6. Encouraging students to step out in
PERFORMANCE
REHEARSALS
Balance positives
Start with sections, parse to individuals
Use warmups
Create in-class "concert" series
7. Encouraging students to step out in
PERFORMANCE
CLASSROOM
Share from Day 1(and everyday after!)
Prepare them to leave the nest soon
Sing-A-Long
Stepping Stones and Alternative Paths
8. Encouraging students to step out in
IMPROVISATION
Melodic Embellishment/Interpretation
Big Ears
Pentatonics
Apply to performance exercises
9. Encouraging students to step out in
SONGWRITING & COMPOSITION
Free write
Transcribe lyrics in your own hand
Song & piece modeling
BYO sightsinging
Reading sessions
Good morning and thanks for coming. I’m hoping we can use this session to consider the idea that a barrier for our students (and even ourselves as musicians) may be that we haven’t developed a personal comfort with sharing individual creativity with others, and I think we have some responsibility as educators to create positive environments and situations in which our students can feel successful, even if only in the tiniest increments. From there, they’ll have the confidence and determination it takes to refine their own skills, seek out learning opportunities particular to these specialties and also to learn how to collaborate; giving and receiving constructive critiscm, and using it to continually develop their own abilities.
Forms of creativity like improvisation, songwriting/composition and public performance depend on sharing to simply be heard by people, but also to thrive, grow, and seek out refinement. As educators, we have some responsibility to 1st and foremost make sure are students have a positive performance environment (Higgins and Cambell refer to this as a “safe space” in their book on group improvisation) in which they’ll feel comfortable sharing their creative efforts. If they don’t have that, teaching anything specific techniques put it into play. We could teach them all the tools and techniques in the world to be successful improvisers, composers, performers etc., but if they’re still not comfortable sharing those skills with others, it’s still going to be a very frustrating experience for them.
So one of the challenges put to us is to give our students simple, fundamental skill sets that can set them up to have positive performance experiences, and I hope that’s what we can get into today. Because once students get a taste of positive experience >>>
…that’s when they’re going to have the motivation to learn more, and to dig deeper into the discipline >>>
…and that’s when we’ll start to see some substantial creative growth, and finally be able to teach them a lot of the more advanced skills that we’ve been trained to teach them.As a quick aside – I personally believe that what we’re getting at here is really an extra-musical skill, and while I think it’s application in the music classroom is essential, these are experiences that students (and teachers, and adults…) should be having all over the place. And we are a species that likes some instant gratification, so lets explore some simple, fundamental skill sets that can hopefully get you and your students moving in this direction.
I hope you’ll be able to adapt these ideas to any classroom, but let’s think for a moment about large ensembles. During rehearsals, when did the conductor ask people to play things by themselves, or as a section? Was it when they did really well? YES – who were some of the people who got to play individually? was it a section leader? Was it the last chair 3rd clarinet?NO – was it when something went wrong? What do you think the message is (even if just sub-conscious)? What if you were to take a moment to ask individuals or sections to play something they are playing really well? That kind of an opportunity can positively reinforce the good things that the students doing, while giving them or their section a chance to show the rest of the ensemble that the skills they have. Opening a positive door like this can also give the conductor an opportunity to throw a note in there without seeming like they’re picking on them. When your starting to try and empower your students, it’s probably best for you to scaffold the experience by starting with sections, and then gradually parsing the experience down to smaller and smaller groups within the section, and even across sections, until you getting down individual players who are accustomed to this kind of experience and can do it confidently.This kind of scaffolding can also be easily incorporated into warmups, if you scales in rounds, or have one section hold a pitch while another section plays a scale or pattern against it. And maybe your principal oboe always gives the tuning note at the beginning of rehearsal – what if you shared that opportunity around once and a while? These are tiny tiny increments, but once they become accustomed to this being an everyday occurrence, then you’ve really got something you can build on.I know rehearsal time is always at a premium, but I like to try and take a couple of opportunities every year to have in-class mini-concerts and masterclasses. And I like to treat them with a certain amount of formality so it can also be an audience etiquette experience. So I would go to some length to set up our rehearsal room into a neat, formal looking concert space; . And ask students to perform something they’ve been working on for an audition, on in private lessons. We’d give the students the option of a dress rehearsal before the recital, and record those rehearsals and talk about them, do coachings; really as much of a recital experience as we could give them within the constraints of our time. For my class, this actually developed into something that we’d do outside on a really beautiful spring day; it was a nice break. And once this became a regular thing, and the ensemble was comfortable with being a polite and attentive audience, we started to invite guest artists in; private teachers who had connections to our school, alumni who were now working as musicians, and also taking advantage of many of the great chamber music groups the service bands made available to us. My last suggestion
SHARE FROM DAY 1-be it a music theory, general music, or songwriting class; if you ever want them to perform in front of each other, set the tone at the beginning of the semester and follow through with it regularly so it becomes normal. -just like in rehearsals, start in large groups, gradually parse it down to smaller groups but DIFFERENT from a large ensemble rehearsal situation, I think it’s important that you prepare students to get out of the nest relatively soon since they’ll likely be expected to present individually pretty early in the semester – especially for a music theory or songwriting classThe SING-A-LONG can be a useful tool for helping students out of their boxes. Personal favorites include Hey Ya by outkast, Don’t Bring me Down by the Beatles, and Forever Young by Bob Dylan. Use these tunes for any purpose (“let’s transcribe this melody or rhythm or chords”, “let’s learn how to play guitar”) and then have everyone sing-a-long with the choruses, then start to ask for volunteers to sing verses, then encourage non-volunteers to take a verse – if reluctant, offer to sing with them or offer to let them team up. And that brings me to our last point here – letting them team up or sing with you could be a 1st step in getting them to move forward. Take any opportunity you can get to help them make those small steps, and prepare alternative paths for them to present their material that could help them have a positive performance experience. For instance: with a songwriting class, if a student is reluctant to share their song solo, in front of the class, see if they might feel better if you or a friend accompanies them. Offer to rehearse with them to make them feel confident for their performance. At a last resort, ask them if there’s a couple of lines they’re particularly proud of – if not, could you look through their lyric sheet and pick out a line you particularly like? If they balk at this – they didn’t do the assignment! I’ve also offered kids the option of recording their songs in advance (with me or on their own) with the intention of playing it back for the whole class. This gave a few perfectionists with some performance anxiety issues a chance to create a performance they were proud of and that was received well. A quick note here for the music theory teachers in the house: when you are embarking on the journey of sightsinging with your students, make sure they can actually read music, and make sure they can play anything you are asking them to sightsing on their native instrument, because I’ve seen brilliant singers fail miserably at sightsinging because I pushed them into it without realizing they still couldn’t really read music, and I’ve also seen very succesful musicians, who can read music just fine in the classroom, but can’t connect it to their own instrument. That is a disservice! So a stepping stone for the reluctant sight singer might be “sight read this for me, on your instrument”, then once they’ve got that “now let’s try singing it”. And for some humming or whistling or kazoos might come more naturally at first – while they’re getting used to the sound of their own voice. At least you can get them working on pitch matching, interval training, musicality, and if you want to add solfege later, it will come a whole lot easier if they already know how to match pitch and read music!----- Meeting Notes (3/2/12 12:30) -----FOREVER YOUNGTHE WEIGHTDON'T LET ME DOWN (Beatles)HEY YA
At the root of improvisation in ANY genre – is melodic embellishment. In a way, this makes singers fairly natural improvisers, because they are constantly learning melodies, but for many instrumentalists and inside voices, they NEVER learn the melody to a piece, so how can they embellish something they don’t already know? Also – most instrumentalists (of all ages and abilities!) will not be able to natural begin following chord changes, even if they are MONSTER readers in all other respects. It is a skill that must be learned! For many of these musicians, they will have much more success getting started in improvisation by following along with the melody and embellishing on that as their improvisation. Once they’ve really internalized that and found confidence here – THEN they can start to make sense of chords, and apply some of the conventional jazz theory tools and traditions. Hal Galper, who’s a great jazz pianist, is quite outspoken on this topic and there are some good videos of him on youtube speaking up So for this reason (and many others) why not have your ENTIRE ENSEMBLE learn the melody of your pieces? Not just as a vehicle for improvisation exercises, but think of the ear training and interpretation benefits you could get from this! You can tell the 4th horn player that their little solo is a retrograde inversion of the melody and they might actually understand!! You can tell the snare drummer that their sticking needs to line up exactly with the articulations of the melody in the Eb clarinet – they’ll know what to listen for. And you better believe percussionists should learn the melody – not just on mallets, but drums and woodblocks and tambourines. Have you ever made your jazz ensemble drummer play the 1st chorus of Miles Davis’ solo on “So What” on the drumset? They have to listen to all that feel and all those elements of music and figure out a way to represent that on their chosen instrument. It’s a challenge – but that is a critical experience for a drummer. So now it’s own you to make sure everyone in your ensemble has a copy of the melody – in their key, and in their clef. And to take it a step further, I recommend you give them chords (with spellings) and bass lines on three separate staves, so you can have instant warmups, chamber ensembles, improvisation exercises and breakout sessions – and for the truly bold – TRANSPOSITION EXERCISES. What if you gave your whole ensemble the melody, chords and bass line for Ave Verum Corpus in concert D, had them learn it for a few weeks and establish a tradition of playing it everyday during your warmup so it’s ENGRAINED in their heads, and then ask them to play it in concert C!! Ask the Violinists to read the Alto clef parts, Ask the Cellists to read the treble clef parts and violists to learn the bass clef parts, and don’t ask you bass players to do anything because you don’t want to scare them away. This has gone WAY beyond improvisation – but if you listen to Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Frisell, Jerry Douglas, Gabriela Montero – whether conscious or not, melodic embellishment is at the heart of their improvisations, and it is a GREAT first step for any musicianListening carefully – or with “Big Ears” – is a key component to early success in improvisation, and I would take it a step further to say that we need to not just make sure our students are listening, but also comprehending what they’re hearing, but even just in simple ways. For some musicians, the delineation between improvisation, interpretation and strict written playing may not always be clear – nor does it necessarily need to be! But it’s important to ensure that our students don’t just think of improvisation as something jazz musicians do by associating scales with the chord changes of a tune. Our tendency to immediately focus on pitches can really overwhelm the mind of a musician, and shut off our senses to all the other elements of music that are expressed in an improvised solo. If you play a Miles Davis solo for a student and ask them what they heard, there’s a good chance you’ll get an answer of the overwhelmed like “he played a lot of notes” – but give them a few things to focus their listening on, like just articulations or phrasing or dynamics, and then have them listen to the solo again. Getting their head out of the notes and into all the other elements of music can really open up their comprehension and give them worlds of ideas to bring to their own playing.PENTATONICSOrff, A Love SupremeArticle in Fall JournalDarol Anger is giving a workshop on pentatonic improvisation for string players right across the hallMassachusetts Arts Curriculum Framework4.12 Improvise rhythmic and melodic variations on given melodies inpentatonic, major, and minor tonalitiesAPPLY TO PERFORMANCE EXERCISES-Using these ideas on improvisation, and combining them with some of the performance exercises we just discussed, you can carve out niches of time everyday to make improvisation a little part----- Meeting Notes (3/2/12 12:30) -----Principles that are universal to ALL styles
Pat Pattison “Writing Better Lyrics”
With these ideas in mind, I do want to encourage you to be mindful of a couple of hazards in these areas:We often say to our students, with the hopes of encouraging them, “this is simple! This is easy! Just play or write whatever you want!” For some people that may translate into, “if this is so simple, why can’t I do it?” and that open a rabbit hole of self doubt in their playing and themselves, and that’s going to limit creativity.
Have you ever had the experience where a student or colleague asks you a question, and they touch upon something you don’t know much about yourself, so you give an awkward, negative answer that inadvertently discourages them from seeking out more information on the subject! For me – it was a student who came to me after rehearsal one day SO excited, and she wanted so badly, for our band, orchestra and chorus,
With these ideas in mind, I do want to encourage you to be mindful of a couple of hazards in these areas:We need to make sure we prepare our students for these opportunities and scaffold the skills necessary to step out confidently. If you dig an idea I’m saying and walk into one of your classes next week and all of the sudden starting asking your last chair french horn to give the tuning note, that could be a bad experience for them. But if you gradually build up to that, and a week or a day before pull them aside and say “I was thinking about having you tune up the band during rehearsal next week – would you be comfortable with that?” and help them learn how to use a tuner – simple things that are so important to making sure your students have a positive experience.If we want our students to come to class prepared, we need to make sure we’re modeling that by not only preparing ourselves, but also preparing them.
Another thing to be careful of is that sometimes, in our haste to help get a student further faster, we may say something like it’s a rule that’s set in stone, but isn’t actually a hard and fast rule – and might be contradicted by another teacher, or something they’re going to learn later on. So I know for me one of those “rules” was telling my AP music theory classes that if they see a iii chord, it’s probably a I6 chord. Imagine their surprise when we were transcribing the melody, bass line and chords from Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic”, and there’s this beautiful iii-IV progression in the pre-chorus that would sound AWFUL if you made it a I6-IV. All of the sudden I’m telling them “RULE OVER” “GAME OFF” and that’s why>>
I think we might be better served by giving these ideas to them as TOOLS not RULES. And you may give a student a simple tool like a screwdriver at the beginning of their journey, and they figure out that they can use it as a pry bar and a chisel, even if it ain’t pretty. But once they DO learn how to use a chisel, hopefully they’ll see how powerful and delicate it can be, and appreciate the progression and refinement they’ve developed over time.Thank you for your time – I’m excited to hear some of your ways we can foster these ideas, and answer any questions you might have.
