At my band’s rehearsal this evening I was very pleased that we got through our rehearsal checklist. Rather than put up a simple list of the repertoire that we’d be going through this evening I put up (on the white board) a detailed list of each song and what our goals were for each song, complete with measure numbers, and musical details. Here’s what we did:
- Warm Ups – major scales through the circle of fourths – nothing too fancy or in depth – I really wanted to get to the repertoire this evening.
- Ahrirang is a very simple piece that we used this evening as a chorale warm up. It’s based on the same Korean folk tune as John Barnes Chance’s Variations on a Korean Folksong. We’ll be performing this in the spring with our new Community Choir. The band performed it very well, but I still need to refine our percussion interludes, unfortunately I was missing two percussionists from the section so that had to wait.
- After Ahrirang we tuned section leaders to the strobe tuner and then did beatless tuning across each section. Kids are definitely getting better at this task.
- Three Chinese Miniatures – worked the transitions through the beginning to the abrupt key change, then took apart the material there and tried to focus the ensembles’ attention on the use of the four part fugue like treatment of the pentatonic theme.
- Highlights of Carmen – worked out the trumpet melody at measure 9, and phrasing in woodwinds in opening phrase. Had the woodwinds bop the melody to focus on the difference between the accents and staccato. They’re into the bad habit of playing them all at the same level which completely diminishes the overall tango feel to this section.
- Three Brazilian Folk Dances – worked the opening of the first movement and then the tricky flute counter melody at 9. Flutes were getting the rhythms but need to work out the accidentals.
- Mazama – our big number, based on American Indian folk tunes, this was a big problem tonight. Did not accomplish what we wanted to on this one, which was shoking as they seemed to sight-read through this much better last week. It was the end of the two hour rehearsal, so I’m hoping they were just burnt.
That’s it – the big lesson for the evening was to try and avoid our “backwards steps” as it seems I’m needing to repeat myself from week to week. I’m hoping these notes might help the students remember what we did so I won’t need to review again next week.
Fortunately we will be able to get back to rehearsing at out daily class meeting time as our final presentations on our community/culture project are now complete. (That will be another post!) We also went over our long term repertoire goals and our opening performance schedule which begins in early April. Hopefully that will help fuel the old practice fires and get the kids moving as I really don’t want to go through our waiting-’till-the-last-minute-to-perform-well-to-give-Mr. P-more-grey-hairs scenario that we usually go through just before performance time.
Overall, besides Mazama, the rehearsal went very well. Keeping the detailed goals for the evening really does help. And while I know this is a truth that many band guru’s preach, for some reason none of us always find the time to prepare in advance and get this list up in front of the kids before a rehearsal – but it really helps focus their attention and time on task.
Any thoughts? Ideas? Next week I’m going to try and post our rehearsal plan the weekend before so kids can prepare and practice better.
