How I'd Teach It

So why? Why do bands lose focus as a semester goes on? What changes? I've heard it suggested that students are busier and more tired. Their minds are on the piles of homework awaiting them after rehearsal rather than the drill at hand. I've considered the idea that students simply start to take rehearsals for granted as the months go on and pay less attention because they are bored.

As these theories arise, however, they are quickly able to be rejected. Students are often busy during band camp and, as I know from experience, exhausted. They still focus. Varying the routine of a rehearsal has shown to have little effect, showing that students aren't just bored.

So what is it? Are they just "bad kids"? No. Something huge changed between band camp and october: water breaks.

During band camp, the majority of directors give frequent, long(ish) water breaks. My high school director gave us a five minute break every half an hour when we were learning drill or fundamentals. That was more than enough time to not only get a drink, but also to sit down, relax, and socialize.

For those five minutes, the whole band stopped doing band. It acted not only as a time for physical recovery, but for mental recovery, allowing us all to reset and come back to the drill with focus back in place.

As the year progressed and the weather got nicer, however, our breaks were shortened, then cut entirely. My director saw no need to give us regular breaks because we were no longer sweating off every drop of water we took in. When we had a three hour rehearsal in october we would often only receive one 2-3 minute long break. No one passed out. Unlike in the summer, no one came close. But we missed those breaks, and it showed.

It showed in unfocused, inefficient rehearsals.

So I propose we keep the breaks. A marching band should have a break at least once an hour and those breaks should be about five minutes long. Even when it's nice out. Even when no one might pass out.

Some directors scoff at this idea. A break every hour takes away ten to fifteen minutes of valuable rehearsal time for seemingly no reason. But these breaks give back far more time than they take up. The help students to keep quiet and engaged. There are fewer reps wasted on missed step offs and misheard directions. Students play with more emotion and energy, and move their feet in better time and better technique.

The water break is not a step of rehearsal. It is a necessary part of a functional one, no matter the weather.

In the classroom, beginning instrumental educators do a great job: we teach students skills sequentially, we reinforce previously taught skills, and keep students engaged with fun and familiar melodies. The problem comes with assigning "homework." Most beginning teachers simply tell their students to "practice" the assigned materials.

This sounds simple enough: each exercise in a method book has a specific focus, so when a student plays that exercise they are improving that skill. That idea sounds really nice, but it is unfortunately untrue. A student does not necessarily get better at an exercise each time they play it. They just get more of whatever they are. If a student practices well, they will get better at the exercise and the skill it teaches. If they don't practice well, they will reinforce bad habits which become more difficult to break over time.

So what do we do as educators to help our students practice well? We teach them how to practice. For many educators, this idea is a little alien. Most of us learned to practice on our own, around the time we got really serious about music. I don't think that I personally really understood how to practice productively until around my senior year of high school. But younger students can and should learn practice strategies.

These strategies start with the ones we're occasionally good at teaching: the ones that don't involve the instrument. Students should, if possible, practice at the same time and in the same place each day. All of their materials should be easily accessible from wherever they practice, including their instrument, any additional supplies like reeds, their music, a pencil, and a metronome.

Strategies should then be demonstrated in class. In my clarinet section in my college marching band, I hate rehearsing sixteenth note runs. It feels like a waste of time, because everyone learns the runs at a different pace, making it frustrating for at least half the section when we spend a lot of time on them. I will, however, teach one set of sixteenth note runs each season. While I teach it, rather than taking an entire hour of sectionals to make it sound good, I spend 10-15 minutes walking the group through how I practice runs in my solo music with a portion of the piece we're working on. I tell the section members to go home and do this with the rest of the runs, and give them an estimate of how long it will take them. For non-music major college students, I usually estimate approximately double the time it took me. I know this would be different with younger students.

Many educators will say "class time is for large ensemble work. Students can practice on their own time." This is, of course, technically true, but it is important to acknowledge that students will practice much more effectively if we are willing to spend a few minutes introducing them to the strategies we use. More effective practice leads to rehearsals where we have to spend far less time woodshedding. We don't even have to research new Strategies! When I want to teach someone how to practice with a metronome, I'll work with them on a short section of their music exactly how I'd work on it myself, then instruct them to continue the method with the rest of the piece.

Teaching practice strategies doesn't just increase the effectiveness of a student's practice, it also increases the amount of practice. We all know how frustrating it is to engage in an activity when you're not making progress. Without effective practice strategies, students don't make forward progress. If they feel like they can't progress, they don't practice. This isn't a character fault on the part of the student. It's completely understandable that many of them don't want to put their time into something that's not fun since they're not getting better. So if we want our students to practice often, we should give them the tools and skills to make that practice time enjoyable for them.

If we're going to spend class time teaching practice, both we and our administrators are likely to want some form of accountability for our students: are they practicing? This makes teaching practice difficult, as we don't want to penalize students for having a busy week, and we can't expect every student to improve at the same rate. So how do we evaluate practice? I propose that we ask our students to evaluate themselves.

Students can submit a weekly evaluation where they create goals, state whether or not they felt they achieved their goals, and note which strategies they used. You might even get some new strategies from your students! My evaluation has four questions:

What was your goal this week?

Do you feel you achieved this goal? If not, what could you have changed in order to achieve it?

How did you work towards this goal? Which strategies were effective and which were not?

What is your goal for the upcoming week?

I really like this form for a couple of reasons:

1. It allows students to be at their own level. A fourth grader could fill this out. So could a senior in high school, although they may need a bit more space. Even students at the same grade level are given flexibility. While one student may be trying to play one measure at the correct tempo, another may be trying to play the same piece all the way through to work on endurance.

2. It's easy to grade. Did you answer all four questions? Yes? 100%. It gives you the discretion to give any student the A, even if they just had a bad week. If a student was sick for most of the week, they can easily say "I was unable to practice much this week" in response to how or whether or not they achieved their goal. If a student set their goal to high and they didn't quite meet it, there's no real penalty, as long as they reflect on that.

This is opposed to a practice log, which often expects students to quantify their practice. This forces students to conform to a single model of how to practice, and we all know that different students take different amounts of time to master material. I believe the self evaluation is also superior to the playing test to encourage practice, as students can set their own goals, leaving no one bored and no one overwhelmed.

When I've discussed this idea with both colleges and the some parents I know, I get one question a lot: how will you be sure your students aren't lying on the evaluation? The short answer to this is that I won't. I can't ensure that my students are all really working on their practice goals. But no system will let me know exactly what my students are doing outside of my classroom. I want to give them the tools to practice well, and I feel confident that a self evaluation does this better than a system that penalizes more students.

The self evaluation also gives students an incredibly valuable skill outside of the classroom: critical reflection. Every skill takes time to develop, and students can use the reflection skills they learned from instrumental practice in any field. Administrators love easily transferable skills.

I was a really good student throughout my grade school and high school careers. I got straight As, even as I took my fair share of honors and AP classes. I’m not including this to brag, but to make the point that I was not trying to get out of hard work when I asked “why are we learning this?” or “why do we need to know this?” And I found few things more frustrating than when a teacher said “because it will be on the test” or “because it’s important.” These answers were disappointing, not only because they were dismissive of what I believe to be a really valid point, but because I knew there had to be a real answer. 

I feel like this question is most commonly asked in a math class. The majority of students will never use any advanced math in their daily lives. I haven’t used any of what I learned in precalc since I finished precalc. But when my math teachers were questioned with “when are we ever going to use this in real life?” the answers usually focused on the jobs that involved advanced math, or the upcoming standardized test. 

I couldn’t stand that answer as a student, because I had no reason to care about jobs that weren’t music related, and I really didn’t care about the standardized test. Now, as a young educator, I really can’t stand that answer because there is a much better one: you probably won’t use advanced math in real life. As a music educator, I haven’t used the quadratic formula in years. But math encourages the use of logical reasoning, critical thinking, and problem solving. Every single student will use those skills for the rest of their lives. We learn advanced math as a way to develop them. You can’t teach every scenario that requires logical reasoning. You just can’t. There are too many and they’re too complicated for a class to ever cover them all. But you can teach math. 

Now to bring this back to this blog’s favorite topic: music history. Even in my college classes. I have heard so many people ask why we only cover certain subjects in music history, specifically, straight, white, dead men. Even as college juniors who are majoring in music, I have heard my peers ask why we have to take music history at all. 

Upon being asked this in class once, one of my music history professors responded with the idea that the composers we were studying were the pinnacle of what music can be, and as musicians, it is critical that we are aware of their genius. That is a terrible answer. It depends on an objective definition of genius and greatness, which is impossible in music, and it really abandons anyone for whom music history glosses over all the music they care about. 

Music history neglects not only women and people of color, but also huge numbers of musical genres. We never so much as mention wind ensemble, popular music of any sort, or musical theater, all of which have been around for decades if not centuries. I have never learned about a composer that I am likely to present to my future high school wind ensemble. 

So why should I learn it? I believe that a well designed music history curriculum, at any grade level, presents students with the skills necessary to learn more about any piece. It highlights research skills and characteristics to discuss rather than practicing hero worship for beethoven and mozart. 

We do this in our theory and aural skills classes. We learn skills that we can apply to any scenario. We don’t memorize facts, we practice understanding of complex and relavant skill sets. I know I’ve already applied my music theory education to my work as an educator as I study scores. But I have very little idea of how to ppresent a piece to my students in its historical context. 

I would assert that my college music history classes are being taught in a bubble. I am learning music history because I have been told that it is “important,” although I have seen little justification for this in the rest of my studies. As a student whose primary focus is wind ensemble music, I rarely play pieces by the composers we study in-depth. When I eventually direct a band myself, this trend is likely to continue. Mozart simply didn’t write for wind ensemble, as the wind ensemble did not yet exist. My theory classes covered the music of the baroque and classical eras well before we discussed them in music history, meaning that I was once again unable to apply the things I had learned in the history class. 

This bubble is further created by one of my music history professors outright forbidding our class from connecting what we were learning in class to the music we were familiar with. The class covered music from ancient times until the year 1750. We were explicitly forbidden from mentioning anything that occurred after 1750 in our work. I did a presentation on renaissance instruments at one point, and was not allowed to mention the trombone when discussing the sackbut, nor the oboe while discussing the crumhorn. 

Without the ability to compare the past to the present, the class felt absolutely useless. Why do I need to care about the sackbut in the first place if it is not to understand the origin of the trombone? Why should I care about baroque opera that I can’t understand if I can’t connect it to the modern musical theater that I have so much affection for? 

My answer to these questions became “because I want an A in the class.” As a teacher, I hope that my students never have to answer the question “why do I need to know this” with “because I want a good grade.” That answer leads to a lack of motivation and, worse, a lack of understanding. When students don’t see purpose in learning the material, they aim to memorize rather than really engage with the content. They prepare for an assessment rather than attempting to really internalize the concepts. As an educator, that is heartbreaking. 

Yet that has been the case with my music history education much of the time. When I have asked the question “why are we learning about X,” I am often met with the argument that “X was a genius” or “X is a brilliant piece of music.” I have never found that to be a satisfactory answer. There are lots of things that are brilliant that I have no interest in studying in-depth because I know I will not use the information: papers on particle physics, for example. I’m glad someone did it, but I feel no compulsion to engage with it just because it is a work of genius. I also think that “genius” and “brilliant” are very subjective terms, and are often misused in the world of music, but that’s beside the point. 

Returning to my love of the music history I learned in piano back in high school, I never had to ask why I was learning it: I applied it immediately. I learned about the Russian revolution when playing Russian music, and put the anger and fear that so many people experienced into my interpretation of the piece. Even five years later I remember playing a Kabalevsky’s Sonatina in a minor and learning about the small act of rebellion he committed against the communist party he was employed by when he included two measures with emphasized syncopation. Syncopation was considered a “western” concept rather than a “Russian” one, and therefore could not be used in Russian music. I still know this because I got to apply that knowledge to my performance. Even if my parents didn’t know why those two measures were important, they could tell they were important because I brought them out of the texture a little. 

That application made the material mean something. Kabalevsky was more than a name and set of random facts. He was a rebel. He was fighting against oppressors. He was cool to a sixteen year old me. I have never experienced that thought in my music history classes. 

So the question becomes this: how do we get the goal of academic music history classes to be application? 

As a future high school band director, the solution is simpler than it is for my collegiate music history professors. I will have the opportunity to do something very similar to what my piano teachers did, and teach music history alongside the pieces we are performing: if we are performing “The Washington Post” march by Sousa, we will discuss march form and history, along with why John Phillip Sousa was a big deal and how the march got its name. Where was it performed for the first time? Students will connect to this information because they will be able to use to inform a stellar performance. 

This is quite impossible in a college music history class. At my university, there are members of no less than ten different ensembles enrolled in my music history class, including students specializing in wind ensemble, choir, orchestra, and jazz. It would be impossible to cover every composer we’re playing pieces by, and no composer would be directly relevant to everyone in the room. So this solution that is simple in a band room becomes impossible. 

I would suggest changing the goal of music history from knowing about certain composers and pieces to learning a skill set that is applicable to any composer and any piece. This skill set would include an advanced musical vocabulary. We would still need to learn about genres, forms, textures, and instrumentation. We would have a basic timeline of the evolution of these concepts so we can understand approximately where a piece fits in. We would learn about the useful generalizations that can be made using the idea of musical eras. This necessary skill set would also include research skills: how do you learn about music once you’re out of this classroom?

Now with the idea of a skill based curriculum comes the question: what about all of the “brilliant” composers that we focus so extensively on in our current model? Well, firstly it is important to remember that some of them fit into an understanding of the musical ideas I’ve already discussed. You cannot talk about the evolution of the symphony without talking about Beethoven. You cannot discuss the development of opera without discussing Mozart and Wagner. But these discussions can be had based on what they did rather than simply their excellence. Students can learn for themselves why these figures were important. These so-called geniuses can also offer great practice for the application of research skills that are so essential to music history scholarship. Rather than simply reading about these people in a textbook, why not read primary sources focused on their work? Why not expect students to find pieces that demonstrate general characteristics common to a composer’s style? Not only will students learn more about whatever great master is being studied, but they will be able to apply that information beyond that individual. 

This approach would have multiple advantages. Firstly, if we’re studying the people in music history for reasons other than “they’re important” it is far easier to diversify the curriculum. Music history is very straight, very white, and very male. When pieces and composers are being used as part of a broader curriculum rather than the sole focus, lesser known artists and works can be incorporated. A lesser known classical sonata can be substituted for one by Mozart. A wind ensemble symphony can serve as an example of the genre’s modern incarnation just as easily as an orchestral one. This allows all students, even those for whom orchestra or choir is not their primary focus, even those who are not white men, to see themselves in the class, and to connect to that. 

Secondly, and I cannot stress this enough, students can apply this curriculum when they are not discussing Mozart or Beethoven. As a band director, it is unlikely that I program much Mozart. But I will certainly use my understanding of how to discuss music history when I program a symphony for band, or discuss the latin origins of a piece like Kevin Day’s “Havana.” (If you don’t know Kevin Day, you will one day. He writes great wind ensemble music and is going to be HUGE). My students will need background on these pieces just as much as they would if they were playing baroque music. I wish I was being prepared as if that were the case. 

Textbook: Beethoven’s music is universally great. It is appreciated equally by people from all parts of the world and never should be questioned in quality.

Response: Greatness is and always will be subjective. I agree that Beethoven’s music is great, but I know lots of perfectly intelligent people who couldn’t stand listening to all of symphony no. 5 but could listen to Cardi B for hours. Cardi B is great to them, and because greatness is subjective, she is great. Even if I wouldn’t have the best time harmonically analyzing her music in theory class. Even if we won’t be studying her 200 years from now. Even if the person who says she’s great says Beethoven isn’t. My textbook will never convince me of objective greatness because it does not exist. 

Textbook: Beethoven’s third symphony got bad reviews when it was premiered because no one had heard anything like it before. It was programatic, emotional, and long. Critics didn’t know how good it was, but we know better now!

Response: it’s incredibly important to note that Beethoven’s music wasn’t always perceived as brilliant. I’m really happy we’re studying this. But the conclusion that you’ve reached, textbook authors, is just absurd. “Good thing we know better now?” You don’t include a single mention of wind ensembles or concert bands because they’re not western art music but comment on how Beethoven’s critics were “missing out” on his greatness? What we should get out of this is that we could be missing something brilliant because we think of art music as being only what came before us, just as Beethoven’s harshest critics were upset that he wasn’t duplicating what was produced by Mozart and Haydn. Music history should be reminding us that wind ensemble music can be brilliant. It’s not orchestra music. But Beethoven was brilliant and he wasn’t Mozart, so maybe we should take something from that. 

Textbook: *Casually never mentions the abuse that Beethoven endured as a child*

Response: teaching Beethoven without ever mentioning the fact that his father abused him both physically and mentally throughout his childhood isn’t really teaching Beethoven. Beethoven’s early period sounding similar to Mozart is GREATLY influenced by the fact that his father expected him to be the next Mozart, and anything that strayed too far from what Mozart did got young Beethoven severely beaten and verbally assaulted. Some have gone as far as to theorize that Beethoven’s deafness could be at least partially attributed to the beatings to the head he suffered in his youth. And this abuse explains why Beethoven was able to write music that touches us so deeply and emotionally hundreds of years later. Beethoven was guided by the intense pain he experienced due to that trauma. He writes about music being a refuge from suicide. How is this not important to know when we discuss what makes Beethoven’s music exceptional? 

Textbook: Beethoven belongs in the Classical Era

Response: No? He doesn’t? He actually is a really compelling argument for the arbitrary nature of eras. His early music can be characterized as Classical, but his later music is undoubtedly romantic. The just because his dates are “classical” doesn’t mean all of his music is. He is complicated and nuanced (like MOST PEOPLE ARE) and that makes his music difficult to categorize using a term as broad as Classical. 

I found the Beethoven chapters in my book to be severely lacking. They give us pieces and dates and the names of Beethoven’s teachers, but very little information about why he was influential or why we should care. I know why my future band students should care about Beethoven. He exemplifies what we’re always trying to do in music: make people feel something. He was willing to try new things when people didn’t really want to hear them. He found a safe refuge from a terrible life when he was performing and composing. I want my students to know that music is a place where they are safe from harm. Where they can experiment, where they can be emotional. Beethoven allows us to talk about that, making his story valuable.