Revitalize Your Band Or Orchestra Program - The Solution May Be Simpler Than You Think!
One of the worst things that parents and music educators do to beginning instrumental students is ensure that playing their instrument is boring, tedious, and completely the opposite of everything that the child wants to do, and that needs to change! My guess is that I just lost the portion of my readers who have been the worst offenders in this area.
But you are still here, and that means you are probably one of the musicians who recognizes the problem and wants to do something about it.
My experience has been in violin instruction.
And it may well be that bowed strings is the most egregious instrument group in ignoring the passage of time and the changing of musical taste.
Many players of the King of Strings, as the violin is called, believe that music will return to sanity some time.
They believe that tastes are cyclical and that in the future we will return to the "right" kind of music.
They believe that the violin and its cousins will some day surge to the fore once again.
For many years the popularity of bowed instruments has ranked somewhere in the vicinity of bagpipes, pan pipes, and kazoos.
I believe that in many junior high and middle school classrooms you would find more boys interested in learning the whoopee cushion than you would find interested in playing the violin.
Those same students would probably rather pick up the bagpipes and kazoo just for their ability to annoy parents with them.
We need to find ways to make the instruments more attractive to young people.
And a large part of that transformation of ideas involves changing the music that we allow students to play.
I grew up in the 1960's and early 1970's.
I learned to play in a traditional violin program.
I learned by playing Lightly Row, Minuet in G, and the entire standard repertoire that we have been performing for more than a century.
The students in my junior high school orchestra got excited when we got to play anything composed within fifty years of the concert's date.
My district's orchestral strings program had three elementary school orchestras with thirty violins in each.
We shrank to a single junior high orchestra with twenty-four violins, and eventually to a high school orchestra with fewer than a dozen string players.
The reason? I believe a large portion of the loss was simply due to playing music which, although beautiful, was just not what the students were listening to.
The solution? We need a serious overhaul of the repertoire performed in our concerts.
Students need to hear and play music that is interesting to them, not just to their teachers.
That is going to require time and effort on the part of the music faculty of most schools, but I believe the results will far outweigh the difficulty encountered.
Introduce popular music, bluegrass, Cajun, jazz, and even rock music to the classroom.
Rather than simple rote repetition of etudes from a standard lesson series, bring in music from popular television shows and movies.
Teach music theory and show students contemporary examples of what is being taught.
Teach and practice improvisation.
Play recordings in the classroom which portray the instruments as vibrant and exciting rather than creators of cultured sounds.
All of these things help bring what many consider dead instruments back to life.
Will the popularity of orchestral music, orchestral strings, and woodwinds return to what it was? I don't know, but my guess is that students will have more fun with their instruments, practice more, and improve much more rapidly! That's-My-2-Cents.
But you are still here, and that means you are probably one of the musicians who recognizes the problem and wants to do something about it.
My experience has been in violin instruction.
And it may well be that bowed strings is the most egregious instrument group in ignoring the passage of time and the changing of musical taste.
Many players of the King of Strings, as the violin is called, believe that music will return to sanity some time.
They believe that tastes are cyclical and that in the future we will return to the "right" kind of music.
They believe that the violin and its cousins will some day surge to the fore once again.
For many years the popularity of bowed instruments has ranked somewhere in the vicinity of bagpipes, pan pipes, and kazoos.
I believe that in many junior high and middle school classrooms you would find more boys interested in learning the whoopee cushion than you would find interested in playing the violin.
Those same students would probably rather pick up the bagpipes and kazoo just for their ability to annoy parents with them.
We need to find ways to make the instruments more attractive to young people.
And a large part of that transformation of ideas involves changing the music that we allow students to play.
I grew up in the 1960's and early 1970's.
I learned to play in a traditional violin program.
I learned by playing Lightly Row, Minuet in G, and the entire standard repertoire that we have been performing for more than a century.
The students in my junior high school orchestra got excited when we got to play anything composed within fifty years of the concert's date.
My district's orchestral strings program had three elementary school orchestras with thirty violins in each.
We shrank to a single junior high orchestra with twenty-four violins, and eventually to a high school orchestra with fewer than a dozen string players.
The reason? I believe a large portion of the loss was simply due to playing music which, although beautiful, was just not what the students were listening to.
The solution? We need a serious overhaul of the repertoire performed in our concerts.
Students need to hear and play music that is interesting to them, not just to their teachers.
That is going to require time and effort on the part of the music faculty of most schools, but I believe the results will far outweigh the difficulty encountered.
Introduce popular music, bluegrass, Cajun, jazz, and even rock music to the classroom.
Rather than simple rote repetition of etudes from a standard lesson series, bring in music from popular television shows and movies.
Teach music theory and show students contemporary examples of what is being taught.
Teach and practice improvisation.
Play recordings in the classroom which portray the instruments as vibrant and exciting rather than creators of cultured sounds.
All of these things help bring what many consider dead instruments back to life.
Will the popularity of orchestral music, orchestral strings, and woodwinds return to what it was? I don't know, but my guess is that students will have more fun with their instruments, practice more, and improve much more rapidly! That's-My-2-Cents.