Losing Your Roots

Lack of Concert

     Today, I'm pretty much going to complain at you a bit. Well, there will be a bit of a lesson of course, but regardless, I have something I want to feel sorry about myself for- publicly. It has to do with my origins as a musician and my greatest musical love: concert genre music. 

     Classical and other concert pieces have always been my absolute favorite thing in the world to learn and play, and I've always excelled at them. Throughout high school, I grew on such pieces, performing for four years with an enthusiastic excellence. Such are my roots, excluding junior high.

     After high school, there is college, but as I've explained before, I'm not in school for music. Therefor, my only way of playing my favorite music was through the newly founded community band, run by my beloved high school instructors, two very talented individuals. 

     Last year was the first year of this band, and we played some exciting concert pieces. I played along side some high school attendees, some eighty year olds, and some teachers from the school. The group was new and full of different people, but we all played together wonderfully. It was fun and exciting.

     Unfortunately, this year, the band has been cancelled for reasons which are beyond me. This is a sad thing, as the band, had it continued, could have grown quite large, enabling us to perform some truly intense pieces.

     It is sad, too, because now I have no concert type venue in which to play. Most frightening, is the fact that I have no concert type venue from which to learn. I pride myself, musically, primarily on my sweet tone and near perfect pitch- that which I have achieved through talent, but mostly years of hard work. 

     I suppose, I can only hope that new venues come up for me, as I wish very much to be able to play along side some talented musicians once again.

     I'd like to say that all of you out there should stick with the parts of music that you love most. While it is, of course, great for you to experience other aspects of music, keeping near your roots is also very important. If you ever lose sight of why you fell in love with music in the first place, you may end up lost, or even giving up music- which is a mistake. 

     While I'm very saddened by my current situation, I'm still alright as I look optimistically towards new opportunities. I know that I'll one day join a new and impressive band of musicians. It's just a matter of time.

Let's Change Perspective

How Do You Think They Feel?

     I always write this blog from the perspective of a student of music simply because that's what I am. I do tutor kids occasionally in music and the saxophone, but I'm still a student myself. In this post, however, I want to talk about what instructors must go through and what it is they do for their students, because while learning the inner functions of music may be difficult, teaching it is a whole other thing.

     Probably the most basic part of teaching music, or anything really, is to know about your subject completely. In order to ask a good question you must first know the entire answer. You've got to have a complete knowledge of what it is you're teaching to your student, and you need multiple ways of explaining it. Everybody learns and understands information just a little different than everybody else. This makes instructing a room full of individuals very challenging.

     One-on-one tutoring gets easy enough after a while. At first you need to get to understand the student, and you need the student to get to understand you, but after this everything falls into place as a routine comes to form. Group instructions, such as a community concert band or school concert band, is something different. Some bands are huge while some are smaller, but all have more than one person, making band instruction a challenge. While I've never done this, I have instructed a section, so I can tell you for sure that getting multiple people to understand your instruction completely feels impossible. I imagine band instructors have to be the kind of persons who aren't easily frustrated- otherwise nothing would get done.

     Besides the fact that there are many individuals, each one of those individuals in a band plays an instrument and resides in a section (corresponding to that instrument), of which there may be many. I get stressed out just thinking about it, but I do find solace in the fact that there are usually senior players in each section that can diffuse know-how upon his or her junior players. Militarily, the instructor is a general while the section 'leaders' are his or her captains. The captains have the general's back, as they help to drive the band forward.

     Inevitably a band is fairly similar to one-on-one tutoring. You can think of the band as one person, so that the single 'person' is instructed by the single instructor. With this, all the information instructed is essentially the same, but with more emphasis on the pieces at hand. Even then, a lot of the time I tutor is to guide a student through pieces.

     With both similarities and differences between tutoring and band instruction, regardless, I feel fortunate to know that any band instructor will have some prime experience with which to teach. In the high school I graduated from, I was very lucky to have a superb concert band instructor. It's instructors like those that make anyone able to be part of a functioning band, and I think we need to give them credit where credit is due: it isn't an easy job.