and good. And maybe the student turns in a terrific 3-pager that earns him a nice “4” as well. And we take that “4” and mark it down and after we go home that day, our conclusion is that our student truly learned the error of his ways and that he was very sorry for punching Ted in the face.

            Wait a minute – do we really know for sure that he was sorry, or did we base that assumption over an assignment? But he got a “4” on it, didn’t he? How could he have gotten a “4” if he didn’t really learn anything? But then we think on it for a second and realize why this is so… haven’t we, in the past, achieved good grades on assignments from middle school, or high school, or even undergrad, when we know deep down that we didn’t really get anything out of the lesson? Weren’t there times (and be honest with yourselves!) that we went ahead and “phoned in” an assignment once or twice? Now, it doesn’t mean we didn’t give a true and conscious effort – we did every time – but we all know when we learned something and when we didn’t. I used to get all A’s in high school chemistry assignments, and I aced the midterm, and the final exam, and today I don’t know one thing about chemistry. Not one thing!

            And maybe you can argue that I simply forgot what I had learned, but that I had learned it in the first place at some point, so it counts. But if that’s the case, how do I still have all 50 states memorized in alphabetical order from learning that song in 1^st grade? And how can I rattle off all 23 helping verbs flawlessly 15 years after I initially learned them? We all know the answer – some things we really, truly learned, and others we threw in our short term memory bank (just long enough to spew an assortment of facts and tidbits out on the final exam) just to delete them shortly afterwards. No rubric in the world can accurately say for sure things we learned and will keep, and things we put in a big box to junk later.

            So is that really a problem, though? A good teacher would think so. After all, our job is to teach so that students learn, and when students learn, they can use the knowledge they learned in their lives effectively. They can keep our lessons forever, to help them grow, to make them smarter, to allow them to pass on this knowledge to future generations after we’re all dust. Isn’t that what this whole thing is about in the first place? Teachers teach things to pass them on to future generations – if no one is really learning this stuff, but merely pretending, then our descendants can potentially lose out on a lot of information! Thousands of years’ worth!

            I guess that’s a slight problem with Alfie Kohn’s article, a lot of which I admittedly agreed with – there is a problem with traditional grading and rubrics, after all. But the author’s entire article was nothing more than an elaborate complaint. It was a lot of buildup with no endgame – obviously it was written primarily to spark more curiosity over the subject, but nonetheless, I believe there were a great number of people who expected a more definitive answer to the critiques than we were given.

            ”Neither we nor our assessment strategies can be simultaneously devoted to helping all students improve and to sorting them into winners and losers.  That’s why we have to do more than reconsider rubrics.  We have to reassess the whole enterprise of assessment, the goal being to make sure it’s consistent with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.” - Alfie Kohn

            So what’s the solution, then? We need to do more than fix our rubric system, and I agree with that, but if one has the wherewithal to compose such an argument, he or she in the very least should propose some sort of amendment, right? Kohn dances around giving us an idea, but for some reason avoids doing so. If one sees a problem with something in the world (social injustice, for example) then typically we immediately begin to work out a counter in our heads (the old, “Well, if I were in charge, boy let me tell you, things would change around here!” routine.)

            But on the other hand, I suppose it’s okay that Kohn could not offer up any proposition to fix our assessment problem, considering a solution does not exist right now. The fact that the author is so harshly critical of the system did imply that there may be some idea cooking, but the bottom line is this: aspects like intelligence, critical thinking, willingness, effort, passion, motivation, and inspiration were not meant to have a numerical value. You can’t give someone a 6 out of 11 on their individual drive to succeed, or a 92% on proper utilization of knowledge outside the classroom under no surveillance. And I don’t know what kind of assessment models I’d use in my classroom, either, because there are no current models I’m even satisfied with at the moment, precisely due to the numerous reasons Kohn gave in his article. They simply aren’t accurate, and I’m not going to just pick one to satisfy all the requirements of the assignment, either – after all, that would be me telling somebody else what they want to hear, rather than giving my own, honest opinion on the matter (a problem we are actively trying to solve!) And when traditional grading and rubrics dominate the overall mindset of the classroom, that is exactly what we’ll lose – the real voices of our students.

Link to Alfie Kohn's article: http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/trouble-rubrics/