You may be surprised to find out just how much time I spend on fundamentals. The longer I teach, the more I focus on fundamentals, scales, breathing, warm up exercises, and more. When I first started teaching a 45 minute class would consist of 10 minutes on fundamentals and 35 minutes of working on the music. Now it’s about half and half. I find that fundamentals transfer over to what the students are doing in the music. We work on breathing, tone, chorales, scales, arpeggios, tuning, and rhythmic exercises. When we do get to the music, I usually only have 2-3 songs selected for working on that day, and not even entire songs – 2-3 sections of the music. Our aim is to perfect those sections today. There might be a rhythmic goal, or a tuning goal, or some other goal. There might be 100 things you know need to be fixed. You can’t do all 100. Pick 2-3 items that will make the performance better and fix those.
In the short term, they don’t feel like they’re paying dividends. I’m going to share 4 tips that have helped me. You know these things already! We all need reminders.
It’s so easy to let Student Posture slack. It’s so easy to just pay attention to the front row of students and ignore those in the back. I set up my room to be able to walk around. When you’re actually up close to a student, you might find posture problems you don’t see from far away. Some students tuck their feet underneath them.
Call students out on their Stand Height. I don’t just say, “Hey, students raise your stands please.” Many of them will think I’m not talking to them. After I’ve explained a couple of times what proper stand height is – you can see music and me, you’re not looking down, you can play your instrument properly – I’ll call out specific students whose stands are too high or too low. I also do the opposite; talk about stands that are just right.
I do Breathing Exercises every day with every class – band, orchestra, drums. It cleanses the mind. It gets us ready to focus. It helps us be in unison. Students will easily get lazy with this exercise. I stress the importance and aim for 100% participation. As we incorporate this into our performance, I talk about the importance of sound all the way from the start of a not to the end of the note. Almost every ensemble plays well in the “middle” of the note. The skill that splits the good from the great ensembles is playing well at the start, middle, and end of a note. We often talk about where the release of a note is. For example, a whole note releases on beat 1 of the next measure. The release is where the next note begins.
Put the responsibility for sounding great on the students. They need to take responsibility. We’re so used to taking charge as directors. Use questions to get students to think. Instead of “trumpets were overblowing here” say “What did you notice about the sound at letter A? What could we improve?”
Try to Keep The Rehearsal Flowing at all times. If something is taking too long, move on to the next item. There might be a different strategy you need to incorporate. Sometimes music just needs to sit for a little bit. I’m amazed at the number of times we run through something, experience a train wreck, and come back to it a few weeks later with it sounding decent. The rehearsal should be about playing. Many directors – and I’ve been guilty – spend too much time talking. Aim for 90% playing. You don’t always have to explain what went wrong. Sometimes the comment can be, “I know you can perform that better – let’s do it again.”
James is retired from full time teaching. He has served private, suburban, and Title 1 schools and now teaches half time at a charter school. Find out more about James at www.jamesdivine.net Subscribe to his podcast Almost Everything I’ve Learned About Teaching Band.
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