Posts filed under 'Music Curriculum'
Today, in my school mailbox, I received a sample copy of the new Measures of Success beginning band method book, which is to be released by FJH publishers. The method book and its various related pieces were authored by a team comprised of Deborah A. Sheldon, Brian Balmages, Timothy Loest, Robert Sheldon and David Collier.
The package includes a very nice letter from the book’s co-author (and uber-composer) Brian Balmages, a ‘director information guide’, and finally a full copy of the series’ B-flat Clarinet Book One which includes two audio CD’s. As a collector of beginning band method books (at least it’s less geeky and more useful than collecting stamps or wearing movie costumes to comic book conventions) and a fan of Brian’s music, I have been waiting for the release of Measures of Success (MOS) for a few months now.
First impressions:
The design and production look good, as you would expect from FJH Music. The cover is black with blue, red and yellow designs; the inside is basically black and blue. The physical product is a soft-cover, consumable-workbook-style book (essentially the same physical presentation as the other major methods). The CD’s ride inside the front cover of the student book in a paper envelope with clear plastic window, again duplicating other previous publications.
The book is complete, in that its contents include concept introductions, short exercises, assessments, items which ask the students to write answers in the book (a la workbook above), and full-band arrangements embedded within the progressively-numbered ditties.
The only immediate, obvious differences between MOS and other leading methods (Standard of Excellence, Essential Elements/EE2000, Accent on Achievement, Band Expressions, etc.) are that MOS: (1) is organized into six large units rather than 20-30 small units, (2) includes six full-page assessments rather than two dozen one-line assessments, and (3) seeks to set itself apart from other methods in the quantity and quality of full-band arrangements.
I’ll dig in to MOS this weekend and give a little bit more detail in the coming week. Check back soon!
March 6th, 2010
Following further on the theme of perfect practice, I would like today to highlight the latest addition to my blogroll. Gerald Klickstein is the author of the book The Musician’s Way and also of the blog of the same title. With Gerald’s strong emphasis on quality product through quality process, The Musician’s Way Blog definitely has a place in the toolbox of every third-stream music educator. Thanks to Jen Cluff for the tip.
November 13th, 2009
After my second day of parent conferences, the Practice Tips for Parents has earned a permanent place in my parent communication toolbox. Parents expressed high interest in its information, relief at gaining usable strategies for their students, amazement that musical strategies might apply to everything else in life, and overall satisfaction with the conference. For my own part, I felt that having the “script” streamlined my presentation, and in many cases finished individual conferences in shorter time (I am notorious both for talking too much and for blowing schedules by giving too much personal attention to my clients).
Please note that the Practice Tips are still a little generic. I did not hit every point with every family. I added other material to the sheet for some students, and handed the sheet out without directly commenting on it for others. Like all tools, it is only as good as its match to the job at hand.
In any case, conferences went well with the Practice Tips handout, and I will make it a permanent addition to parent conferences. Now to phase two: refining the language for spring conferences. What will you change when you adapt it to your own purposes?
November 8th, 2009
I created a quick sheet of tips for improved practicing for use at parent conferences this week. Quality of at-home practice is a big idea in middle-level musicians (even many of the college freshman music majors I knew). Teaching students how to solve problems and teach themselves are two of the most important extramusical benefits of music study, and is the rocket fuel of bringing your performing ensembles to top-level musicianship. So far, this handout seems to be making a difference. Maybe it’s because I talk to so many parents about practice strategies for their children. Maybe it’s because parents feel satisfied when they have a piece of paper to take home. Either way, I wanted to pass it along for your use.
PRACTICE DOESN’T MAKE PERFECT
….perfect practice makes perfect. Practicing badly just reinforces playing badly. Encourage your student to follow these helpful guidelines to get the most improvement out of the least practice time.
1. Practice more often. Psychology experiments have shown that practicing more often (i.e.) is better than big practice sessions (i.e. fifteen minutes each day for six days is better than an hour and a half once a week).
2. Focus on the goals. Practicing for fifteen minutes (or twenty, or thirty) is not the important thing. It is the sound of the music that you make that is important. Practice until the music sounds good, not until some amount of minutes is gone.
3. Focus on the goals. You wouldn’t drive your car without knowing where you want to go; you wouldn’t pay a tailor to make clothes without knowing what kind of clothes you wanted. When you know exactly what you want to accomplish, then practicing is more productive…and more fun!
4. Break it down. Break big tasks (like a song) into smaller, easier pieces (like one measure at a time, or just the fingerings).
5. Listen and adjust. As you drive your car, you constantly look where you are on the road and steer back into your lane. As your student plays their instrument, they should be listening and constantly steering back towards their best sound quality, correct notes, steady beat, etc. You cannot play music without listening and adjusting.
PERFECT PRACTICE STRATEGIES
Athletes get stronger, companies make millions, and armies win wars when they have a good strategy. Get more improvement in less time with these helpful strategies:
Sing and finger – to reinforce or accelerate pitches
Clap and count – to decipher or solidify rhythms
Chunking – do a small piece, then add another small piece
Go slow – slow and steady wins the race
Use a metronome – to check your steady beat
Repetition – over and over again to train your fingers
Check the fingering chart – if you don’t know the fingering
Make it a game – take a challenge and make it fun
Flash cards – you can even practice without your instrument
Take a break – and come back to it after two minutes
Play for an audience – when you think you’re ready for the concert
November 5th, 2009
I was recently asked to contribute to the music education portion of the Jemsite blog. Important excerpts are copied below, but I encourage you to read the full post here. You can even purchase guitars and accessories from the site.
I surprised myself a little bit with the honesty with which I answered the last question. Read it through, and see what you think.
Q: You currently teach Beginning Guitar classes in school. What do you teach exactly, especially considering you say you only have a repertoire of about 6 major chords?
A: My guitar repertoire may be larger than six chords, but I am still not a guitarist. Neither was the band director who started that class at that school. But she felt, as I do, that music is not a spectator sport and that every school should provide an inroads into music for every child.
The guitar curriculum for that class requires that by the end of one semester, every student will demonstrate that they can: hold and care for a guitar; tune a guitar; work correct left-hand technique; work both right-hand classical technique and use a pick; read pitches between the low E and high G; read rhythms including whole, half, quarter and eighth notes and rests; read basic tablature; play a melody alone and with a duet partner; play basic major chords alone and accompany a melody; play power chords; compose an original power chord riff; use simple multitrack recording software; and create an arrangement of a song using all of the tools in their toolbox.
Q: What’s the difference between “training” and “education?” Do you think teaching music education is more important than being an actual performer?
A: “Education” differs from “training” in a small but important aspect: process is more important than product. In a training scenario the student learns how to do one thing one way, whereas in an education scenario the student learns the concepts that operate that thing and therefore can apply the knowledge to new situations. A burger flipper in a fast food joint gets trained to toast the buns the same every time, but a chef in a Michelin-rated restaurant should educated in how flour combines with yeast and therefore can create new kinds of breads or adapt to different ovens. In a guitar lesson, a teacher can take one of two strategies: teach the E minor chord and the A minor chord so that the student knows two chords, or teach how minor chords are built so that the student knows every minor chord. Unfortunately, most guitar teachers in the world pander to the lowest common denominator, and teach the student how to play the song (for example, “Today we’re going to play ‘Foxy Lady’. Play this note, then play this note, then play this note…”) rather than teaching the student how to play guitar (for example, “Check out these crazy notes….they are called tri-tones. Here’s how they work, here’s why they sound strange, here’s how to make them yourself. Let’s practice some tri-tones in this song ‘Foxy Lady’.”)
“Music education” isn’t something a guitar teacher would teach. Rather, it is the philosophy with which the guitar teacher approaches the lesson. Surely every guitar student wants to be a performer. The question is, does the student want to perform a limited selection of songs in their bedroom, or does the student want to perform a wide variety of songs, including their own original tunes, on a stage in front of an audience?
Q: You direct the Wind Ensemble, Jazz Ensemble, Concert Band and Rock Band Workshop for an international school in Asia. How are guitar classes currently being integrated into school band/choir programs?
A: Most schools in the U.S. don’t offer guitar. With easy availability of guitar teachers and private guitar lessons outside of school, most districts feel no pressure to add the faculty or spend money on a class set of instruments. Schools that do offer guitar mostly offer it as a one-semester elective, with no opportunity for student to continue after the final exam. This scenario is better than the old-fashioned Music Appreciation class in which student memorized the birth and death dates of Mozart. Some schools with beginning guitar also have an advanced guitar ensemble class so that students can continue indefinitely, gaining more skill and becoming mentors to younger guitar students. Because most music classes in middle and high schools are Band and Choir classes, student who have studied guitar on their own find opportunities to participate in the school Jazz Band. Often these are students who are also singers or wind instrument players who play or sing classical music in the Band or Choir while taking guitar lessons after school.
Q: Do you believe the guitar is a worthwhile instrument amongst school musical performances? Why?
A: Any instrument, and any style of music, is worthy of school music concerts. The point of teaching music in schools is that music (1) is valuable just because it is music, (2) teaches personal and social skills that are critical to young peoples’ success in real life, (3) builds school spirit and community identity, and (4) is fun. Guitar meets these criteria just as well as clarinet, violin and voice do.
Q: Tell me about your Jazz Ensemble and Rock Band Workshops and how guitar comes into play there.
A: I usually have one or two guitar players plus a bass player every year in the Jazz Ensemble. These are typical numbers for a big band (think Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Gordon Goodwin). In fact, my Beginning Guitar class has been an important recruiting tool for the Jazz Band.
Rock Band Workshop is an open-door program, like open-mic afternoon. We have had between two and twelve guitarists show up to any given session. Anyone can come play, whether alone or with a group. We have had singer-guitarists cover Jack Johnson, and we have had six-piece rock bands play Iron Maiden. We even had a solo bassist perform just the bass part of a Slipknot song because she was new to our school and didn’t know any other musicians. At the Workshop that day, she met a metal band who was performing without a bassist. By the next workshop she was in that band, and by the following school year she was in the Jazz Band and the Wind Orchestra. At Workshop, each person/group plays their song and then gets feedback from the guest experts (our school has a shocking number of faculty with serious gig experience) on everything from how to play in time together to how to get the best sound out of their distortion pedal/amplifier combo.
Q: How important is music education in school in determining how a child does in other areas of learning?
A: Research on this question has been huge but inconclusive. We are sure that students who excel in music also excel in other subjects. However, researchers have not been able to show whether this relationship is a cause-effect situation or merely a coincidence caused by another factor. For every study that shows cause-effect, there is another that shows no cause-effect. However, wouldn’t you rather your own child have it than not?
Q: What is the future of music education?
A: The future of music education is in technology, student compositions, and self-directed learning. Guitar and piano will play an increasing role in school music classes as Web 2.0 tools become more commonplace in the classroom. Within the next 30 years, Band class as I know it will lose precedence in school curricula. Chamber music will be more common. The new music class will be more about students recording their own music (on any instrument—guitar, woodwind, brass or otherwise) and distributing it digitally than about large ensembles. Band, Choir and Orchestra will not be forgotten; their excitement, energy, inclusiveness and community ties (not to mention their relationship to sporting events) will keep them active in schools, but as extra-curricular activities rather than as graded classes. Students’ technical performance skills on their chosen instrument will be increasingly measured by computer, giving music teachers more tools for grading technique objectively and for coaching students to more fully create the emotional effects that make classical music so powerful. And finally, within the next 50 years, music will become mandatory in every year of school for every student as new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology will convince school administrators and politicians that music makes definite, measurable improvements in students’ ability to solve problems, mature emotionally, relate to others and generally be successful in life.
October 26th, 2009
Regardless of your political views (he used to work on Al Gore’s speechwriting team), I think you will find Dan Pink’s TED presentation about motivation to be quite applicable to planning the assessment (and accountability) side of your music program.
The short version: old-fashioned pay-for-performance systems of reward work well for mechanical tasks, but can actually sabotage success during challenges requiring even a smattering of creativity. Tasks requiring creativity, intuition or out-of-the-box thinking (sorry for the pun, it was unavoidable - watch the video) can only be rewarded by their intrinsic value.
What is the catch for conductors of scholastic ensembles? Half of it is simple: points-based evaluation of music performance can only apply to mechanical executions such as scale fingerings, rhythmic accuracy or metronomic measurements of agility. Grading student performances of holistic musical efforts - that is, a piece or excerpt of a piece - cannot be tied to points, grades, rubrics or percentages if the desired outcome includes emotive, artistic performance. This presents a challenge to music educators whom, as a group, are working hard to elaborate systems of musical measurement that can help quantify the unquantifiable for the purpose of report cards. At best, it gives us all permission to stop banging our heads against the brick wall of measuring what we all know to be immeasurable. At worst, it negates all of the psuedo-objective assessment tools we have written, traded with peers, and defended to parents over the last fifty years.
Perhaps the best solution is to go back to giving unapologetically subjective letter grades, given only at the end of the term; but then, how would you communicate (and document that you had communicated) unacceptable progress to students during the term so that they could adjust their efforts? More likely, it supports the current trend of text-based feedback (i.e. comments taking precedence over letter or number grades). Without a doubt, Dan’s data suggest frequent student self-evaluation - supported, I would add, by widespread use of audio- and video-recording technology in the music classroom.
Here, then, is the question of the day: How might a Third-Stream band, orchestra or choir conductor utilize Google-style “Twenty-Percent Time” within the performance-ensemble class?
October 24th, 2009
I’d like to take a little time today to recap the “third-stream” in Third-Stream Music Education. What is “third-stream” about it, anyway?
Two concepts define “third-stream” music education (as a concept, and someday hopefully as a blog, too!) The first is, as the title implies, a balance between classical (in the generic, lower-case sense of the word) and pop music. The idea is to (a) teach outstanding musicianship through classical music but also (b) keep music classes relevant to the students by including serious instruction in the here-and-now folk music of our time and our place [i.e. pop, rock, jazz, hip-hop], and simultaneously (c) transfer the artistry and attention to detail associated with classical genres to pop music performance while (d) reciprocally bringing the passion young people feel about their preferred pop style back to their performance of classical music. The goal is for the students to learn to perform every piece as authentically as possible by manipulating articulations, dynamics, tempi, even timbre to replicate the aesthetics of the target time/place/culture.
The second defining concept of third-stream music education is a balance between conceptual and practical training. Please allow me to indulge in two brief generalizations: general music courses do a great job of teaching theory and history but often neglect to demand technical expertise or deeper interpretation of performed works; and performance ensembles often focus more on winning trophies or placing honor-band members than on educating every student who walks through the door. In one worst-case scenario, students know the birth and death dates of ten classical composers but can’t play a single work in its entirety; in the other, students can solidly execute their assigned part of last year’s show but take on a confused (or terrified) expression when asked to sightread or to discuss a piece of music. They may be generalizations - nay, blatant stereotypes - but these two scenarios play out in both posh and poor school districts every day. Third-stream music education seeks to develop young people who can both make music in the concert hall and talk music at a cocktail party.
Other ideas important to the concept of third-stream music education include expanded use of appropriate technology (which is being well-documented in other blogs), improved assessment, multicultural/world music, intrinsic motivation and critical thinking, as well as preparing young people for real life by instilling uber-important personal and inter-personal skills that math, science, language and history classes simply cannot.
More than anything else, third-stream music education (and, hopefully, the Third-Stream Music Education Blog) is about inspiring in students a personal, emotional, lifelong connection to music….their music.
October 13th, 2009
I recently responded to a call for assistance (read: ammunition in rhetoric) from a colleague who was actually asked to justify having any concerts at all. His new campus administrator wanted to take all after-school Band performances off the school calendar.
We do three major formal concerts per year, plus as many small performance opportunities as we can scare up. Concerts are critical because they (1) are required assessments under every major music standards currently published; (2) are the culminating event of any Band season; (3) form both summative assessment as the capstone of the previous curricular unit as well as formative assessment as the launching pad for learner reflection and goalsetting for the subsequent curricular unit; (4) are the reason students sign up for Band; (5) are the reason parents rent the horns, buy the reeds, pay for the lessons and listen to the horrendous first year of at-home practicing; (6) are the music department’s (and the school’s) number one publicity and recruiting strategy; (7) enhance the school’s community nature and warm the school’s atmosphere; (8) are fun. I cannot name a single research study that attempts to explain WHY we do concerts, because every study I have ever read (in music education AND in educational administration journals) begins with the paradigm that concerts are a self-evident part of any music program. We can quibble about how long a concert should last, how much classical vs. pop music should be programmed, or in what grade level students should transition from recorders to orchestral wind instruments, but we cannot really find any support in either research nor anecdotal literature for arguing against concerts as an integral part of the curricular and extracurricular music program.
What else would YOU say to this administrator?
June 19th, 2009
Your academic standards (objectives, benchmarks, goals, curriculum) most likely calls for students to demonstrate some level of proficiency in describing, analyzing and evaluating music and musical performances. This is a very important standard in a young person’s growth as an artist and as a member of civilized society. The cocktail party, for example, is founded on the principle of intelligent discussion between worldly people. And considering how many business deals in the world are made or lost at cocktail parties, I consider constructive musical critiques to be part of the holistic education our schools strives to provide.
However, adolescents often focus on negativity, and often approach the “conversational tone” of a diplomatic critique a little too conversationally. The paragraph below is real feedback to a real student following a real self-evaluation of a real playing quiz.
Dear (Student): The self-evaluations on this blog are intended to be academic in nature. As such, the success of your blog would be augmented by retaining words of an academic character during the thesis and conclusion statements of each blog entry, for example “poor”, “mediocre” and “need to improve”, while simultaneously excluding words of a vulgar and unconstructive nature, for example “sucks”, “blows”, and all references to bathrooms. Furthermore, you can improve your overall critique by focusing on specific elements of music such as intonation, rhythmic accuracy and timbre rather than broad generalizations. In the future, please compose your self-evaluations in a more productive, academic tone. Thank you.
March 24th, 2009
Here’ a question that begs for feedback:
Let’s pretend for a moment that we are all teaching for process and not strictly product, that we are teaching concepts and not memorization, and that we are teaching for mastery and not merely for ‘no mistakes this time’. Let’s also pretend for a moment that we all teach and assess (again, for mastery) music theory, analysis and history during our performance ensemble classes.
If students will be required to understand and to perform music, and (here’s the assumption that may sink this hypothesis) if they must understand a concept before they can perform it reliably, then is it advisable—nay, even mandatory—that we assess a concept in writing before we assess it on the instrument? Should we strive to precede, or at least connect at the hip, every playing quiz with a written (or at least verbal) task?
February 2nd, 2009
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