You are about to embark on an exciting journey as you begin as a music education major. Allow me to give you a few pieces of advice.
    What you learn in the classroom is important, but the connections and friends you make outside of the classroom may be even more important. The music world is small; the same classmates you have in college will be your colleagues later. They will be the people you reach out to when you cannot figure out why your third trumpet player cannot hit a top space E and you need suggestions.. They will be the people you reach out to when your budget has been cut, and you need new music but do not have your own resources to purchase it. They will be the people from the neighboring town you call when you have no one to chair the All-County band. Later on in your career, they may even be the people sitting across the table doing interviewing when you are trying to find that perfect job. These are important people.
    Your professors are just as important. You need these people more than you realize, both during college and in the future. Your studio teacher, music education professors, and conductors will be references for future jobs and a source of advice in your first year when all other ideas have failed. They will be there to talk you off the ledge when you cannot find a job, or during the first year of teaching when you cannot seem to feel secure in your job. Even 10 or 15 years later you will still be emailing them to ask for revisions on an article for publication, share good news, or seek advice.
    Take advantage of the classes your college has to offer. Do not just take the minimum. Take extra piano classes. The skills learned here may come in handy when your first job is an elementary general music job that also has band lessons, but instead of playing your main or even secondary instrument, they want you to model your piano reading skills.
    Take every instrument repair class you can find. As an instrumental teacher, you will be repairing instruments on the fly, often three seconds before you walk onto stage for the concert – and sometimes on stage during the concert.
    Even the classes you hate and the conductors you dislike have something to offer. Sometimes the best way to learn is to learn what not to do.
    Join national, state, and county professional organizations. Subscribe to publications. It is fine to let them sit in a pile during the school year. You might look through them over the summer, or seven years after you get the magazine. The periodicals contain important pieces of information. If you look through them now, rip out the articles that are helpful, put them in a binder, and keep it. You will be glad to have these when you need them – and you will.
    Take student teaching seriously. If your cooperating teacher comes in at 6:00 a.m., be there to walk into the building with. If he stays until 9:00 p.m., so should you. You are there to be a shadow and absorb all of the information they have to share. You may have the perfect placement or the worst, but either way you will learn a great deal, including what you like to teach, what you struggle to teach, and what you want to teach later on. Incidentally, once you discover something you struggle to teach, spend more time on it.
    Once you graduate and find your first job, take a breath and have patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day; it was laid brick by brick with precision and patience. Similarly, you do not need to accomplish everything in your first year of teaching, or even in your first five years of teaching. Understand that there are many colleagues who have been there much longer than you. Listen to them tell you the history of the program and why things are the way they are. Be respectful to all the work that they have done before you started teaching there.
    As you go through your first year, take time for yourself. Go home without work sometimes. Work will still be there, but the relationships and connections in your personal life are important. These are the people that will support you in good times and bad. They will be there when you get a pink slip for the fifth time. They, along with your mentors, colleagues, old college friends, and professors talk you off a ledge when you feel like you want to change your career. They are important. Treat them that way.
    Allow yourself as a first-, second-, or even tenth-year teacher to be vulnerable. Ask colleagues to come into your classroom and give you advice and criticism. Do not be afraid to hear critiques; this is how we grow as teachers and ensemble directors. Hearing from a colleague that there are things to fix does not mean you are a bad teacher, it means there is a clear path toward becoming a better teacher. Use recording devices and send recordings to your college friends or any other music teacher who will listen. 
    Volunteer often at music events. Help in the scoring room at solo and ensemble contests (if it is allowed in your area). Volunteer to chair All-County ensembles. When a volunteer is needed do not look down, trying not to make eye contact. Others volunteered to give your students opportunities; volunteer so you can give your students and other students opportunities!
    Have fun. Have fun learning and growing as a musician. Remember, music is your passion.

The post Dear Younger Me, Advice I Wish I Had In College appeared first on The Instrumentalist.

A Frank Lloyd Wright building only five miles from the school made a perfect first-day attraction.

Day One Itinerary
    Belly dancing at a studio around the corner from our school. None of the students had noticed it before, but they had a great time.
    A tour of the Darwin D. Martin House, a crown jewel in the home portfolio of famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It is only five miles from our school.
    A tour of our local public broadcasting studio, WNED, for students to learn a bit about the communications and broadcasting industry.
    Lunch at the West Side Bazaar, an economic incubator for immigrants to learn how to run a business with the guidance of a team of professionals. Here we tasted foods from a dozen different countries but were still only six miles from school.
    A concert at the local VA Hospital three miles from school.
    Stay at the LeTourneau Christian Camp in Canandaigua, New York, which was 90 miles from school. Students had the full run of the camp, including paintball, a full rec room, a stage set up with backline for them to jam, campfires, dormitory rooms, and meals set on the picturesque banks of Canandaigua Lake.

Day Two Itinerary
    We arrived at Canandaigua High School for a musical collaboration with the band and orchestra there. Band director Greg Kane and orchestra director Nicholas Dubin worked with us to coordinate a piece of music for everyone to rehearse together with students from each school alternating seats. We shared the cost of bringing in music leadership guru Ron Sutherland to work with everyone in music and leadership clinics.
    We toured Finger Lakes Com­munity College and found that they have an amazing state-of-the-art audio production facility and major program there that we never would have guessed existed. We ate lunch at their dining hall.
    We then traveled to Rochester, New York to have clinics and a tour at Nazareth College. While the orchestra worked with Associate Professor Nancy Strelau, the band watched a rehearsal with the wind symphony under the direction of Assistant Professor Jared Chase, who also coordinated our visit. After dinner on campus, we then performed in an evening concert with the college band under the direction of Steven Zugelder. It was a terrific visit.
    We did tell our parents that Nazareth College would be our final stop, so that they could join us for this concert. Several families did attend the concert, as it was only 45 minutes from home.
The trip was fun, educational, musical, and affordable, and it gave our students a unique view of their backyard. The final cost for the mystery tour was about $175 per person, but the experience was priceless.   

The combined bands of Canandaigua High School and Kenmore East High School rehearse during a clinic by Ron Sutherland at Canandaigua High School.

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    The suspended cymbal is one of the simplest percussion instruments, but it requires detailed interpretation from student musicians. Classified as an unpitched idiophone, its body simply vibrates to produce a wash of sound. Percussionists must determine exactly how to make it vibrate to produce the appropriate sound for a given musical passage. Four important considerations for playing the suspended cymbal successfully are selecting the instrument, choosing appropriate mallets, monitoring playing spots and angle, and focusing on physical technique.

Selecting a Cymbal
    Generally, concert suspended cymbals are manufactured to create a full wash of sound with no perceivable pitch. The best way to purchase new cymbals is to try several identical or similar ones with the same mallets, noting differences in their initial response, overall fullness, and gradual decay. Ideally, percussionists should have several cymbals of different sizes available to them for rehearsals so they can choose one that works best in a given situation. An 18" plate is probably the best first cymbal to purchase for your program, followed by 17", 19", and 16" cymbals, although not necessarily in that order. You might consider adding a new cymbal when the repertoire seems to require it. For example, a large, full, dark roll with a big crescendo might inspire you to invest in a 19" cymbal, while a piece with light, repeated, syncopated patterns might call for a 16" plate.
    Assuming your students have several options available, selecting the best one for each situation requires attention to several physical factors, including diameter, thickness, and dimensions. Larger cymbals are usually better for dark, full sounds, sustained rolls, and gong-like effects, while smaller cymbals are useful for sharp attacks, metallic sound effects, and fast rhythmic passages. Remember, however, that the relationship between diameter and thickness can create vastly different colors from cymbal to cymbal. Diameter especially affects the potential volume and initial response, while thickness determines the color and pitch more substantially. Therefore, the combination of these factors may offer surprising resultant sounds, depending on how the cymbal is played and the context of the musical passage. A cymbal with a larger diameter does not necessarily mean that it will provide a bigger sound than a smaller one; it also depends on the thickness, and vice versa. Finally, the dimensions of the cymbal are the relative size of the bell and curvature of the body. These dimensions contribute substantially to the effectiveness of a given plate, especially for specific sound effects. In all cases, students should try several cymbals, if possible, instead of assuming that one is the best choice from the start. They may also need to use more than one cymbal on a single piece, even if the part is simply marked suspended cymbal throughout.

Choosing Mallets
    While any number of implements can be used, some of which are prescribed in detail by composers, percussionists typically use yarn-wrapped mallets to play standard suspended cymbal parts. The wrapping should be consistent and full around the entire mallet head. Most commercially made mallets are wrapped quite well at the factory, but even minimal use can begin to wear the yarn at various spots. Uneven wrapping creates potential for uneven sound, especially on sustained rolls. To protect the yarn over time, make sure students store their mallets in the plastic bags in which they were shipped or in padded bags designed for mallets.
    Percussionists can use specifically designated suspended cymbal mallets, but some vibraphone and marimba mallets also work quite well. Just as it is ideal to have several cymbals available from which to choose, it is important to have several pairs of mallets that can match them in different musical ways. Finding the right mallets for a piece requires experimentation, to compare the effects of mallet head size, amount of yarn wrap, and length and material of shafts, for example. One guideline to keep in mind is that the mallet heads should be heavy enough to set the cymbal fully into motion, even at a soft dynamic. For both single attacks and sustained rolls, the whole cymbal should be vibrating fully, unless the composer purposefully calls for a superficial, shimmering sound. Students can experiment with the contrast between the unsatisfactory sound of mallets that are too small for the plate and the full sound of mallets that match the cymbal appropriately.

Playing Spots and Angles
    Composers may indicate any of three main parts of the suspended cymbal in typical passages: the bell (raised cone in the center), bow (main section of the cymbal), or edge. When playing the bell, students should experiment with various implements and angles. For example, a snare drum stick produces a much different sound when striking the bell on top with the tip than on the side with the shoulder. These two parts of a stick produce a similar contrast when playing on the bow – a pointed ping versus an aggressive metallic attack, respectively. A stick or other hard implement can also be used at the edge of the cymbal, played with the shoulder at about a 45-degree angle to create a fuller crash.
    Perhaps the most common playing spots are on the very edge, given that both single sounds and sustained rolls are produced with yarn mallets there. The mallets should generally strike flat on the surface, so that the largest possible area of the mallet head makes contact. A common mistake among developing percussionists is playing in too far from the edge. They may think they are playing at the edge, but just an inch or so inward reduces the quality and fullness of sound dramatically. Have students experiment with how close to the edge they can play before their mallets actually miss the cymbal. They may be surprised and can then move the mallets in slightly to get the best sound. When rolling, the lateral angle between the two mallets can vary depending on dynamics, but avoid playing the two mallets exactly opposite each other (e.g., three o’ clock and nine o’ clock); this can cause the cymbal to rock back and forth uncomfortably.

Physical Technique
    Most suspended cymbal parts are relatively simple rhythmically, but achieving high-quality sounds is dependent on technical nuance. The slightest variation in physical technique can make or break the resultant sound. Generally, single notes and spaced groups of notes are played at the very edge with a legato stroke (like playing a large bell or gong, for example). This can be done with one mallet, and usually is, although playing with two mallets near each other at the edge can make single notes sound more full. Note that the cymbal does not speak as quickly as, for example, a snare drum or xylophone, so percussionists will often play a legato note slightly ahead of the beat to match an ensemble entrance. In contrast, faster rhythmic passages, or any note that requires a sharp attack, should be approached with a more staccato stroke, similar to playing the snare drum. Players will need to adjust their stick velocity and rebound (providing more upstroke) to make sharp attacks speak effectively. Finally, shorter notes, or any notes for that matter, may require muffling. The non-playing hand simply closes around the edge of the plate to cut off the sound. Incorporating muffling into rhythmic passages sometimes presents surprisingly difficult coordination challenges, which may require slow, choreographed practice.
    One additional technical tip is that students tend to play suspended cymbal sustained rolls too quickly. Percussionists can achieve a smooth, sustained roll on the suspended cymbal with a much slower roll speed than they would use on a snare drum or timpani, so students will need to calibrate their hands accordingly. Have them experiment with slow and fast rolls, noticing the differences and discovering what works well for a given dynamic. Ultimately, the goal is simply to keep the plate in full, consistent motion for the duration of the marked note. Sensing how fast the hands need to move to maintain the vibrations requires experimentation. In fact, for all recommendations provided here, students will be served best by time and opportunities to experiment with how a range of approaches affects their sound. If they can imagine the ideal sound for a given passage – perhaps with the director’s guidance – they can then manipulate the options described to produce it. Encourage percussionists to be persistent in their quest for the best cymbal sounds they can possibly create.

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The body is a three-dimensional entity.
    Arguments among teachers and students about breathing often center on the question of whether the lungs fill from the bottom up or everywhere at once. (It is the latter, but more on that later.) Regardless of one’s position on this question, common explanations from both perspectives often come from an implied viewpoint that the body in general and the lungs in particular are two-dimensional. The body is considered from up-down and side-side perspectives but not from a front-back one. The lungs are thought of as being in the front of the body, with little acknowledgement that they extend all the way through the chest to the back. This mental concept leads, unconsciously, to the body moving with the breath in such a way that up-down and side-side expansion is allowed but front-back expansion is minimized, and a certain amount of potential air volume is never realized. For more barrel-chested individuals like me, this unrealized capacity can be a considerable amount, indeed.
    Think of the lungs in three dimensions, and feel them expanding in all of those directions as you inhale. If you haven’t thought of the body in this way before you will likely notice an immediate and drastic change for the better.

The lungs are in the chest, not the abdomen.
    Often paired with the two-dimensional lungs problem is a focus on movement in the abdomen when breathing. Many of us have had teachers who admonished us to breathe low to play, and when rightly understood and applied this can be a correct instruction; a proper breath includes movement in the lower part of the torso. However, when this is overemphasized or misapplied it can lead to several errors.
    The first of these is simply that students will conceive of the lungs as being in the belly rather than in the chest. This leads – unconsciously, like the error previously discussed – to breaths where abdominal motion is exaggerated and motion in the chest, sides, and back is restricted; thus maximum air volume is not attained.
    Even worse, the emphasis on abdominal motion can lead to excessive engagement of the abdominal muscles when playing, creating unnecessary tension that can extend to the legs, arms, shoulders, and embouchure. While the abdominal muscles do come increasingly into play as one ascends into the high register, the best results are achieved when muscular effort is kept to the minimal amount possible for the instrument and range being played.
    A somewhat less harmful but sillier-looking error related to this is the aforementioned bottom-up approach, where the lungs are conceived of as filling like liquid being poured into a bucket, rather than like air being blown into a balloon. I have even seen techniques where people will move the abdomen, the sides, the chest, and the back in sequence whenever taking a breath, and the effect looks like a bizarre belly-dance. While there are perhaps some therapeutic applications in which breathing sequentially in this way is helpful, a normal breath involves allowing the lungs to expand in all directions simultaneously.
    While proper breathing involves motion in the abdomen, this is a secondary motion that occurs as a consequence of the diaphragm lowering and flattening, not a primary motion undertaken by the abdominal muscles. The lungs are in the chest, so that is where the air goes. Keep that in mind when breathing and, again, allow the lungs to expand omnidirectionally. When this is done, the ribs, spine, diaphragm, and other structures of the chest and abdomen will move in a delightfully coordinated manner to allow a full, relaxed, comfortable breath.

Breathing exercises increase efficiency, but not capacity.
    Regular use of breathing exercises by wind players seems to have started in the drum corps and marching band worlds, but with the advent of The Breathing Gym and similar programs their use has become common in a variety of contexts. There is good reason for this widespread popularity – breathing exercises work. Never­theless, there is some misunderstanding of how these exercises improve performance. To put it briefly, breathing exercises do not increase lung capacity. Our lungs reach their maximum size when we reach adulthood, and any increase in lung capacity experienced by younger students occurs because of the growth of their bodies generally.
    Nevertheless, while lung capacity itself is not increased by using breathing exercises, the efficiency with which we use the capacity that we have is. Think of all the muscles and structures that come into play to allow and contribute to the expansion and contraction of the lungs every time we breathe. Breathing exercises are essentially a type of overtraining of the breathing apparatus, which over time becomes more flexible and efficient as these exercises are performed. As a result, we become able to move air more easily and effectively when playing.

We inhale to exhale.
    For wind players, the primary purpose of breathing (other than to sustain life, of course) is to make tone production possible. Creating sound is the main thing, and that is a function of exhalation, not inhalation. Thus, in a certain sense, the most important part of the breath is the exhalation. Despite this, students often focus too much upon the inhalation, or more specifically, on creating the feeling of having filled up with air, rather than focus on efficiently moving that air through the instrument. The problems with this are threefold.
    First, the sensation associated with having taken a full breath is often not the result of having filled with air, but rather an unconsciously created muscle tension that the student associates with filling up. As has been suggested previously, breathing fully is a relaxing experience rather than a tense one; a full-capacity breath should feel pleasant rather than stressful. In fact, the tension created to generate that artificial sense of being full actually ends up depriving the student of the ability to efficiently use the air he has.
    In any case, even the correct sensation of having filled up should be a somewhat rare experience, because not every breath has to be at full capacity. This statement will come as no surprise to oboists, trumpeters who perform frequently on piccolo trumpet, and other players of high-pitched instruments, but to many low brass players it is tantamount to heresy. Most of the time, though, we have ample opportunities to breathe, so much so that attempting to take in a full breath every time will only create tension and timing problems rather than facilitating better playing. Focus on using a correct, relaxed, efficient breathing technique, and take in the volume of air needed for the passage at hand. Think of a good breath being more about correct methodology than high volume.
    Third, seeking the filled up sensation inevitably leads to a hiccup of varying severity between the inhalation and the exhalation, as the player needs to hold momentarily before releasing the air to achieve the desired sensation. This leads to the final topic for this discussion.

Stopping the air destroys timing and coordination.
    “Breathe together, play together” is a common refrain among band conductors seeking uniform initial attacks from their ensembles. Indeed, you might have even observed fine string and percussion players achieving coordinated entrances by breathing in time as an ensemble. A well-timed breath benefits more than ensemble performance, though; even individual tone production becomes more effortless and pleasing when the inhalation and exhalation occur evenly and in time. Sadly, even students and directors who acknowledge the importance of breathing together and in time fail to reap the benefits of doing so for one simple reason: there is a pause – however brief – between the inhalation and the exhalation. When this happens, even a group that begins the initial breath in unison will fail to play the first note precisely together. Players sometimes notice that their initial attacks have an explosive quality but do not always understand that momentarily holding the air before playing is the cause of this.
    The solution to this problem is simple in concept but sometimes challenging in application. To eliminate this issue, simply inhale until the exhalation begins, without even a split-second pause between the two. This will deprive students of the sensation of filling up, as was indicated previously. Instead, the sensation when playing should be one of constantly moving air – in and out. Internal subdivision of the beat becomes vitally important here, as continuing the inhalation for the entirety of the preparatory beat can be effective only as long as everyone agrees on the duration of that beat. Repeated practice of the initial breath and attack, with and without a metronome, individually and as an ensemble, is necessary both for creating and reinforcing the correct breathing sensation and for perfecting timing. The benefit of improved performance is more than worth the effort needed to apply this and all of the concepts discussed here.

The post Five Truths about Breathing appeared first on The Instrumentalist.

    Director of bands and 2016 California Teacher of the Year Mitch Bahr is in his 16th year at Foothill High School in Palo Cedro. The school opened in 1991, and when Bahr arrived in fall of 2002, he was already the ninth band director. “There seems to have been great difficulty getting the program started. The freshman band had eight students and my advanced band was in the low twenties. The band students were the laughingstock of the school, and students were ashamed to be in band. The jazz band students were not required to sign up for concert band, which led to an elitist attitude from them. When a program is in disarray like this, the only solution is to start working.”

What were the first steps you took to build up the program?
    Prior to my arrival, the band was tucked away in the corner of the bleachers, playing songs like The Chicken Dance. At my first football game, students trudged toward the field and made a left toward their usual spot, but I made a right. I got to the 50 yard line, saw them still by the end zone, and waved them over. When they got to me, I said, “This is our spot now,” and we played from there that week. The next Monday, the varsity cheerleaders came into band room in full uniform. They brought us cookies, thanked us for adding to the football game, and applauded the band. My drum major that year was a senior, and she broke down crying when the cheerleaders left the classroom. It was the first time she had ever felt proud to be a musician at Foothill.
    That was the beginning of the culture change at the school. I told students right away that I would never put them in a situation where they would be embarrassed about a performance, and this showed them that I was telling the truth. People began to see what we were building.
    It takes time to gain that trust from students, but once that trust is earned, students buy in wholeheartedly. Children thrive on reassurance, and they need it often. A former professor who I admire greatly, Bob Feller of Biola University, is someone I describe as firm, but giving grace, which is the approach I take with my students. It means I have their back, I am in their corner, and I will fight for them. It does not mean I want students to be content where they are. I will push them and urge them to keep improving themselves as people and musicians. High school students have days when they only want to give minimal effort, and I want them to understand that unless I see someone is about to break under life’s circumstances, I am going to push beyond what students think they can handle That is where students learn. I want students to understand that everything I do on the podium is for their benefit.
    When people ask what drives me every day, I say to serve the students and serve the music – in that order. I liken a teacher’s job to that of a servant, but not someone to be walked over. You are still the authority, but if students do not see that you have compassion for them, they won’t believe that you really are in their corner. If they don’t see you walk down to the gym and cheer on that freshman volleyball team that has a couple flute players, they won’t believe that you care about who they are outside of band.

What are the unexpected difficulties of teaching in a rural area?
    If you take on a high school job in a rural area but come in with unrealistic expectations of how much a student who lives five miles down a dirt road off a poorly traveled highway is going to do for you, it can become frustrating quickly. We have students who hop on a bus long before I need to leave for work. Many of them also get home later than I do. This has to be taken into account in your teaching.
    Some people might bristle at this, but I think the Foothill band was built with a Frisbee, a deck of cards, and food. When we have Friday night football games, I leave the band room open all day and am at school until the game ends so the students who usually ride the bus after school can stay in town and have a place to be. Students can practice a little bit if they want or just hang out with friends. They look forward to it. We have snacks and hearts tournaments. This is how you build memories with students, especially in a small town.

What courses do you teach at Foothill?
    My current job assignment is two concert bands, two jazz bands, and a string orchestra, but it started differently. My job assignment when I arrived was jazz, freshman band, advanced band, and two enormous acoustic guitar classes. I had never played acoustic guitar before but learned over the summer. I also had a music appreciation class, now taught by the choir director. I realized there were many future band students in the guitar and music appreciation classes, so I helped these students love and appreciate music. My guitar curriculum included reading music. I know tablature is traditional, but it doesn’t give you everything you need. I loved teaching that class.
    Once I had started to win over the students and community, the next step was setting expectations for students and parents. The biggest hurdle was telling jazz band members that they would also be enrolled in concert band. That was a multi-year struggle; the last entitled students from before I arrived started to see the importance of that during my fourth year. After I brought the jazz band students back into concert band, everyone interacted, and interest in jazz skyrocketed to the point that I convinced the district to add a second jazz band that feeds into the first.
    There are a number of students at Foothill who were home schooled through eighth grade. A few of them were string players, and they clearly missed music. I received permission to start an orchestra and funding to buy violas, cellos, and basses, and we have an orchestra of 15-20 each year. Some kids aren’t wired for band; they are meant for orchestra. We are a great grade 2-3 orchestra and have fun with it. Students learn about Vivaldi, Mozart, Bartók, and many other important styles of music.
    Band students are required to learn all twelve keys, so at the end of the orchestra’s second year I combined the two groups for graduation. I seated the orchestra students in the middle of the group and put condenser mics on them. I commissioned a band piece for a festival a few months earlier, and the composer wrote in some string parts. It was incredibly well received.

How do you recruit students?
    Out of fourteen schools that feed into this high school, only four have a band. They are all too small to go to the local college festival, so each spring we have the Foothill Feeder Frenzy. The feeder bands come to the high school’s small gym and play for each other. My classes are the audience. I assign three seniors to score each band, and they recognize a couple people from each group and give out treats as rewards. Then I give each group a clinic with the aim of making students feel good about their work.
    During the rest of the day, the feeder school students rotate between several classes taught by my students. These might include marching practice, an improv class, or even a trivia game. At the end of the day, my band plays so the younger kids hear what life could be like in high school. I avoid showy or difficult music for this performance, because I don’t want them to feel nervous about high school band. It is easy to forget how intimidated sixth graders can be at the sight of sixteenth notes.
    In addition, we also invite middle school students to join the high school band at a football game once a year. For this game, we exchange our up-tempo, difficult tunes for music middle schoolers can handle. We play a simple arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner, Go! Fight! Win!, Louie Louie, and Land of a Thousand Dances. I have seen similar events at other schools where the feeder school students sit separately and only play on a couple of the songs in the stands because the high school director chooses not to change the music. Why invite them? It is better to bring all of the pep band music down to their level for a night and have high school students set between them and get to know them. The football audience hears the same songs from week to week; the change is nice.
    In the high school, band students started to recruit their friends. I have 75-80 in the symphonic band, and I started a third of them in high school. Not knowing how to play is no excuse. Few high school students know anything about physics, but this doesn’t stop them from signing up for physics class. Nonetheless, there is a stigma that no one should sign up for music unless they are already a musician. This can only be overcome by helping students understand that my job is to educate them in music. Being a musician has to do with how much someone will work at long tones, scale patterns, and etudes. I tell students that my only expectations are that they listen to my words and practice. The rest takes care of itself.
    Maybe your best future trombone player is a sophomore with no musical experience. Put an instrument in his hands and send him to his trombone-playing friend to learn the basics. By next year, that student might be one of your best musicians. I had a student approach me last spring to say, “I haven’t been in band for three years, because I have had an extra class, but I’ve always wanted to be in band. Can I?” I gave her an instrument and a few lessons before summer and told her to go have a good time” I want students to look back and be glad they experienced music. If you do not give students that chance, all they know of music is what they hear on the radio.

How do you assimilate beginning high school students into the band?
    I always loved playing basketball, but I was too chicken to try out for the team. Finally, my senior year buddies begged me to try out for the team, but I didn’t know how to play basketball. I just knew how to shoot. I went over to a friend’s house, we made a Lego court, and he moved the characters to demonstrate how the game worked. People will put in hours with sports, but musicians rarely think about getting together and sharing things like that. There is so much worry among musicians about whether it is perfect and how others will react if it isn’t. The reality is that it will not be perfect, so I tell students to be content where they are, where they started, and to cherish the opportunity to be on the journey of learning music.
    My section leaders are not in that position because they are the best players. They earn the position because they care about everyone in their section. They are servant-based leaders. I do not believe in chairs; I believe in finding one or two people that care about building the musicianship of the section. Their job is to carry new students for the first couple months until they get up to speed with the band, even if that means they have to come in at lunch or after school.

What are the keys to improving musicianship?
    There is no magic exercise that changes a band’s sound for the better. The primary way to improve musicianship in the band is getting students to care how they sound. When someone sings, you can tell what music they like – if they sing with a twang, they listen to country music. Likewise, I can tell if an instrumental music student listens to people who play the same instrument, and I tell students when I hear improvements and when I do not. This is especially true for jazz band. I hand students my tablet and ask them to pull up what they have been listening to.
    I had a guitar player last year who had only been playing two years planned to attend California Polytechnic State University and hoped to get into their jazz band this year. He spent all his spare time listening, and we had wonderful conversations about John Scofield and Pat Metheny. He was listening to everything.
    I often burn mix cds together for students. If they listen to them, great, but if not, I do not worry about it. When I pass out a cd, if two or three people listen to it, the effort was worth it. This is the same reason I grade practice sheets in high school. I know some students are going to forge a parent’s signature, but there are many in band who want to please their director. If I say, “I know everyone is busy with sports, travel, and work, but I would like everyone to practice at least this much,” and I get a dozen band members to do it, collecting practice sheets is worth it. How many of that dozen would have practiced without that expectation?

How do you reach out to the community?
    It saddens me to see people at a wedding walk down the aisle to recorded music; performance should be part of our culture, and the school music program should be woven into the culture of the community. If there is an assembly at school, we play in it. If there is music performed on the campus, we want to be the ones playing it. If a community event music needs music, I want us to be the ones providing it. The veterans’ community cannot afford to bus us over there, so we pay for it ourselves; to me the expense is worth being able to teach students how to sit through the military services for Veterans Day and Memorial Day and what that music represents. I want the community to understand how much everyone would lose if the Foothill band ever went away, or if funds were lost. A director who only serves his needs does not build that connection with the community, and that program will not be considered valuable.
    We also reach out to elementary students by bringing classes to the high school for 25-minute demonstration concerts. We start by performing while students listen. Then we have them stand behind a chair and watch music go by. We demonstrate different dynamics, but none loud enough to hurt any ears. We have mouthpiece sanitizer available and set up stations for students to try different instruments. Finally, we give them some percussion instruments, and let them play along with a song. We test them by getting softer or louder or speeding up or slowing down. It is a fun day for everyone.

How do your school exchange programs work?
    A school exchange is calling up a school and setting up two days, one this school year and one the next, where each band plays for the other, and then both bands play a piece together. These happen during the school day; the idea is to take a couple hours out of school to share ideas. This shows students that bands at other schools are doing the same thing they are. Each has a culture.
    The last school we went to was struggling. The students there had had a new director each year for a long time. I warned my students, “They probably are going to have little trust in their director. I am going to pump up the kids, and we are going to find the good in their performance. I want to you be celebratory when they’re done and appreciative of the music you’ve heard. Be genuine and positive.” It takes few brain cells to be a critic. Mistakes in music are easily heard. It takes more skill to find the good in a struggling program. What do you hear that they’re doing well? If a group is far behind on music, you may have to praise the culture of the classroom. It may be the only thing you can find to compliment is eye contact with the director, but this matters, too.
    The truth is that I rarely stop for a missed note. They happen. It is more important to me that students commit to good tone and finishing phrases well. The discipline it takes to commit to a course of action or to self-improvement transfers to every area of life, while fixing a wrong note takes just a pencil mark. It is more important to me that students, most of whom will stop playing their instruments after they graduate, master the former two. The discipline, accountability, and compassion we learn from each other goes way beyond whether someone misses an accidental.    

The post The Right Turn that Changed a Culture An Interview with Mitch Bahr appeared first on The Instrumentalist.

    There is a McDonald’s commercial that has received heavy airplay over the past year. A teenage employee bursts into the restaurant clutching a letter from a college admissions office. The manager snatches the letter away and calls the rest of the staff over. As the letter is read, it becomes clear that the teenager has earned a spot at the college. The restaurant kitchen erupts in applause.
    I have seen this commercial a hundred times, and it always moves me. I often think about what this moment will be like for my stepson, Eliott, when he gets his first acceptance a decade from now. I am guessing the news will not come by snail mail in 2028. On weeknights, as we sometimes slog through his library reading books for the week, I keep in mind the distant shore where we are heading.
    At age 7, he has only the vaguest notion of college life, but I have begun a low-key effort to make higher education seem like a given. We spent many afternoons last winter at Northwestern watching Chris Collins and the Wildcats earn their first-ever trip to the NCAA tournament. The nuances of the game were lost on him as we spent precious minutes chasing down the elusive cotton candy man. After one game, he asked, “Can we live here?” I told him, “Someday, if you work very hard, you can go to school here like all of these big kids.” He probably just wanted a bunk bed near the concession stand, but I went home smiling that day. This fall we are adding lunches near campus and NU football games to the agenda. The subliminal advertising has begun.
    On this academic journey, I face a dilemma common to all parents – how hard to push him to succeed. We live in a district where the vast majority of students attend college. For most, it is not even a question. That certainty about college comes with inevitable academic pressure. I have seen plenty of students zip through school with all of the joy of a tax preparer. I don’t want my son to feel like he has to earn perfect grades. I want him to find a true love of learning and to reach for the upper levels of his abilities.
    We are still working on this love of learning. It is disconcerting to see how much homework already is given in second grade. With his reading assignments, I sometimes feel like a conductor, deciding when to prod and when to pull back. I choose between stopping to point out a mistake and pressing ahead. The pupil frequently objects. “Why do I have to read all the words?” The road to the future is long and has many detours.
    One of my broader goals is to create an environment where learning is fun and where mistakes are tolerated. An educator who lives by this approach is Mitch Bahr, our October interview subject. Bahr, the 2016 California Teacher of the Year, inherited a demoralized program 15 years ago, and promised his students that he would never put them in the position of feeling embarrassed as musicians. In his view, changing the culture of the program and emphasizing the social aspects of music were just as important as improved playing. To bolster his instrumentation, he showed a willingness to recruit high school students with strong motivation and limited musical experience. “Few high school students know anything about physics, but this doesn’t stop them from signing up for physics class.” I don’t think Eliott can commute to California to play in Mitch Bahr’s band, but I can’t wait for him to play for a director with the same spirit and creativity.
            

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