Wednesday Rehearsal

Posted by spuchinsky in Conductor Journal on May 3, 2012

Finally had a chance to get back to a Concert Band rehearsal this evening. The past few weeks have been busy with Jazz Ensemble and I’ve been taking a back seat on Concert Band. We once again tried something different this year – with a major performance in March for Concert Band and another one coming up quickly in May. Our ensemble is having difficulty learning all of the repertoire, but I feel the students will be ready with most of the repertoire.

For next year I’m thinking to develop the Concert Band repertoire for the entire spring season in the same way we develop jazz ensemble repertoire. To start out with a few songs, perform, refine, and add to the repertoire as we go.

This way some of the more challenging rep can be developed through performances over time while simpler selections can be interchanged.

The main difference is that we’ll be developing more smaller performances for the Concert Band. Our other problem is the Student Faculty Alumni concert – the concert is great, and I think it’s great that we have something like this to help support and recognize our seniors, but the rep for this concert have been dominating the jazz ensemble’s set list for the past two years.

Back to the music – this Wednesday’s biggest problem was The Washington Post March. This is one of Sousa’s simpler marches, and we thought we’d be able to pull it together with the limited time we have, but we are struggling – especially with the limited instrumentation we have.

Our students need to hang onto this work for one more week and really shed it! Between our Band II students and Jazz Ensemble, along with some of the better readers from Band I and the elementary schools, I think we can pull the Sousa march together.

I’ve posted a recording of the march from YouTube on our band’s website, hopefully the students will pull through and master this march. In the future I need to really think about repertoire planning for the later half of the year and try to plan more performances so the Concert Band students get more exposure and performance practice.

Performing and critiquing a work from a rehearsal is much different than critiquing a work from a performance. The students in Jazz ensemble really benefit from multiple performances and developing their repertoire. I need to think about how to bring that same experience to the Concert Band on a grander scale.

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Classical Concert

Posted by spuchinsky in Conductor Journal on March 17, 2012

Another concert has past and it’s time to reflect – what went well and what I need to improve. The theme for this concert was Classical music – all “classical” music – and we tried to perform at least one work from each period in music history, even though some repertoire selections may have not been perfectly accurate.

For this concert or program included:

  • The Battle Pavane
  • Bach’s Prelude & Fugue in Bb Major
  • Mozart’s Andantino from his Concerto for Flute and Harp
  • Beethoven’s Allegretto from his 7th Symphony
  • Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture
  • Stravinsky’s Finale from his Firebird Suite
Overall the concert went very well – our main problems were intonation and some timing difficulties. Our biggest obstacle I feel was integrating all of the new 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students into the ensemble in such a short period of time (started in January). Our high school students work in class everyday, and with only two months preparation, and six selections, this was a big task to overcome when we only met with the elementary students once per week.
Even with the elementary students out of the critique mix, however, our high school ensemble still needs to really work on the basics – intonation, tone quality, and more dynamic contrast and control. I stated before that the concert was “better than rehearsals” but after listening to the concert recordings I admit (as do most of our students) I was wrong. We had much better intonation and dynamic contrast for most of the repertoire in rehearsal.
We will definitely be working on some serious intonation exercises, and will also be listening to more rehearsal recordings. Students really need to get on board with their blogging, and start using the blog posts about rehearsal more regularly – and everyone needs to listen! Listening to the recordings is really the only way to hear what’s going on in rehearsal. I thinks the students are finally starting to realize this and will hopefully get on board.
Here are a few clips from the concert – the end of 1812, Andantino, and part of Beethoven’s 7th. This was also the first time working with artificial low brass – we have only one tuba player, no trombones, french horns, or euphoniums. Our low brass section is filled in completely with synths using very decent brass patches, and sometimes string patches.
Clips
listen to ‘1812 Overture Clip’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘Beethoven 7th’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘Andantino’ on Audioboo

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Concert Band Fright Night

Posted by spuchinsky in Conductor Journal on March 2, 2012

I just posted this weeks listening assignment  to the Band Website, this is my critique of last Monday’s rehearsal.

Rather than go into each tune, and give a detailed critique, I think I’d rather just talk about our overall mood last Monday and all week. We’ve got a few problems that we need to work out, but before we go on, I need to say that I think the concert on the 15th is going to be great! We just need to get it together!

Schedule Changes

No one likes a schedule change – least of all me – but sometime we simply cannot avoid it. I feel that our concentration and focus was really diminished last week due to the last minute concert schedule change. I know you work much better under pressure – you focus better, and work harder when you know there’s an impending performance. As soon as everyone heard that the concert had been delayed for two weeks – everyone went to easy street.

Please try to avoid this in the future! We waste precious rehearsal time when we relax and don’t take it seriously. You also drive me crazy and cause many of the grey hairs I now have – so please – for my hair’s sake – let’s always practice like it’s the last rehearsal before a performance!

 

Homework

We NEED TO LISTEN TO OUR REHEARSAL RECORDINGS. There it is – I did it – shouted online – a cardinal sin of blogging – but it had to be done. I know you don’t particularly like blogging, but we need to do this. We need to listen to our rehearsal recordings, we need to think about making the music better outside of the rehearsal hall, we need to practice our parts and get them ready for rehearsal.

Many of you have received very poor comments on this marking period’s progress reports due to a lack of homework – please get onboard with this project! This allows us to communicate outside of the rehearsal and classroom and work on critiquing our repertoire and working towards a better ensemble sound so that we can do more when we rehearse together! Please take this seriously and find time to listen to the music!

Audioboo

Finally – I’m trying out a new service called Audioboo – the rehearsal recordings that are posted here for Concert Band, and here for Jazz band, are using this new service. These recordings are limited to 3 minutes each – so parts of some songs have been cut.

If we like this service we may look into upgrading it so that students can record themselves and post their own recordings up to the service for use on their own blogs. this could prove to be a very valuable tool for us to use for better at home practice, self-assessments, and teacher assessments. Please let me know in your comments if you like or dislike this new service and why.

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Discover SpringPad

Posted by spuchinsky in Web Tools on February 26, 2012

I recently came across an amazing bit of free software – and a notebook service – called SpringPad. What’s truly amazing is that it works on any computer – and on any smart phone – iPhone or Android, and it has an iPad app as well. It’s simply amazing and I’m coming up with several ways to use it in my classroom.

  1. As a central hub for organizing the band – I can keep to-dos, important emails, documents, and more all within a notebook and I can share that notebook with specific people or make it public on the net – complete with filtered RSS feeds.
  2. Instrument inventory – each item in our inventory can get a photo and note with important info. If an instrument is loaned out? You can add notes within notes to record who borrowed the instrument.
  3. Music Library – online, searchable library of all of our music so local schools can borrow music for their own bands.
  4. Address Book – I always hated keeping student contact info in my personal contact manager on my iPhone. With SpringPad you can keep a separate database – keep it private online, but associate specific contacts to specific notebooks. Like a notebook for a specific class or trip. You can also add on notes for each student, and photos.
  5. Understanding by Design – I’ve been re-writing curriculum, and I’m posting curriculum strands on our district blog as they become complete. SpringPad allows me to organize all of my resources and make them public to share with the rest of the music department.
  6. Bookmarks – goodbye diigo & delicious – SpringPads bookmarks are smart – it can tell what you are bookmarking and set up an appropriate note. You can also take clippings of websites – save them in a bookmark notebook, or share them across several notebooks at once.
  7. Events – SpringPad can keep track of events, share them with iCal or Google Cal, and associate them with notes, photos, emails, etc.
  8. Reminders – you can set reminders for anything!
  9. Music – SpringPads smart lookup can look up artists, songs, albums, and supplies direct links to iTunes or Amazon
  10. Snapping – you can snap photos of just about anything – including bar codes, and SpringPad will look it up. A sort of cross between Evernote and SnapTell.
  11. Linking with other social networks – SpringPad works with Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, and my Google+ and G Mail.

Drawbacks

The only drawbacks at this point are the limitations on the size of file uploads – 5MB per file, and there’s no text recognition like on Evernote. The sharing capabilities, however, as well as the smart notes, far outweigh those issues, especially of you can team up your SpringPad with your public folder on your DropBox acount.

Future

I’ll be using SpringPad for as much as I can in the future weeks, and I’ll post on how it goes and how SpringPad lives up to the demands of my job as a High School Band director. Any other uses in the classroom for SpringPad? Please share them!

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Battle Pavane

Posted by spuchinsky in Conductor Journal on February 19, 2012

Last week at rehearsal we spent most of our evening working on The 1812 Overture, but we did also work on The Battle Pavane. Here’s a recording of Monday evening’s rehearsal performance: The Battle Pavane 2.13.

The blend and balance is much better overall with the exception of our trumpets. Trumpet intonation is sometimes really poor, and I think we need to use flugelhorn in the opening two phrases to better mimic the missing french horn parts. Towards the end the trumpets get better – but the lead trumpet is still too loud, need to hear all FIVE trumpets – not just the one. We need to work on trumpet articulation as well – lots of cracks and false starts.

Our last note was awful, by the way – it should have been held out a bit more and the release was very sloppy. For next week we must get the trumpet section up to speed with the rest of the ensemble in the tuning department, and work on getting our 2nd and 3rd trumpets playing out a bit more- especially at the end.

Clarinet and flute dynamics were really good – good swells, and dynamic contrast. I cannot hear, however, the saxophones. I even listened again – were the saxophones out that night? No! You can hear them at one point where they have a soli feature, but with band performing together, the saxes are lost in the sauce.

Percussion – much better in keeping that stead quarter note! Dynamics were very good as well. We do need more of the mallets, however, at the end – especially the chimes!

Synths – great work – I think this was the first night both synth players were here – we need to work on the patches and getting a better balance and blend – next week we’ll have both synths hooked up to the computers for the better sounds and we’ll try using the better sound system instead of the practice amps.

What’s your take on this tune? What can we do to make it even better? Leave your comments below!

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