My Concert Band Repertoire, Spring 2009

This Spring, I have purposefully programmed music that is easier than what I’ve chosen in the past. I’ve decided to err on the side of giving the students music which is more easily within their grasp instead of overwhelming them with difficult music. I still want to challenge them with new musical concepts, but not necessarily in the context of concert selections.

With that said, here’s what’s in my Concert Band’s folders:

Distant Journey by Paul Lavender. This is written at the Essential Elements Explorer Level, and correlates with page 11 of the method book. I’m drawn to easy music in minor keys, and this one fits both of those descriptions.

Intensity by Sean O’Loughlin. It’s labeled as “Very Easy Band,” although the ranges get pretty high. In my humble opinion, a written D for trumpet is not “very easy.” Nevertheless, the piece is well-written and rehearses easily.

Latin Fire by John Higgins. Essential Elements Performer Level, and correlates with page 24 of the method book. This is a good choice for young groups who are ready for a little challenge. It uses lots of the musical concepts from the later pages of the method book, including dotted-quarter/eighth rhythms, slurs, accidentals, accents, and dynamic changes.

Let’s Go Band  arranged by Andrew Balent. A perennial favorite. To give you and idea of how well-liked this piece is, I programmed it last year after hearing another school perform it. A colleague of mine heard my groups perform it and wanted to include it in her repertoire also. My students keep asking to play this one in rehearsals.

Pirates’ Cave by Mark Williams. Labeled as Grade ½, Very Easy, and correlates with page 13 of the Accent on Achievement method book. Similar in style to Distant Journey (and a million other pieces), this is in G minor and uses the only first seven notes typically taught in beginning band. My students ask for this one often.

Simple Gifts arranged by Jack Bullock. Belwin classifies this piece as “Very Beginning Band,” but the clarinet ranges make me disagree with that “very beginning” label. Coincidentally, Yo-Yo Ma and Itztak Perlman and company performed a John Williams arrangement of Simple Gifts at the President Obama’s inauguration ceremony. I plan to include this piece in my Spring Concerts, highlighting the fact that it was featured at the inauguration.

To read about music I’ve programmed in the past, click here or here.

Do you have any experience with the above music? Have you found a new gem for young bands? Share your thoughts!

Winter Concert “Fogged Out”

 “Winter Concert Cancelled Due to Intense Fog.” Does this sound like the headline from a bad Christmas movie or what? Well, that’s what happened for one of my schools this year. Here in Bakersfield, we regularly have 2-hour fog delays during the Winter months, and the concert happened to fall on one of those days.

Downtown School doesn’t have a stage, and the cafeteria is about a third of the size of a normal cafeteria, so having a big concert on campus just isn’t an option. For our school concerts, the whole student body gets on buses and drives about 3 miles to the district offices where there is an auditorium with a large stage.

Okay, so the concert wasn’t entirely cancelled, but we did have to make a last minute change of venue. Instead of having the field trip like we usually do, we put on three performances of the program in the dinky little cafeteria.

The highlight of the program was the Concert Band’s performance of The Night Before Christmas (arr. by James Swearingen) narrated by two of our local NBC news anchors. One of my trumpet students is their son (the two anchors are married), so they were a logical choice to narrate at the concert.

Concert Programming

Like many of you, I’m feeling the pressure of upcoming Winter Concerts. Can anyone out there relate?

I teach at three schools, each with beginning and intermediate level Band and Strings, so 4 ensembles per school multiplied by 3. Some of these groups have been doing well and are prepared to perform. Others, on the other hand, are still struggling just a few days before the proverbial curtain rises.

So now I’m faced with the decision about making last-minute changes to the selections some of these ensembles will perform. In the process of doing so, I can’t help but question whether I selected music that was too difficult, or if it was simply an issue of the students not rising to the occasion.

I’m curious how you make your final decisions on concert selections. Do you ever make changes two or three weeks before a performance? Have you had to bail out on a difficult piece and substitute a much easier one?

My Concert Band Repertoire, Fall 2008

I always enjoy seeing what music other band directors put into their ensemble’s folders. Here’s what I’ve got in the hopper this fall (in no particular order):

- Bells, Bells, Bells/arr. John Edmonson. A nice Grade 1 Christmas medley which features The Ukrainian Bell Carol (Carol Of The Bells) and Jingle Bells. This one has required a little more effort in my bands as the piece has less repetition than the others.

- The Might of Hercules/Mark Williams. Similar in character to his Centurion and March of the Cyborgs. Requires students to count through rests, and is a good next step in the process of teaching students rhythmic independence.

- The Little Drummer Boy/arr. John O’Reilly. Nicely scored. Rehearses pretty easily. The low brass part is easy, but is also for the most part boring for talented players. I like arrangements like this which give all the winds (including low brass) a chance to play a melody line.

- Refried Beans/Bruce Pearson & Barrie Gott. This title is from the collection “Standard of Excellence First Performance Plus.” Similar in character to Bruce Pearson’s other titles, Jamaican Holiday, Starfire March, and Rio Bravo. The students like that it’s a fun piece to play and easy to learn. It’s been a good piece for the beginning of the year to get the band’s momentum rolling again.

- Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)/arr. Michael Sweeney. From the Essential Elements Performer Level series. Although the Essential Elements method book includes Banana Boat Song, this arrangement is a more thorough version of Harry Belafonte’s recording.

- The Night Before Christmas/arr. James Swearingen. This medley uses a narrator reading the poem ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Includes familiar Christmas carols Ding Dong! Merrily On High; Jingle Bells; Up On the Housetop; Jolly Old St. Nicholas and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. I’ve asked one of the local NBC News anchors (whose son is one of my trumpet players) to read the narration in our Winter Concert.

How about you? What music do you have in your folders? What titles are the kids excited about this year?

Copyright and Fair Use: My Two Cents

Music teachers have always debated about copyright and fair use issues. The blogosphere and recent podcasts have created new forums for this debate. Technology has certainly changed the framework of many copyright issues, but at its core, the debate continues.

My take on the whole thing involves a little of the golden rule, recognition of the law, a little hypocracy, and hopefully a lot of common sense.

It seems to me that there are a few principles which play into this issue.

Principle #1: Writers and publishers should profit from their work. I have no doubt we all understand that already.

Principle #2: Students will lose and destroy sheet music. I’ll never forget when one of my students brought me his music folder which his dog had peed all over. I very willingly replaced the whole thing, including the method book he had bought.

Principle #3: Teachers are caught in the middle. Our budgets sometimes don’t allow for frequent purchases of sheet music, yet we want to provide the best possible musical experience for our students. I also believe many of us sincerely want to support the writers and publishers whose music we enjoy.

With these principles in mind, here are a few of my own opinions about particular dilemmas.

Opinion #1: Sheet music purchases deserve a bigger percentage of our budget than we often allow. We are willing to spend $2,000 on a new instrument, but are we willing to spend $50 to buy a legal edition of a publication? We spend thousands more on band uniforms and dry cleaning, busses and hotels, instrument maintenance, but are we willing to spend money on our music? We wouldn’t shoplift reeds, valve oil, strings, or instruments from a music store, so why should we do effectively the same to publishers and writers?

Opinion #2: I recently heard a discussion about prodiving original scores to adjudicators at music festivals. One teacher felt it was unfair to expect teachers to pay the publisher again for copies of scores they had already purchased simply to provide originals to adjudicators. My feeling is that if the teacher has a high enough opinion of the work to use it as a festival selection or even a concert selection, the few extra dollars for legal scores are worth the price.

Opinion #3: Publishers need to come up with some sort of provision for teachers to distribute sheet music. This is where things get tricky, of course. Consider the format of various classroom publications: You’ve probably heard of “blackline masters” and “reproducibles.” Publishers of curriculum recognize that classroom teachers will need to photocopy the material, and it’s not cost effective to sell sets of 30-40 sheets of each page for students’ use. What about some sort of equivalent for sheet music?

What do you think? Does anyone here have experience with getting permission to make photocopies? Do you buy the required extra scores and parts when necessary? I don’t expect anyone here to confess to copying huge volumes of music, but what are your thoughts and practices?

Elementary Band Repertoire: Spring 2008

I recently had the opportunity to spend some money at J.W. Pepper, and couldn’t be happier with this new music.

Midnight Mission by Brian Balmages/FJH Music. This has been turning out to be a real favorite this season. Read my previous comments here. One warning: If your group has too many alto saxophones or too few flutes, be careful of balance in this piece.

Starfire March by Bruce Pearson from the Standard of Excellence First Performance collection. An easy march my students love to play. It is arranged with too much verbatim repetition, but the melody is catchy. My groups almost always cheer when I call this piece, and I frequently hear complaints when we don’t rehearse it.

Olympia by Brian Balmages/FJH Music. Balmages’ writing here is very harmonically colorful, yet the accidentals are playable by young students. I had really been looking forward to working on this one with my groups, but I have been disappointed with the results so far. My groups’ lack of full instrumentation contributes to the less than ideal outcome, so I would advise anyone considering this wonderful work to consider that factor.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious arranged by Michael Sweeney/Hal Leonard. An easy arrangement of the classic Mary Poppins song. This one has been working well for my groups, but is being overshadowed by some of the other titles this season.

Temple of Darkness by Rob Grice/FJH Music. Another one my students can’t seem to get enough of. It’s one of those pieces that makes a young group sound impressive. It rehearses pretty easily too, so it doesn’t tax the students’ patience… or mine!

Sahara by Roland Barrett/FJH Music. Again, another one which makes a young group sound impressive and rehearses easily. It includes an aleatoric passage which initially intimidated my students. They’ve had a little trouble grasping the concept, and it has been surprising how much time it has taken to rehearse something which is meant to sound improvisatory. But the students love it.

Aunt Rhodie’s Appetite by Joseph Compello/Carl Fischer Music. This arrangement uses actors and a narrator to link several familiar beginning band tunes like Hot Cross Buns and Go Tell Aunt Rhodie. Although it doesn’t necessarily make a young band sound more mature, it does serve to lighten up a concert program. Audience members who are more likely to enjoy drama rather than instrumental music will appreciate this choice.

If you have a comment or would like to suggest a title, by all means do here.

Honor Band & Orchestra Concert Reflections Part III: More is Caught than Taught

Last night was my district’s Honor Band and Orchestra concert. In other posts, I have written about the audition process, music advocacy, and celebrating excellence.

On a personal note, one of the ensembles made the debut performance of my newest orchestra composition. One other music teacher also had a new piece premiered. While I don’t mean to pat myself on the back, I was reminded of the impression these compositions might make on the students. Among those student musicians are likely to be some future aspiring composers. I remember when I was in school I was always impressed with my teachers who also performed regularly around the community. It meant something to me that one of my teachers recorded an album or performed with well-known artists.

A pastor at my church once offered an axiom to parents: “More is caught than taught.” Children learn more from what they observe than from what they hear. This is true on a number of levels. A student will really learn what staccato means by hearing it demonstrated rather than just by reading a definition. Students will believe they can become excellent performers when they see their peers do so.

My point is that hopefully a few students will carry a memory with them that their teachers are also composers, and that composition might be something they might want to try for themselves. Let me offer a little encouragement to music teachers to teach by example, demonstrating that in addition to being a teacher, you are also a performer, a composer, a recording engineer, whatever.

Essential Elements Correlated Music

I’m a big fan of the band music which is correlated with specific pages of method books like Essential Elements. Selecting pieces from these collections has made my job a little easier in that I know in advance if my young players are familiar with the concepts and fingerings involved in the piece.

Here are some titles from the Explorer Level which I have had success with:

The Lost City

Bugler’s Dream (Olympic Fanfare)

Dragonfire. A fellow music teacher recently told me that one of my former students told him she had played this piece with my group and she wanted to play it again his band. You know it’s a favorite when this happens!

March of the Romans

Here are some titles from the Performer Level which I have had success with:

Linus and Lucy

Day-O

Feliz Navidad

Forrest Gump

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Yabba Dabba Fragilistic

This week I had my bands sight read an easy arrangement of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. At one of my three schools, less than half of the students knew where the title came from. At my two other more affluent schools, there were also several students who didn’t have a clue.

On a similar note, one of my private students brought in her part to a jazz band arrangement of The Flintstones. I asked her if she had ever seen the show, and she said no. When I asked her about Fruity Pebbles cereal (Fred and Barney are on the box), she made the connection. But there was still no real familiarity with the theme song.

So much for choosing music the kids already like.

Favorite Band Compositions

One of my favorite aspects of being a music teacher is discovering new pieces for my various ensembles. Perhaps being an aspiring composer makes me naturally inclined to see what new material is on the market.

Here are some relatively new (as in less than 10 years old!) pieces for young bands which I have had some success with:

Centurion by Mark Williams. Centurion is great for getting kids to count; it’s got aggressive little one- and two-note punches followed by a few counts of rests which require careful counting.

Midnight Mission by Brian Balmages. This has been great for introducing students to staccato. It includes 2 preparatory exercises to rehearse before sightreading the piece. (I wish more publishers and composers would include teaching material like this.)

Alpha Squadron by Greg Hillis. Similar character to Centurion, but requires slurring and a slightly wider range for each instrument. This was my groups’ favorite piece this fall.

For you who teach high school band, visit Travis J. Weller’s poll on band repertoire.