Into the Woodshed

"Take that home and woodshed it!"
                     - Charles Roberts, Greece Arcadia High School Band Director circa 1970


These are the words of my high school band director. This is one of the many sayings he had that he harangued us with, badgering us to do better, be better. And we loved him for it. What he alluded to, I guess, was the practice of going to the woodshed for a spanking, a dubious practice designed to make neurotic adults out of misbehaving children, but when applied to music meant to beat all the mistakes out of it. I have been thinking a lot lately about the merits of practice, what it takes to get kids to practice, and who really benefits from practicing. We have just finished a grading period at the middle school and are rapidly approaching concert time, and so this has been at the forefront of my focus for my classes.

What brought this into sharp focus for me yesterday was a silly and cute video that was making the rounds of two very small children sparring in a Tae Kwon Do test for their next belt. The two children, in full sparring gear, hop up and down on their toes, make sporadic kicks, but never once connect with each other. Having sat through many such tests at a school here in So Cal, I knew that those kids would both be granted their new belts. My husband, Jon, has always contended that in commercial martial arts classes, students progress through their belts by "testing" and always "pass" no matter whether they can demonstrate the skills required at that level or not. Many adults (my stepdaughter, say) take those tests very seriously and practice hard for them. But we have been to several of her tests and watched the little kids get their next belt when they barely made it through the test. My stepdaughter's brown belt is NOT the same as the brown belt won by a 1st grader, but getting that belt assures the school that the 1st grader's parents will keep paying for classes. This cheapens the belt test, and if you're an adult, you have to wonder if you would have gotten your belt anyway, even if you couldn't get through your forms or break a board.

It was testing week in my middle school class last week, and I am sitting here at the end of it, puzzling. This is the only thing, besides participation that I have to grade them on for this five weeks. We have a concert coming up in 10 days. The seventh and eighth graders have been through testing many times, and approached their tests with one of three attitudes: 1) terrified 2) don't care 3) care enough to work on the music at home to get it right. The sixth graders, for the most part, took this experience really seriously, and it was in that class that I saw the most dramatic improvements in skill. What several of the sixth graders accomplished in the last two weeks is nothing short of amazing, and all of them understood the importance of the test and what it means for the overall achievement of the orchestra for them to do well.

I think my mind is chewing on the issue of practicing because as a child and teenager, I, myself, didn't really believe that practicing would make any difference. I had some kind of block that prevented me from knowing that practice actually improved my performance. This was partly due to the fact that I was, from early on, a pretty good sight player and reader and could fake my way through lessons even well into middle school. I was the sort of kid, and I have met many like me in my teaching, who easily mastered things at a certain level, and instantly became frustrated when the level got past my easy mastery. I didn't know, until I was doing Master's work on cello performance, how much I could really achieve by systematic, careful, slow and abundant practice. I had always thought, before that, that somehow people were just ABLE to play difficult music, because, I don't know...they were magic! And since I didn't have that magic, I was doomed to mediocrity.

I also have been watching my husband learn the ukulele. I got him one for his birthday in September, and he has devoted many, many hours to learning chords, songs and strumming patterns, until now he is amazed and delighted that he can play some things with unconscious ease, making real music on his own for the first time in his life. He echoes back to me what I have said to him in our discussions of my own classes: "If you like it, you'll practice it".

So why is it important to me that my students understand the value of practice? Maybe this is the question I should really ask myself. When a student ends up in tears because of the pressure of performing and my expectations, have I really accomplished anything? Can I get them to care when they don't? Can I SHOW them how much they can achieve when they put the time in? When does individual practice turn into individual self-confidence? Should I be easier on the kids, not make them play for a grade? Give them all 3 (my highest mark) even when they can't get through the assigned passages?

The last two questions are the ones that have been eating at me all weekend. All the kids hate this test, some more than others. But for some the fear has spurred them to work harder and master all or part of the whole. Some moved forward a few inches in their skill level, and some just crashed and burned, with nary a backward glance. They all recognized excellence in their peers and roundly applauded after tests that earned a 3. But my grading system also takes into account other factors. For instance, several of the students in both classes are first year players and I measured their success by how far they have come, evidence of individual practice, and willingness to put themselves on the line. They might not get a 3, but could get close, just by stepping up and making progress.

Another video that came to me yesterday shows extreme athletes doing impossible things. I can't even begin to imagine what the practice looks like to achieve such impossibility. But there they are, flying, jumping, skiing, climbing in the most IN-human ways. They were not born with these abilities. No human is. And it's not magic. Somehow, they practiced.

But I have spent the weekend thinking about this: If I cheapen the test, to save some from embarrassment or failure, then I am really telling ALL the students that I don't think they are very capable. When I set a high standard and make everyone measure up, I am telling my students that I have confidence in their ability to achieve great things. There is no magic, no special birthright here. Instruction helps, but "taking it home and 'woodshedding' it" is really the only thing that stands between failure and success.

Weren't You My Music Teacher?

It happened again the other day. I was tuning violins in an empty school auditorium in preparing for a large 4th grade string class, and a young woman came in and asked me my name. "Are you Miss Betty?" was how she asked, and I said "No, I'm Mrs. McLean." Her face fell, as she said she thought I looked like her old music teacher and then when I told her I used to be Miss Crocker (get it? Betty Crocker!), her face lit up with recognition. "Yes, that's it!" she exclaimed. "You were my music teacher!" I asked her name, and, indeed I remembered her. She had been a viola student of mine in 4th and 5th grade and then went on to middle and high school where she played in the orchestras, as well as in the local youth symphony. She still has her viola, she told me, and "really ought to get it out and play it one of these days". She is now the parent of a kindergartener. The elementary group that started with her that year, way back when, was a small, really enthusiatic group. I only taught at that school for two years, and lost track of those fun kids. But it made me happy to know that she had played all the way through school.

This is not the first time this has happened, and every time it does, I have to stop and wonder where all those years went. How did these kids change so much, while I stayed the same (What!!!? I've changed too???)? The time I have been working as a public school music teacher has gone by in a blink of an eye, but constitutes a significant chunk of the life of a young twenty-something. It has not yet happened that I am teaching the child of a former student, but that day is coming.

Some of the young adults who stop me to recall our shared past are parents of elementary students now themselves, or they are working in our schools or elsewhere in town here. Some have gone on to college, others have not, but no matter what the level of their higher education, these kids all graduated from high school at least. They are members of our greater community, and, it seems, stable, healthy and productive. Maybe this is the best reason for keeping active music classes in all school levels. Kids stay in school if it's fun and there is some part of the school day that feels like it is just for them. They are part of a community within their school that has shared interests and goals and which, over the course of the four years of high school, at least, builds a shared history of events and memories. Music allows kids of different ages, classes, and peer groups to interact. Girls and boys participate together. Together they do what no one of them can do alone. Each has a part, and each part is necessary for the finished product. Individual effort pays off, as well as cooperation. There is nothing else in school, except for team sports, that can do this.

And just as with sports, in order to have satisfying high school music experiences, it is best if the students begin learning their instruments early on, say, in elementary school. Most fourth graders don't really know this, and they sign up for music class because it looks like something fun, and/or they can get out of class for a half hour a couple times a week. More and more, I am trying to paint this picture for them, of what they can expect if they stay with it. My mantra: Just keep 'em playing, no matter what. Then, some day down the road, I will be sitting in a restaurant or getting my hair done, or walking across a school campus and a young person will say: "Hey weren't you my music teacher?"

The Talent Myth

Talent- a special innate or developed aptitude for an expressed or implied activity usually of a creative or artistic nature


I believe Talent is a myth. This is my own personal belief, and I have had spirited discussions with friends, family and colleagues about it. It came up again the other day with a co-worker, this notion that people who pursue and succeed at music are somehow different from regular people. It comes up that the defining difference is "natural" or "god-given" talent, and I reject this notion. Maybe it is the liberal and democratic part of my being that does so. I want everyone to feel able to participate in the joy of making music, and not sit on the sidelines because of some perceived lack of "talent". When it comes to music, I believe that everyone and anyone can learn, and the only real limit to that learning is what I call affinity.

Early exposure to music of all kinds, and an expectation from parents that a child WILL play music can give a person an advantage out of the chute. I see this every day, where kids who come to start a band instrument succeed quickly because they have had piano lessons and/or the parents have exposed them to lots of music, especially live performances. Such students take success on the new instrument as a given; that they will have to work at it to succeed is also understood from day one.

But I have also seen students who have no early exposure to live music, or very little, have had no previous training, and whose parents have zero expectation of their child becoming a musician move to the head of the class. But is it talent that explains musical success where the groundwork is missing? I don't think so. I think it is that a student discovers he really LIKES making music. He likes fooling around with the flute  or cello at home, making attempts to get sound, dragging the bow across the strings, trying the buttons, figuring out how to play Jingle Bells or the first few notes of Happy Birthday or the USC fight song.

And no one at home tries to stop him. Nothing makes me sadder as a music teacher than when a child tells me she cannot play at home because a parent won't let her. The family lives in an apartment, or has a small baby who needs to sleep, or the parent can't stand the squeaks and squawks that are inevitable at first. Or there might be a toddler in the home who might damage the instrument, so it is put away in a safe place, which is, unfortunately, not accessible to the fourth-grader either. These impediments WILL keep a student from succeeding.

But if the child has access and loves it, he or she will succeed. There ARE students who try it for a while and discover it isn't their cup of tea, this blowing and scraping away on some piece of arcane equipment. Some don't even feel compelled to try; music doesn't have any pull for them. They become visual artists or actors or dancers or soccer stars or history experts or spelling buffs or scientists, because that is what they LOVE to do.

What makes one person like one thing and not another? I don't know the answer to that. Maybe we need to redefine "talent" as something closer to "desire".

Maybe the job of the music teacher is to make sure the student is having fun. Due to some scheduling issues last year, I have almost all beginners in my elementary classes this year. There are a bunch of them. What's fun for a group of 30 beginning violinists, or a beginning band? I think, and am basing this year's pedagogy on this, that what's fun is success. I have been keeping this idea in mind, focusing on basics and getting it right. Sitting up with good posture, forming good embouchure, playing in tune, using a "beautiful bow hand", starting and stopping together are all things easy to overlook in the throes of trying to get some music happening, but when made the focus of the lesson, can be achieved by everyone and create an atmosphere of teamwork and accomplishment. What is interesting to me is that I hear from kids and the parents of those kids that they are having fun!

I have to admit, I didn't really think about this as I was going into the new year. I was thinking more about crowd control, breaking things down so I could manage so many beginners at once. The added benefit of creating successful moments for my students is something that I didn't foresee, but am enjoying nonetheless.

Now I hope I can keep the fun going, because that's where their future lies. Talent-shmalent. If they are having fun, they are going to keep playing. And if they keep playing, then doors open into worlds of fun they can't even imagine yet.

They Do It Every Time!

Well, here we are, deep into the school year. It's only October, but we have been back to school since before Labor Day- a first for us this year in Pasadena. I have nearly 300 kids signed up to play music in the elementary classes, and all but a handful of the instruments in my inventory are checked out. Kids are blowing in head-joints, buzzing lips, plucking open strings, learning about playing postion and rest position. They are excited, and in every single new class, sometime in this first month, sometime during the relative noise and chaos of those first meetings, someone will turn a clarinet or a trumpet or a violin up, place it on his shoulder (it really is the boys who do this, not girls) make two clicking sounds and then pantomime a kick back, and an innocent musical instrument is transformed into a gun. It is universal. It ALWAYS happens. My response to this is quick and serious: guns are not allowed at school, guns are not a joke, and instruments are never, NEVER guns. Usually I get a wide-eyed stare back, like how-did-she-even-know-what-I-was-doing...as though he was the first person ever to think of doing that.

I remember in the 70's when I had friends my age with small children, and those children were not allowed to play with guns, or weapons of any kind. These kids were not given cap pistols or air rifles or even pop guns, but they DID play with guns. Sticks, trucks, Legos, almost anything, except maybe a stuffed animal could become a gun. I am quite sure that if I had been teaching music classes then, the clarinets would have had their turn as semi-automatic rifles. We, as children, did play with toy guns, had a couple of realistic-looking pistols in a closet high up, where we had to ask permission to get them down. Sometimes we had rolls of caps that fit into the hammer, so that when you pulled the trigger, they made a dandy sound and emitted light, smoke, and the smell of gunpowder.They were fun, but I didn't care much one way or the other about them, and have absolutely no interest in guns, toy or otherwise, now. But, in every new class, in every year for 15 years, and I'll bet for the next 15 years, someone does.

So forgive me, kids, for getting on your cases about it, but in a post-Columbine world, I don't feel I have a choice. I cannot say that allowing 4th graders to weaponize their trombones will result in mass shootings in the high school cafeteria later, and I cannot say that making a big-deal prohibition of this weaponization will prevent such horrors from happening. But if I don't make my speech, I will be forever hearing that click-click kaboom, we will have it in every class, every week, instead of just the first month. I think we're done with it for this year. Good.

My Life in 6 Songs: Part IV- War/Lean on Me

Hai-yai, Kay-ay-kus
Nobody like us,
we are the campers of RSC!
Always a-grinnin'
Always a-winnin'
Always a-feelin' fine!
Kay-Ay!


Okay, this is actually two songs or maybe three if you count the one above. But they merge in my mind into the experience of one summer- the summer of 1972. I had graduated from high school a year early and was excited about starting college in the fall, and had landed my first job as part of the kitchen staff at Rotary Sunshine Camp in Rochester. RSC was, and is still, a summer camp serving disabled children( http://www.sunshinecampus.org/). The idea behind the camp is that, for a couple weeks each year, no matter how disabled a child is, he or she will be able to have fun, just like any other kid. Swimming, camping out, crafts, campfires, movie nights, special visits from bagpipe troupes and ventriloquists, sherriff helicopters and magicians all were accessible to even the most severely involved child. 4 ten-day sessions brought hundreds of children from ages 7-18 to the 23 acre camp situated on the shores of Lake Ontario. The camp relocated in 1973, and the format of the summer program has changed, but the mission of the camp remains to serve children whose disabilities keep them from being able to participate in other summer programs.

I worked in the kitchen. I had wanted to be a counselor, but was only 17 so was not yet eligible for that position. Instead, I was part of a team which included two other high school girls, Chris and Janet, Stella, our severe chief/chef, and Henry, a handsome African-American young man, the first such person I had ever spent any close time with. Our day started at 6:30 a.m. preparing breakfast for the 200 or so campers and staff. We broke egg yolks with our fingers in the steel vats where they cooked into scrambled eggs. We put out boxes of cereal and made piles of toast. We boiled pots of oatmeal. We fried bacon or sausage. We set tables with napkins and flatware at each place. The staff routinely and loudly complained about the lousy food, but to many of the campers, it was delicious.

In our kitchen was a radio that played all day long, tuned to a top 40's radio station. Having been brought up in a household where mostly only classical music played every day, the songs that came out of that radio were new to me. Stella tolerated the radio, but only because, I think, she was a little afraid of Henry. She was a no-nonsense boss, who kept us busy all the hours of our shifts, scrubbing the floor, mixing up government-issued butter with the dry, government-issued peanut butter, cutting, slicing, mixing, cleaning, washing dishes in the big, steamy Hobart.

Henry did all the heavy work, and was a jovial foil to Stella's seriousness. He was NOT afraid of her, as we girls were, and joshed her and teased her till she would crack a tiny smile, indicating that she wasn't all that tough after all. He was a lusty boy who stole kisses from us girls in the walk-in refrigerator. But he was our friend, and the kisses were just silliness that lightened the day.

We worked through the morning, and then had a couple hours off every afternoon to do as we pleased before coming back in to start on dinner. We finished the dinner work by around 6:30 and then had the evening to do what we pleased. Being teenagers, we would stay up till 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. and then get up at 6 to start all over again. We had 2 days off out of 10. It was a gruelling schedule for a solid 8 weeks. For this entire summer of work I earned $125.00. We got room and board, so I really didn't spend any of it, and it was the first money I had ever earned doing anything besides babysitting, so it seemed a small fortune.

In those afternoon hours, Henry wanted to prepare a song for the staff talent show. "War" (Edwin Starr http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-2pNCZiNk) was one of the songs that came out of our radio in the kitchen. Henry told us he had a band that was going to come to the camp to play for one of the dances and he wanted us to perform this song with them. We were going to be the three white chick back up singers and he used some of our time in the afternoons to teach us the moves. My memory is fuzzy about whether we actually ever performed this song. I seem to remember that the whole band thing was a hoax. But we had fun, and whenever I hear that song I think of those days.

The other song that takes me right back to the steam tables of Stella's kitchen is Lean On Me (Bill Withers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaVXfHZv50Y ) which was also on the playlist of our top 40s station. It was a summer of firsts. This song might be one of the first top 40 songs I ever knew all the words to. We sang along in the kitchen as we opened #10 cans of ravioli and green beans or mixed up vats of jello or made sheet cakes. We were 4 strangers who shared 8 weeks of hard work and hard play. I don't know what ever happened to any of those people, but when I went back the next year as a counselor, they were all gone. I never complained about the food.

The Matrix Music Teacher: New Year's Wishes

The Matrix Music Teacher: New Year's Wishes: Here I am on the 4th Wednesday of the new school year, and it is the first day I feel I have a grip on my schedule. One of my former scho...

New Year's Wishes

Here I am on the 4th Wednesday of the new school year,  and it is the first day I feel I have a grip on my schedule. One of my former schools closed at the end of last year, victim to state and local budgetary woes, and so I took on one new school this year. I have had more or less the same schedule for the last several years, and suddenly I have a new bell schedule to accommodate. It's all worked out now, and I think I will actually sleep tonight, instead of lying awake trying to see into the black hole of instructional minutes, recesses and lunches. The new school just so happens to be a school I spent LOTS of time at up till about 4 years ago. It was my home school, I had my office there and I taught two or three middle school classes plus 3/4/5 instrumental and choral music. We put on huge musicals every spring, and at one time I had fully a third of the middle school population in my classes, and most of the 3rd-5th graders. I had only one other school during those years, and so was heavily invested there.  I have now come back to work with only 4th and 5th graders. It's great to be there. There are many familiar faces, and there are lots of new ones. None of the kids remember me from before, as most of them didn't go to school yet at all last time I was there. That's a good thing, if only because there are no expectations of the former glory of the music program. We can rebuild it from scratch, though I won't ever be able to devote the time there I once did. The new principal had been a music teacher herself once upon a time, so, while respecting the needs of the classroom teachers, is very adamant about getting as many kids playing an instrument as possible. All of this is wonderful. So what else is new? We have a new room at Sierra Madre Middle School, where the AC works ALL the time and there is room to do everything we need to do. I have 45 kids signed up for the orchestra, whose name is now iPAK (instrumental Performing Art Kids) and there is talk of splitting it in two- a real BAND, and ORCHESTRA! They are sounding pretty good at moments, and I only wish there was more good music at their level for this kind of mixed ensemble. I think we have played almost all of it in the last year or two. I have to be careful what I wish for. I might just get it! I wished for 40 kids, I got 45. I wished for the new room and we got it. I have wished to have a band and orchestra, instead of the mash up of strings and winds together that we call a symphony orchestra (heavy on the alto sax); I might just get it. If it happens, it will further complicate an already complicated schedule- I have no two days in the week alike- but I will be thrilled. Check back in October. Meanwhile, the other elementary schools are raring to go. Field Elementary Band blew a few notes today. The 4th graders at Roosevelt are learning Hot Cross Buns on the recorder and the 5th graders are learning how to hold a violin bow.  At San Rafael, we had a few classes on note and rhythm reading in anticipation of passing out instruments. In a week or so, I will jump in and work with some string classes at Marshall Fundamental. This will bring the total of number of campuses I visit each week to 7. I will rub my lamp and wish for enough instruments for everyone who needs one, and off we go! Labels:

draft

My Life in 6 Songs: Part IV- The Sound of Music

Friends and Sisters

Last week my sister and I drove over the mountains from her home near San Francisco to Las Vegas. It was a long, and grueling, and also very pretty trip. I got the first speeding ticket I have ever gotten in my life when we were streaking along in the Nevada desert night after having to stop for 1) a jackknifed big rig on the 2-lane Sonora Pass 2) multiple construction sites, and just trying to GET THERE. It was late. I was going too fast. There are burros on that road. 'Nuf said.

The reason for the trip was to reconnect with my childhood friend, Bonnie. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and facebook, I was able to find her last year around Christmas. We have been emailing since, and had finally come up with a plan to meet in, of all places, Las Vegas.  She flew from our hometown, Rochester, New York, to Pensacola, Florida to meet up with HER sister and her sis's boyfriend. They slammed across the country in 36 hours in a Ford Taurus and got to Vegas several days before Lee and me, but we met them bright eyedthe next morning under the Arch d'Triomph of Gay Paris for breakfast.

The non-stop talkfest began immediately, and it was easy to remember why we had gotten in so much trouble as kids for talking during class. We caught up on classmates, family and each other. Bonnie's sister headed to the casinos after breakfast (she is very lucky and won lots of money) while Lee, Bonnie and I wandered from hotel bar to hotel bar in the 110 degree heat, sipping cold drinks, stopping into a few shops and talking all the while.

What does any of this have to do with The Sound of Music? Well, Bonnie and I were friends through the 10 years between 2nd grade and when I graduated and left town after 11th grade. She played clarinet and I played cello. Eventually I played tuba and French horn too. We sang in the choirs. We played in the pit orchestras. We were in every music group together for eight of those 10 years. We stomped around the snowy fields of our suburb, played Clue (she always won) and rode bikes, learned about sex from another girl hanging around the apple trees in the vacant lot and dated boys who were also best friends. We walked to school together in the predawn cold of a Rochester winter, except when her dad drove us to school in their Ford Falcon.  And the one thing that we shared all through those years was our love of music.

In about 5th or 6th grade, I became infatuated with two movies. The first was Mary Poppins. The soundtrack recording of this movie was one of the first records I ever owned. I knew every song, and could sing them with proper English pronunciations. I thought Julie Andrews was marvelous, and I wanted to BE her.

But there was another movie that Bonnie kept telling me about. She had the record and we listened to it over and over on her little stereo in a suitcase on the floor of her bedroom. THIS was the movie to end all movies. If you like Julie Andrews, you are going to LOVE this! Finally, I got to see The Sound of Music. I don't really even remember the circumstances of the actual viewing of the movie. But, yes, this movie had it ALL over Mary Poppins. It was for adults, a serious story, a love story. The songs were about adult things. Learning those songs, and singing them gave me glimpses into adult life. Nuns, Nazis, the Alps, teenage betrayals, a stern father relearning to love his children: this was epic.

Together, Bonnie and I learned The Lonely Goatherd, and performed it as a duet for our class during General Music class (yes, we had such a class in those days). I remember that she knew the words better than I. It was the silliest song in the whole show, and maybe that choice was a reflection of our not-yet-ready-to-leave-childhood state of mind, but The Sound of Music was a jumping off place for becoming my own musician. It was a grownup musical, unlike Mary Poppins, which was obviously for kids.

Until that time, the music I had listened to was pretty much the same as the music my parents listened to. Bonnie, in turning me on to SoM, became one of my first non-family music influences, and she and I continued to influence each other's musical experience through high school. When I think of anything having to do with music as a child, she is almost always there in my mind. As we chatted fast and furious in Las Vegas on a hot summer day in 2011, this influence came back into focus, and I felt reconnected not only to my childhood BF, but to my own musical roots.

My life in 6 Songs: Part III Water Music

7 a.m. in the Crocker household at 10 Ironwood Dr. in Rochester NY. The family is stirring, beginning the day. From the radio in early years, and the homemade stereo "hi-fi" tuner in later years sounds the reveille that accompanied the morning every day for the 17 years I lived with my parents: George Frederick Handel's Water Music- specifically the Hornpipe in D that was the sign-on signature from WBBF-FM 91.5 on your FM dial.

Dad was a guy who had to have the radio going, tuned to his favorite radio station every day from Water Music to the National Anthem. The classical play list of WBBF was the background of all activity in our household, and is the reason I didn't know much about pop music till I left home. Such was Dad's dependence on his personal soundtrack that he installed speakers in both bathrooms, the dining room, the basement and the back patio. With kits purchased from Craig Audio Shack, he rigged up elaborate switches to control which speakers were playing, so it would be possible for us to watch TV in the living room, while he enjoyed a Mahler Symphony in the backyard.

Dad was an expert on this music, and would confidently announce the composer and name of a piece playing whose introduction he had missed (how? Walking from the car where the radio was also permanently tuned to WBBF? Walking from one room to the next? In the flush of a toilet? Or the buzz of a saw during a building project of which there were many? ) I was always amazed that he knew so many of the pieces, could identify them within a few moments. When I asked him how he knew so much, he said it was from his days as an usher in a theater in Minneapolis where he grew up. I guess instead of Coke-sponsored trivia quizzes on the screen accompanied by up-and-coming pop artists, the movie theaters of yesteryear played classical music for their patrons.

Many years after I left home, my parents retired and bought a house on 20 acres near Columbus, Ohio. My sisters and I loved this rural retreat with its woods full of songbirds and spacious grounds including a small pond perfect for swimming and puttering around in various dilapidated watercraft.

One day, after a compressed year of school and who-knows-what other kinds of stress, my older sister and I visited the "farm" for some R&R. We decided to take a ride in the crummy rowboat that spent most of its time upside down on the grass. We pictured ourselves languidly floating around in the green water, chatting and listening to the quiet. But here came Dad, sliding open the doors to the large garage and pulling out two large speakers, aiming them right at us! Just in time for Shostakovitch 5 he told us! Here, you can listen from right where you are! If you know this piece, you can imagine that it was just the thing to destroy the mood of a bucolic afternoon shutting up the birds and thwarting any quiet chat. My sister and I just shook our heads. Some things never change.

Nowadays, I am called upon to play cello occasionally for weddings with a local string quartet. Almost every time out, we play the Hornpipe from Water Music, either as prelude music, for cocktails or sometimes for the wedding itself. Dad has been gone for over a decade already, and WBBF is thousands of miles away. I wonder if they still play Hornpipe every morning. But always, every time we play that piece, memories of early childhood morning in the Crocker household fill the space just behind my eyes. And when I listen to our Southern California KUSC classical radio station and miss the introduction of the piece, I amaze myself that I can confidently name the composer, if not always exactly the name of the work. Thanks, Dad.

My Life in 6 Songs: Part II- The Letter

Last night, my husband and I watched the movie Pirate Radio. Great film, great cast. It is about music, specifially the music that stirred up the airwaves in the US through the 60's and was, apparently, outlawed in England at the same time. I never knew this, and find it interesting to note that during one of the most fertile periods of British music, the people of that country could only listen via a ship parked in the North Sea broadcasting from outside the purview of the British Government.

It really is a fun movie, but this is not to be a movie review. The music of the 60's wallpapered the background of this film so that by the end, we were wondering if the filmakers had picked a dozen or so of their favorite songs and built the plot of the movie around them. One of the songs, The Letter, by the Boxtops, made my husband pause the movie and tell me a story about being a teenager picking up his date  (he grew up in Memphis) at the home where she was babysitting, which happened to be the home of Boxtop member Alex Chilton. On the wall in the house was the gold record for The Letter. Good story, true story.

As we put dinner dishes aside before resuming the movie, we both started singing that song. The words came slowly back to me, and reminded me of my own story. I didn't tell it to Jon, because I wanted to write it here, and sometimes telling a story out loud dissipates the necessity of writing it.

This story starts in the Music Building of Ohio University, 1976 or so. I had just read "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues" and was enamored of the idea of goats as traveling buddies. I walked into a practice room where a friend was talking to a slightly built, older bald guy (by older, I mean 31 to my 21) where I announced that I wanted to walk across the US with a goat. I was just goofing around, sort of, but this statement started me on an alternate path. The man in the practice room was named Erasmo Switzer. He was from California, and was in Ohio to record an album of his original songs at a studio in Chillicothe where he knew the owner. I signed on to play cello on this album, and we got to be friends over the following summer. Somewhere in that summer, we decided to buy a school bus and become a traveling band. Just the two of us.

This wasn't a whim. I had wanted to live in a school bus for years. Maybe since I had read The Boxcar Children as a kid. Erasmo had already had experience living in a bus. It was the 70's, after all, and he was 10 years older, had already lived his own hippy fantasy.

So we bid on a 1966 Chevy school bus, 35 feet long, and paid I think 700$ or so for it. It ran like a top, had NOTHING wrong with it, and between working on the album and working around the studio to make a little money, we converted the bus into a pretty slick home where we lived for the next couple of years.

January of 1977 was one of the coldest I had ever experienced, especially as I now lived in a tin can with nothing more than a little woodburning stove for heat. As the snow piled up around central Ohio, we decided to head west, to California, his home, and a crazy new life for me.

First stop, San Bernardino (his parents let us park the bus in their driveway), where we tried the showcase circuit in LA. The Troubador and The Palomino stand out as places we played and had people listen to us. But we didn't have enough focus to our act. That's what we were told. And this makes sense to me now. Erasmo had all these songs he had written, and then also a bunch of random songs that he just happened to like. They weren't any particular genre. And I really only knew my classical music, and the several mountain folk-y tunes I had learned in Ohio.

After 6 months of this, and when the smog started backing up against the San Bernardino Mountains, we headed to San Francisco, where Erasmo was entering school at SF State. I got a job as a bicyle messenger and we lived a romantic year in that beautiful city as part of the counterculture underground vehicle dwellers that populated parking lots and curbsides in those days. Our music together suffered here, mostly because I got distracted by other interests. I started fooling around with watercolor painting and writing and just absorbing this cool life.

Erasmo's Album (as the finished product was called) started with an original pressing of 1000 records. We sold as many as we could, but never got rid of them all. He had borrowed money from some wealthy friends in Oregon to make the album, and by the next winter he was feeling the pressure to pay them back. Instead of paying them back directly from album sales he arranged to work for them on their ranch. So off he went with the bus to Halfway, Oregon, leaving me in San Francisco to finish out the job I now had as a teacher's aid at Lucinda Weeks Center. I sublet a nifty apartment in the Sunset a few blocks from Golden Gate Park, and indulged in a fertile few months of writing songs and trying out open mikes on my own.

In July I took the train up the coast and across the top of Oregon, through the green lushness west of the Cascades into the arid scrub of the east. I remember seeing plumes of smoke where forest fires raged, and stepping off the train in Baker, Oregon, being hit with 104 degrees HOT!

That summer was spent on the ranch, Hooker Flat, overlooking the mountains of Idaho and seven miles over rough dirt roads from the nearest town of Halfway, population: 350. Erasmo, in preceeding me there, had already built a reputation for his musicianship. This was a place full of college-educated transplants from all over the country, living in tipis and yurts and log houses and berm houses, stunning the locals with their strange ways. They were hungry for live music, and Erasmo was able to provide that. When I joined him in July, we picked up our instruments and played wherever and whenever we could. We met other musicians there, a young biology teacher at the middle school who was a very skilled guitar player, and a high school kid who could play drum set. Now we had a band. We called ourselves Northwest Passage, and played parties and gatherings of all sorts all around northeastern Oregon. We developed a loyal following. It was a good time.

The songs Northwest Passage played were the same strange mix of songs we had tried in LA, but here, they worked. We played rock songs, some jazz standards, originals and mountain folk songs. Our audiences loved it.

And here is why this story means something to me now. Many of the rock and pop songs that our guitar player and Erasmo knew were ubiquitous on the radio in the 60's and early 70's. But I didn't know them. I had never listened to pop or rock radio, and so the only versions of these songs I knew were what I learned from my bandmates. This was a time before iTunes and youtube and Guitar Hero and all the ways kids have these days of accessing music from the past. We didn't even have a record player, and had left stashes of records with people around the country, thinking we would return one day to collect them.

The Letter was one of the songs we played. I didn't know where it came from. I just knew how we played it, and sang it. I know that song gave me heartache, and I loved the harmonies and mood of it. It wasn't until last night that I learned the name of the group that originally recorded it, as I sang in with my husband in the kitchen in 2011.

My life in 6 Songs: Part I

Having recently read the book by Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, I have been thinking of my own life in terms of the music I have learned throughout it. This thought process got started last weekend when I pulled my dusty mountain banjo out of its case for a jam session at a friend's house. Hadn't played the thing in at least one, maybe two years, and yet, my fingers remembered the few little Appalachian-flavored tunes I learned some 35 years ago. Clumsy and slow, but definitely still accessible from the muscle memory banks, the songs brought forth a flood of memories of the days living in Ohio where I learned them.

I was a young college student, a transplant from New York, studying first Music Therapy and then Cello Performance at Ohio University, ending up, finally, with the Music Education degree that has served me so well this last decade and a half. Athens, the home of OU, sits at the southeast corner of the state, at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains and region. Such a place, I found, was home to a whole new kind of music I had never heard before. Not bluegrass, but something more raw and simple that appealed to me right away and made me want to learn.

There was an Anthropology professor in those days, Art Saxe, who lived with his wife, Susan, on a 40-or-so acre farm at the top of a knobby hill in Millfield, once a coal mining town about 15 miles from Athens. Art had befriended some of the local musicians, some of us students, and also some hippies that lived down the road from him. During the first summer I lived there, we would gather in Art's living room to drink homemade wine and beer and play music together. He knew- it seemed- hundreds of these mountain songs, and sang them with gusto while thumping on a banjo made from the torque converter of -I think- an old Plymouth. I would bring a fiddle along and he patiently taught me what he knew. I learned that I needed steel strings, not the silver wound gut or synthetic that I had been using. I also learned that I needed to flatten my bridge out, the better to play on two strings at once.

I got hooked up with this group of musical friends in the spring when I had cat-sat at a friend's apartment in town over spring break. Her apartment had a window that opened on to a roof where I would play my fiddle in the open air. This was a fiddle that I had borrowed from a boy, an English major, on whom I had a desperate crush. He and I joined together with another boy and  formed a band that played Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and Jonathan Prine songs around town. I had started learning a few fiddle tunes by this time and they were always the hit of any gig. But I was still thinking bluegrass and the mountain style hadn't quite sunk in yet.

So here I was on a sunny spring day, playing fiddle on a roof, and a young man appeared in the alley and shouted up to me "Don't go away, I'll be right back!" And back he came with a guitar. He introduced himself -Lucien Geoffrey Matte- and we shared tunes and jammed the rest of the afternoon away. Soon he introduced me to his friend, David Kuhaneck who played clawhammer banjo in the frailing style of Appalachia, and I was hooked. It was through these two new friends that I became a regular at Art Saxe's summer night gatherings.

The night air of summer in Appalachia is like nothing else I have ever experienced anywhere. It is dense with the sound of night insects, the twinkle of fireflies, the buzz of hunting night hawks and the condensation of the day's humidity. Between songs, the space between the musicians filled up with this mix, making a continuous, velvety fabric of sound, smells and fecund too much-ness. Learning the songs here wasn't like learning music in school. The songs kept coming, and I had to grab what I could as they flew by. Consciousness altered with beer and other substances, I felt like a goldfish finding the castle all over again in his little bowl. Every time, every song unremembered until so many songs went by so many times, finally some of them stuck.

Chickens a-crowin' on Sourwood Mountain
Hay, dang dang, diddle aylee dang,
So many pretty girls, I just can't count 'em
Hay dang dang, diddle aylee dang.

Or

Old Molly Hare
What're you doin' there?
Sittin in a corner
Smokin' a cigar.

Or

Oh the cuckoo
She's a pretty bird
She warbles when she flies
She don't ever holler cuckoo
Till the fourth of July

 Sometimes, returning home at daybreak, the mist settling into the hollows in gauzy wisps seemed like a reflection of the sleepy dreams of music in my head.

The next fall, Art was in the hospital for a while, I forget what for, but Susan made him a tape to listen to of all the versions of his favorite song, Ragtime Annie, that he had on various records. That is one song of those many that I learned and learned well, and play to this day, in the version that Art himself taught me. Won second place in the fiddle contest at Julian a few years back with that song.

The Appalachian Mountains are far away and Art is probably long retired and moved to Florida or something by now, but those tunes are in me still, and can still fill me up, just like a hot summer evening on a steamy mountain top.

National Boards?????

Fellow music teacher colleague and friend, Karen, is thinking about tackling the daunting prospect of  acquiring a National Board Certificate. She has taken the first plunge by attending a four-hour informational meeting. She has gotten me thinking about it too. It's funny how, even though it immediately pops into my head that it is WAY too much work, on top of the way too much work I already have on my plate every week, month and year, a little spark of excitement lights up my brain imagining that I could really slow down and THINK about how and what and why I am doing what I do. Get feedback, develop new ideas toward best practices, and in the end, get some recognition and a raise. It's not an unattractive idea. Especially if there would be a fellow music teacher on the road too.

We (okay, I AM seriously considering this, even though I wouldn't even have dipped a toe in the water if it hadn't been for Karen diving in first) have till July 11 to decide. Meanwhile I am reading everything I can about the process, talking it over with husband and those who have been there and done that.

It takes a certain self-confidence in one's teaching practices even to think about taking this on. The whole point of the project is critical reflection and it's maybe only after this pretty good year that I feel I could stand up to such self-inflicted scrutiny. After 15 years in this district, I could actually hold a mirror up to my classroom and maybe not flinch. It would be okay to look closely and see what I do, and not run screaming from the profession as an abject failure. Maybe it would even be fun. I'm thinking this blog atmosphere might be useful as a tool to help me think out loud, so to speak.

I will think on this some more...any thoughts, friends?

When the Leadership promotes the Arts, amazing things happen

Gayle Bluemel has always looked at her position as the principal of Sierra Madre School as one of facilitating the wonderful work of the inspired and inspiring teachers who work there. Keeping directives from "above" to a minimum, she has always supported and encouraged the teachers, students and parents in this thriving school community to move above and beyond their own and everyone else's expectations. As she finishes her last few days in her distinguished career, this tribute, prepared in secret by hundreds of people, was the perfect gift to a woman whose educational philosophy directly results in the actual ability to pull something like this off. Have a look!

http://sierramadre.patch.com/articles/flash-mob-serenades-retiring-principal?ncid=M255

The End of the Year Already

The time has flown. It seems we just loaded our cars with the instruments from the warehouse to distribute to eager new students, and now we are already collecting them, cleaning them and taking them back. All around, I have to say, it's been a pretty good year.  I know that for the first time in 15 years, I actually feel my own competency, know where I need to develop and improve and have begun to understand why I do what I do and why it matters.

In some ways our music department for the whole district has become more closely knit than ever, and the benefit goes to the kids.We have been trying to have more continuity between schools, keeping track of where kids go when they leave our programs at elementary or middle school. We have tried to connect kids from different schools through the music they can share. We have joined together as a faculty of performers to make the Staff Lounge jazz band.  I personally have watched several of my colleagues teach this year, and, I hope, have learned some new tricks.

My own classes have done well. I feel that the students who stayed with it through the whole year will move on to the next level next year with skills in place to succeed. I still puzzle over the ones who don't make it through the year, and am determined to address this- and maybe solve it- in the coming year.

Update the inventory, nudge some performers through a couple of promotion ceremonies, pack a few boxes (did I tell you we are getting a new room next year? Not much view, but GREAT air conditioning!) turn in the keys, and it's all over, Rover. There is summer school to look forward to, but a week off to hang in the desert with my sister, play Scrabble, swim, talk and talk. All too soon we teachers will be back at the warehouse, carrying armloads of instruments back out to our cars and trucks, wondering when the heat will break, wondering if there will be any stars, wondering what the new year will bring.

Silver! The PAK Orchestra Goes to Festival

So, finally, the big day arrived. The PAK Orchestra from Sierra Madre Middle School was finally going to Forum Music Festival for the first time ever. The big carrot for this event is the afternoon we would get to spend at Knott's Berry Farm after the performance and awards ceremony at Cypress College.

The kids had been looking forward to this trip since Christmas, and had worked hard together to prepare the music we would play. We had six pieces to choose from, and had played all six for the Spring Concert and assemblies at school the week before. Though we had made a good showing of "Jupiter" for the school concerts, I was still nervous about all the things that could go wrong in that piece. Better to play things more within our ability, and do well, than to try for harder music and mess up. The was the advice from the Festival organizers themselves and also from my friend and colleague who had attended this festival many times in the past, and who had heard our school performance. In the end we chose "Glorioso", "Can-Can" and "The Tempest".

We met early in the morning to load the bus, check in last-minute permission slips, and finalize plans with some of the chaperones. Then we were off. The kids were subdued on the trip, just sleepy still, was how I figured. IPods and phones kept everyone busy and tranquil the whole way. When we got to Cypress College we saw the group of yellow buses dropping off students and knew we had arrived. Three of the four schools represented in the morning portion of that day's festivities were from our own Pasadena Unified School District; Eliot Middle School and Blair Secondary School were also there. We had made some efforts throughout the year to connect kids from the various schools in the district, so there were happy reunions among students and teachers alike.

After check-in, we entered the hall to hear the first group- the only one NOT from PUSD. This band was from Eliot Middle School in Downey, and right off, we knew we had some competition. They all had matching tee-shirts, and sat up with almost military straightness. They focussed like lasers on their conductor, Ms. Peen, and played with a precision and clarity that was very impressive. I hoped my own students were watching and learning, and not just letting this group's excellence intimidate them.

Next we watched our own PUSD Eliot Middle School, under the very experienced direction of Karen Klages. She has a wall of plaques from this festival, and her students were very comfortable getting up there and showing their best. We heard her band play, and they also sounded great. We cheered them on, counting their members among friends.

Then a staff member came and got us to go to the warmup room. My students sat right down in approximate formation as they do on our stage at home, and got busy warming up. I tuned all the strings (my OCD kicks in over this! I do not trust my string players to tune themselves), and we talked briefly about the Downey group and what they could bring to their own playing from watching them (sitting up straight, watching the conductor, starting and ending REALLY together...this from my own kids, yay) and then it was time.

As we left the warm-up room to go on to the stage, I had to pull a hat off one kid's head (argh!) and another needed to drop his sweatshirt somewhere...okay, right here! The emcee, named George, asked me some questions. What does PAK stand for? (Performing Arts Kids) Have we been to the festival before? (No) How many students in the school? (about 300). The stage crew removed a couple extra chairs and stands, and then there we were- in an unfamiliar auditorium, in front of strangers and JUDGES and under bright lights. George introduced us, we took a collective deep breath, everyone sat up a little straighter and focussed a little closer, and we played.

The first piece lost control slightly as the group started letting their nerves push the tempo, but we kept it mostly together and finished really well. Then they all settled down and Can-Can sounded like a professional orchestra to me. They're only 12, 13 and 14! I basked in their exciting sound. The dynamics were better than we had rehearsed them, articulations more precise, and the sound seemed balanced to me. Our last piece, The Tempest, is, by far, the group's favorite piece of anything they have worked on this year. They did a great job on it, remembering to watch dynamics and listen for balance. And then we were done. A whole 8 minutes of music. We went out and put instruments in cases and then came in to hear  Ms. Klages' string group from Eliot. This is a group I have worked with also on and off through the year, and I was impressed to hear how far they had come since their Christmas concert.

We waited a few more minutes and then the emcee announced our awards. While the Eliot strings had been playing, one of the staff came and asked the name of our timpanist. I wrote it down for him. They gave the awards- Bronze to PUSD Eliot Band and Blair Band, and SILVER to Sierra Madre PAK Orchestra and Eliot Strings, and Gold to Downey Eliot Band. I thought they got it pretty much right, although I think I would have given silver to PUSD Eliot Band as well. There were also awards for various individual and sections in the groups: The flutes from Downey Eliot, the snare drum and first violin from PUSD Eliot, and our own timpanist, all of whom received a special plaque for Outstanding Musicianship.

I would like, in another post- this one has gone long enough- to write about the benefits of preparing for an event like this. It's more than just getting ready for a concert for family and friends. I have always wanted to do it, because I thought it would be a great way to recruit for my group, and would be a good way for me to focus on performance techniques that are easy to gloss over when you perform for your usual support group. But I really didn't foresee the kind of in-depth analysis of their own playing and ability to critique themselves that the kids got into in our final rehearsals. But I will come back to that another day.

Happy as could be, we posed out front for parental photo ops and then packed up our bus to head to Knott's. The kids spread out in all directions with their intrepid chaperons while I sat down for a famous chicken dinner with Ms. Klages, her mom and the parents of my trombone player (who also happen to be Ms. Klages' friends and colleagues) and we mulled over the event. After lunch, I wandered through the park, stopping to look at whatever I wanted to. Later, I spelled some of the chaperons and actually went on some rides, but there was nothing more thrilling to me that day than having the hard work my students and I put in through the year result in the kind of sterling performance they gave that day. I'm still riding high from it! Congratulations, kids! You really earned it!

The Freedom Not To Practice

I have been haunted over the last couple of weeks by this video of these North Korean Kindergartners playing the snot out of these full sized guitars while smiling- if those gap-toothed grimaces can be called smiles- into the camera. It is both creepy and wonderful and has caused me to think a great deal about how we teach music to our children in this country.

I think it comes down to the difference between having freedom and not having freedom. I have shared this video with many of my students, at least one of whom went immediately to her violin and practiced. The conversation I have had with them goes something like this: You do have the right not to practice. You have the freedom to do something else with your time. Facebook, video games, soccer, watch TV, whatever. These children probably do not have that freedom. Since they were very small, someone has probably been making them practice- a lot. These children can probably also dance, sing, recite poetry, multiply 3-digit numbers in their heads and tell you many interesting facts about the life of Dear Leader. This is because their parents must have amazing children to keep up with all the other parents who are having amazing children, because they are expected to do so. And being amazing doesn't necessarily mean cute, or fullfilled or even happy.

Anyone who has seen any of the patriotic displays of North Korean dancing with flags and colored lights can imagine that these five guitar players are not particularly unique in a country where keeping up with the Joneses means pushing your child to excel to the brink of abuse. But do these children look unhappy? Are they proud of their accomplishment? Does that accomplishment have any context in a nation of overachievers? Does that accomplishment come with any compensatory reward such as cash or parental prestige? A better house, perhaps, or a car?

Music is truly a universal language, and while I can understand WHAT these kids are doing, I'm not sure I understand HOW they have done it. What kinds of carrots and sticks are used to push what is developmentally possible into the realm of actually possible? I wonder about all the kids who started playing guitar in the same class with these five. Did they drop out because their parents decided they could be superstars at something else? Or is there a whole army of these almost-toddlers with flying fingers? Maybe children are examined at birth and found to have particularly long and agile fingers and are channeled into the study of guitar without any regard to what the parents want.

The secrecy of the North Koreans only makes me wonder more. If this video had come from Japan or China, you could be sure that there would be someone hawking a method for teaching that would get the same results. But this video is just out there. Not much explanation, not much context. But one thing is sure. I can get more out of my own students. Just by seeing this video I have raised the bar of my own expectations of what my students can do. They do have the freedom not to practice. But I am going to remind them from time to time to revisit this performance and contemplate their own potential. Maybe they will practice more. Maybe at least they will have fewer excuses for not doing so.

Shuffle, Step, Shuffle, Ball Change

This is the mantra I keep saying to myself as I undertake to master at least ONE step of the tap routine we are doing in my Tappercize class. Over and over again, on my springy board in the living room which I bought just for this purpose, I try to get my feet to match up with what my mouth is saying. Not so easy. Shuffles require that you finish with a foot in the air, uncommitted to the next thing, ready to shift weight, or not. Slowly, I isolate the messages between foot and brain, and try to build up to doing two in a row, however slowly. Somewhere between the brain and the foot, a wire crosses and I am saying "shuffle", but actually "ball changing".

This wire crossing seems to multiply as I try to string the steps together, mutant DNA in my helix of instruction. I stop. Try one. Try one starting on the other foot. Try doing two in a row. Got it. Now try to keep it going. Wires cross again. This puzzles me. Why can't I tell my feet what to do? I am SAYING it out loud, for pity's sake! I back up and try one. Try one on the other foot. String two together. Try to keep it going. Say it out loud. Eventually, I manage to get maybe 4 to 6 in a row. The instructions repeat in my head, getting, finally, correctly, to my feet. Whee! I'm flying! Oops. As soon as I think ABOUT what I'm doing, instead of staying in the mantra, I goof up.

This goofing up when stepping outside my brain is something that has plagued me as a musician all my life. But that's not why I am writing today. I am thinking of my music students. As part of their instruction, I have them say out loud, and in tempo what they are doing. Reading note names, singing finger numbers, saying tahn and shh for quarter notes and rests as they clap a rhythm, or moving their bows vertically in the air as we practice a bowing rhythm are all things we do regularly in my classes. It is my belief that these activities develop an inner mantra for my students that keeps them, or gets them focused on pushing the music along and not getting stuck unable to string two or more notes together. And I think it does help. But as I have been observing my own wires crossing between brain and action, I can see my own students in my mind's eye having the same problem. As bows are going up and down in the air, I can see a couple kids completely backward-even as they are saying "down bow" they are pushing their bows up. Usually if I make smiling eye contact, they realize immediately what they are doing and turn around. Sometimes a student will CLAP on a rest when he should be putting palms out and saying Shh. But if we keep trying, and reminding them to look and focus, eventually they get it.

Once again, my own learning reminds me of how my students learn, and how they can cross wires just like I can. My job is to help them untangle the mess till they can fly too.

Springtime Leaps

Back from Spring Break last week, Monday started out with a plop. Kids were forgetting they had music class, and fooling around not concentrating on learning music when they did come. Spring break never seems long enough, but this year it seemed especially hard to come back. Not sure why. Old age. My own spring fever. The proximity of our return to classes to the start date of the standardized testing window. Or some combination of it all. My poor, patient husband let me complain and moan, sympathizing, while puzzling why I should feel so.

By Thursday, my gloomy mood was beginning to lift a little, and I had a good chuckle first thing in the morning. At one school, I teach on the second floor, and have been given a key to the elevator. It is really nice not to have to schlep my stuff up a long flight of stairs. A few weeks ago, as the elevator door was closing, a small child (honestly, I'm not sure if this child is a boy or a girl) peaked into the elevator quickly and then backed up, saying "Oh, I see it's a ThyssenKrupp!" as if this is a name we all should know. On Thursday, this same child (I am going to say "she" because I just have a hunch...) appeared once again, just as I was getting into the elevator. She is small, maybe 1st grade. She asked very politely if I would mind if she watched the elevator. Of course I said she could watch, and she replied by saying she had seen the button light up and knew I was going to use the elevator. I said I was going to push the button inside and then the doors would close and....then when the door opened on the second floor, there she was, waiting for me! I said "You must really like elevators!" To which she said yes. I said "well, would you like to go for a ride on the elevator?" (not sure at all if this was something that's even allowed, but at 7:30 in the morning, with that kind of enthusiasm, I couldn't resist offering). She said that yes, she would like to, but her teacher promised her that when she learned her "times tables up to 5" she would get to have a ride. Well, then. The whole encounter brightened my day, just for the sheer simplicity of it.

The next neat thing that happened was that one of my fifth grade beginning trumpet players came by at recess with his trumpet in hand telling me he wanted to quit.
     "What?!" I exclaimed.
     "Why!?"
     "Because I'm no good at trumpet," he answered.
I told him that no one would expect him to be good at it yet; he's only been playing just a few short months. Truly, though, this was a student who HAD been struggling to play, seemed to be really hard on himself in general, and I wasn't surprised really that he was thinking of quitting. But, as I would hope all teachers would do, I tried to talk him out of it. And I succeeded. I told him that he should keep with it, and there are lots of kids who struggle at first and then get it, and it was really too soon to tell with him. He finally said he would keep trying, and went off to recess.

The class he's in has just three students now. A clarinet player, a saxophone player and this trumpet player. I had my clarinet and trumpet both at hand to play with the kids, and picked up the trumpet first, thinking it would be good to support the sound of my struggling student. But something happened that surprised us both. For some reason (had he been practicing? had he just had a big attitude adjustment in his conversation with me? Dunno) he could play! All 5 notes, plus the new one we added. All the songs he had been sputtering through all year, he could now play! He was delighted with himself, and I was delighted too. As class ended, I asked him if he was glad he hadn't quit, and he said he was .

By Friday, with a fun weekend home project waiting in the wings, I was feeling pretty good. On Fridays I meet with the big 4th grade beginning band classes I had started in November. These classes are both at the same school, and both have a mix of instruments. But they have been making progress at very different rates. The one class had gotten up to spring break barely able to hold the instruments right, and blow a note or two. The other class had taken off and was actually playing recognizable songs before the break. I teach these kids the same, but, inexplicably, one class got it, and the other didn't.

So I was ready on Friday to do some real remedial drilling with the first class to see if we could jump start their learning curve and get some music happening. But, as had happened with the trumpet player the day before, they came into class and played well! Recognizable music came out of their instruments. I don't know what to say about this, but it made my week. The second, better, class tore the place up and played several new songs easily.

Maybe spring does something to 4th and 5th graders' brains. I can't recall if I have experienced this kind of dramatic leap of ability in other classes in other years, but this year it happened, and it restored my faith in my teaching, as well as my enjoyment of my job!

Landing It: More about Music and Shakespeare

One of the biggest things that has stuck with me a week after finishing this Shakespeare course is the teacher repeatedly making the point that we must "land" our lines on the listeners. That it's not enough to know them and say them, even with great interpretive emotion, but that if you don't connect with the listener, you might as well be reciting Shakespeare in your car (no, I never do this...well, hardly ever...). Raise the stakes. Feel the importance of the words, implore the listener to hear you, understand you, go along with you. This is the lesson I am carrying around with me as a music teacher of children who, more often than not, would rather listen to each other than me. It's not that they don't like me. It's just that the things going on in their social world are far more important to them than anything I might want to say to them. Hisa, our teacher, reminded us again and again to "check in; are they getting it?" With her eyes and her gestures and a lovable habit of saying "do you know what I mean?" or "does that make sense?" after her explanations, she pushed us to look for our audience's eyes and signs of understanding.

It seems obvious that a teacher in a roomful of students should be striving to get them to understand and "get" what she is saying. But I know myself. I know that there have been times when I have wondered whether anyone cares enough to get it, or that maybe that what I am trying to get to them is maybe not important enough. It is at these times that I have underlying, unspoken doubts about what I am doing: Does music really matter? Does it really matter if the kids actually play a song? Or is it enough for them just to think they are playing a song, pushing a bow back and forth on open strings, or blowing random notes into a horn? The obvious answer to these questions is "of course those things matter!" But when it seems that said roomful of kids would rather talk to each other, or make random noise on their instruments, or daydream, then I do wonder why I bother. And I also wonder if this feeling is unique to me, or is something that other teachers, and music teachers in particular, share.

I find myself imagining that if I could just say the right things, I would have every kid playing like a virtuoso, motivated to practice that elusive 30 minutes a day, and showing up to my classes because they dare not miss one word of those important, and ever-entertaining mots falling from my golden lips. I imagine that other teachers, my colleagues, all have found the right things to say and their classes are full of eager, silently-listening, paying-attention musical geniuses.

Since starting the Shakespeare class, I have been studying in my working life how to be sure the kids are getting what I am saying. I have spoken Shakespeare's lines in my acting class, and felt the weight of their importance. I know the stakes. I must believe that words I speak to my students are just as important. The stakes are just as high. Maybe most important, I must find "the impulse to speak" that Hisa had us look for before we uttered one word. As teachers, we ASSUME an impulse to speak, a RIGHT to speak, but if we are honest, we would probably admit that we speak more than we should. I know I do. If I want to "land" my words on my students' understanding, to impart something valuable to them, then I must keep the words' value high, by making them rare. Kids learn by doing. I should only be giving them enough words to be sure they can DO. The end.

March

Rainy Sunday, spring teasing us, one music festival over and another one- and spring break- two weeks away, we are in the rolling along part of the year, where we can actually get into a rhythm of weekly classes, going more or less regularly along. After the music festival in February, kids have been coming back to class out of the woodwork, reassured by me that we are done with that really hard music for awhile, and can get back to building their fundamentals and playing easier songs.

I like this time of year, though Spring Break always comes not a minute too soon. There is a steadiness to the schedule, and we get to dig in and learn things like slurs on the strings and "going over the break" in clarinets. The beginning students are beginning to build a little repertoire so they can play something at their spring concert.

But it is also at this time that some kids are coming to me, instrument in hand, saying they are here to turn it in. These are usually beginners who, from the first, had trouble remembering to come to class. They had an idea that playing an instrument would be fun; that first rush of coming to music class, being assigned an instrument of their very own, and those first couple of lessons where it was all so exciting passed, and they realized that they actually would be required to put forth some effort. For some, the challenge of keeping up with classwork that they miss for the time they're are in music class is too much, or at least that's what they say.

So here is where my thinking goes kind of haywire. I have read, many times, figures that suggest that students who study music throughout school do better in school. They get better grades, score higher on standardized testing and are more likely to go to college. This idea seems to be pretty universally accepted. But this point, right here, where children begin to self-select their ongoing committment to music, is where we need to look to determine chicken/egg first-ness.

We teachers of the Arts in general and Music in particular use these facts to advocate for our programs. But what are we really saying? I am haunted by the student who a) keeps forgetting to bring his instrument, b) struggles to get any meaningful sounds out of that instrument when he does come with it to class  c) has no clue how to practice at home and d) falls behind in his regular classwork as a result of the 45 minutes a week he is in music class. The way our music classes are structured now, a certain percentage of our initial number of students will fall into this category, and any statistics we might like to cite to prove the value of MUSIC IN SCHOOL are necessarily skewed by this inevitability.

I have been attempting to look at standardized test scores over time in regards to our own ongoing students in Pasadena Unified. I have not found any conclusive evidence that the little bit of music we are able to do with elementary students has any effect at all. Maybe as we follow these same students through high school, we will find significant differences between those who stick with music, and those who don't. But here's the thing: Those students who stick with music all the way through high school usually had little doubt from the beginning that they would do so. That's the kind of student they are. They do well in school because that's the kind of student they are.

There is another category of students for whom music is so important that, even if they struggle to keep up with school work, they continue music. They may not be the A+ students in any academic sense, but they show up and do the work. They may not be the best musician in the class, but maybe music in their school is what they show up FOR. These kids may get through school, barely, but get through they do. I met a former student who was in this category a couple years ago working as an aide at one of my elementary schools. She had been a really tough, at-risk 6th grader when I first knew her, but she played clarinet, I might say, fiercely, and it was playing clarinet, by her admission as a grown-up, that got her to graduation from high school. I love these students- their passion and their resiliance. Statistically, they don't add to a school's API, but they don't add to the drop-out rate either, and that's worth something. But most important in this discussion is that music becomes a sort of life-line for them.

I am beginning to realize that it might be time for an overhaul of our whole music program. First thing I would like to do is make music class part of the schedule for EVERY student. And it doesn't have to be an instrumental music class. General music literacy is being lost, and it might be the very thing that actually affects brain development and academic achievement. If we work with whole classes, giving the classroom teacher much needed release time and removing student anxiety about missing classwork, and do this in the early grades, we will possibly affect real change. We would also create a pool of students who, by fourth or fifth grade, are more ready and able to handle the challenge of learning an orchestra or band instrument.

My long-time dream is this: General music in K-2, with focus on singing, beginning note reading, rhythm, movement, maybe some keyboard knowledge. In third and fourth grade everyone studies violin.  In fifth grade everyone has a choice: either to continue with strings or start a wind instrument. If we did this, consistently and equitably  I do believe there would be benefits to every child at every level, and I also think that there would be many fewer instruments turned in in March.

Music and Shakespeare

"...the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." -William Shakespeare, Hamlet

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had been taking acting classes. These were fun; I learned some things about myself and acting but I wanted more. So now I have bitten into another class called "Speaking Shakespeare" taught through A Noise Within, a classic repertory theater soon to move to Pasadena (yay!). We have been chewing on a speech from Hamlet for the last four weeks, and I have decided that what I have gained from this chewing is as valuable to my development as a musician/music teacher as it would ever be to some vague notion I might have of trying my hand at actual acting.

The teacher of the class, Hisa Takakuwa, is incredibly knowledgeable about everything to do with Shakespeare: historical context, common practice, deep meanings of words and phrases, the details of the work in the canon, and how to talk to actors to get them to see what she sees. I know that there are many ways to approach Shakespeare, but immersing myself in this one expert's approach empowers me to believe that what I now know about Shakespeare, and Hamlet, is based on solid scholarship.

I thought I was taking this class for recreation. I have always loved Shakespeare and thought taking this class would allow me to delve deeper into that love. It has. But something else is happening in my brain. The words of Shakespeare have begun to run through my head like music. The rhythms of the pentameters, the irregularities of those pentameters, the alliterations and onomatopoeia, have become as "worms" in my brain, filling my dreams and waking times like the catchy hooks of pop songs. Thinking about how to say these words, how to glean their meaning and deliver it and make it "land" on another actor gives me a whole new way to think about teaching and learning music.

My middle school students have undertaken to learn an adaptation of Gustav Holst's Jupiter: the Bringer of Jollity as a possible piece to play at the Forum Festival in May. This piece, though an adaptation, is a real challenge for kids this age, and they are rising to the challenge, eagerly. The trumpets are pushing their ranges upwards. We are working out major choreography for the 4 percussionists so that all the parts can be covered. We have recruited a former percussionist to play tuba. He has never played a brass instrument before this year, and is taking to it in a big way. The flutes are flowing over their beautiful harmonized arpeggios like pros. (Now we just have to figure out how to HEAR them!) The violins are playing in the stratosphere of their instruments with tremolos. My formerly timid trombone player is finding the brass in his instrument. We are shaking the rafters, rattling the windows, and having a blast. And here's where Shakespeare comes in. I find myself talking to them about how to play this monster the same way Hisa talks to us about how to play Shakespeare. Getting beyond the reading of the notes-or words- and hitting the listener with meaning.

Though Jupiter is a jolly planet, he gets pretty intense, and in our adaptation, the really jolly theme is not even presented. I kind of wonder why, since it is actually very easy melodically and harmonically. What we do have, though, are the syncopated tunes in the low brass and strings which are echoed in the percussion. Not easy to teach, not easy to learn, but we persevere, and are making progress. We have talked about the army coming up over the hill to get the trumpets' bells UP so we can hear the fanfare announcing the arrival of said army...maybe it's the circus that's coming. The snare drummer has to play that figure like gunshots. Now, I'm not a fan of guns in any shape or form, and have been known to come down hard on kids for turning clarinets into pretend rifles. But with the images from Henry V in my head (my husband is also a huge Shakespeare fan and we had just watched the Kenneth Branagh version) all I could think was that those snare drum sounds needed to sound like shots. And the imagery worked for the musician. Crisp and clean, he delivered. We talked about energy in bows, about listening across the orchestra to others who have the same figure as you. We have been talking about how the audience will hear this piece. And I want to talk more about the jolly aspect...(I really miss that one theme....maybe I ought to try my hand at an addendum to the arrangement.)

It is thanks to these classes in Shakespeare that I have new vocabulary to use to impart understanding. I don't know if the kids see or hear something new in the way I talk to them, but I feel something new, and that's got to be good, right?

I think these classes should count as professional development -and therefore be tax-deductible- don't you?

Making a Better Violinist

"I may not be able to make you into a great dancer. I may not even be able to make you a good dancer. But if you keep trying and don't quit, I can make you a better dancer".

-Joe Gideon  All That Jazz

This quote struck me as we watched All That Jazz on T.V. the other night. The film version of Bob Fossey's life and times may or may not be an accurate depiction of the real man behind all the great dancing, but I believe in his desire to push the dancers as far as they could go, or as far as they want to go.

We are coming up to our annual All-District Music Festival this next week, and the preparations have gotten me thinking about how the kids in my elementary string classes have separated themselves into three distinct groups. The music for the elementary string players is especially challenging this year, as we are combining the elementary and middle schools to make one large string orchestra. My middle school string players had no trouble learning the music. The music for the elementary band (which I will be directing!) was chosen to encourage even beginning wind players to participate. So the elementary band kids have had very little difficulty learning the music. But for the elementary string players, the task of getting this music "into their fingers" has proved to be a challenge to which some have felt unequal.

I started noticing it right after we got back from Winter break. Here and there a string player wouldn't show up for class. These classes are "pull-outs", so it is up to the kids to leave their classrooms and come to the music room. We have been striving to see the 5th graders twice a week this year, so if a student missed one day, I would expect to see them the next. But they began dropping away, till there were maybe a third of the original students no longer attending regularly.

The three categories of players separating themselves are like this.  First there are the students who LOVE to practice or whose parents MAKE them practice, and for whom the challenge of this music is fun. They are a small, but enthusiastic group, who are proud of their significant accomplishments. The third of the students who dropped away here are the ones for whom this challenge was just too daunting, and no matter how much we went over it in class, they didn't understand how to work on it at home, so rather than fail, they just quit coming. Then there is the third group. These are kids who have kept on coming, who keep on trying, but have not really learned the music at all. They even tell me they are practicing at home. But as I watch them pushing their bows back and forth over mostly open strings, getting a random finger down here and there, I can see very clearly that they don't know what they are doing. And they sometimes seem truly surprised that I am not going to let them go to the festival.

I feel bad for these kids, and try to make it up to them by telling them I can see that they have been working, and I appreciate the work they have done, but no one is going to help them learn their music during the festival rehearsals, and as of now, they don't know it well enough to get through the first rehearsal. "Can't I have till next Tuesday?", asked one boy desperately, yesterday, as I was hyping the class for this last practice together before the first big rehearsal. After I told him no, that today was the last day for me to decide, and he was clearly not ready, he spent the rest of the class shooting daggers at me from his eyes. I asked another student who had missed a few classes to stay after to audition, because she said she knew the music even though I could see she didn't. I thought maybe if I heard her by herself,  I would be able to see that she knew enough to get through the big rehearsals. But when I sat down next to her to hear her play, she said "Well, I don't know it NOW!",-implying that any minute now, she would.  The students in this group sometimes seem to be completely clueless as to what "playing the music" really means.

I have been known to say "fake it 'til you make it" to encourage struggling students to keep trying. For the first group, this mantra helps them get through the hard parts, and persevere until they can jump in and keep going on the parts they know well. They WILL make it, eventually. It seems the second group, the dropouts, DO know the difference, and recognize their own limitations, and have decided to drop rather than keep on faking. But this third group seems to think that the faking is the same as the real, and some seem surprised that I don't think so too.

I really love our District Festival. It gives us a focus to our teaching, and ALWAYS brings up the level of the playing of the kids who stick with it. Even the third group grows from working on hard music. This year, with my elementary strings, though, I feel I will need to do some real re-recruiting when it's all over. It will be time to dig out some easier music that everyone can succeed at, and get back to the fun of making music together. I want all those students who fell by the wayside to jump back in with us. We will be able to move a little slower then, hopefully keeping them all swimming and not sinking.  They may not ever be great violinists, or even very good violinists, but if they will keep trying and not quit, I might be able to help them become better violinists.

Wow, and Wow.

Last Thursday we took a field trip to the Grammy Museum at L.A. Live. We at Sierra Madre Middle School had invited a group of music students from Eliot Middle School across town to join us on this worthy adventure. We had been planning this trip since about September, and we couldn't believe it was already here. (This can only mean that the rest of the school year will register as a mere blip on the radar screen of time.) 64 kids from radically diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds piled on to the bus, unified by one thing: their love of and participation in Music.

I took a group from Sierra Madre to the Grammy Museum last year, and it was such a hit, such a fun and interesting outing that I knew we had to do it again this year. About half my class had been last year, and eagerly anticipated this year's trip with questions throughout the year: Is the Michael Jackson display still there, and if not, what replaced it? What will our workshop be? Since it's "Grammy Week", will we see famous people? If we do, can we ask them for their autograph?

We chose to go during Grammy Week- that is, the week before the Grammy Awards- because we had been told last year that this is a great time at the Museum, with actual Grammy winners giving the programs. This year our workshop was to be a presentation by "a group of Grammy-Award-Winning Blues Musicians from the state of Mississippi". I figured it would be some old guys with slide guitars which would be fine with me. Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Son House, someone like that? Great.

As we filed off the bus a few minutes early we had time to wander around the plaza of L.A. Live which is also home to Staples Center where the Lakers play, Club Nokia and the towering Marriot/Ritz-Carlton hotel complex. Surrounded by light board advertisement, and with the bustling activity of preparations for Sunday's awards ceremony underway, the kids were snapping pictures and pointing things out to each other. Already a good day. (All this interesting activity didn't stop them from wanting to go into Starbucks, however which I nixxed...what IS it about teenagers and Starbucks? I think I could write a whole article about THAT!)

Finally it was time to go into the Museum. Nwaka, one of the welcoming education coordinators, whom we had met last year, and who greeted me with a hug, gave the kids a quick outline of the do's and don'ts of the museum, and then we went in. If you live in L.A., and love music, you really owe it to yourself to take a visit to this museum. There is so much to see and learn and play with, I don't really know where to start to describe it. Suffice it to say that the kids knew just how to enjoy the museum, and the museum seems to have been made just for them, though I feel it was made just for me too. Whatever your musical interests and tastes are, you will find historic artifacts, videos, recordings, interactive displays of all kinds. It is a small, richly packed museum, do-able in a Sunday afternoon.

After about an hour (which was plenty of time for a group of middle schoolers) we went into the Clive Davis Auditorium for our workshop. We were given a short introduction to a group called The Homemade Jamz Blues Band from Tupelo Mississippi, and then saw a video clip of the band's interview on the Today Show. All well, and good. But then...the band itself took the stage and we were treated to a short set of hard rocking original blues songs which had the kids screaming for more.

Who is this band? They are a family consisting of an 18 year old lead guitar player, a 16 year old bass player, and a 13 year old drummer, with dad on blues harp. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed that these performers were kids. They have been playing together as a band for several years now, and have toured the world.

You can check out their web page at http://www.hmjamzbluesband.com/. They released their third CD in November.

After they played for us, they pulled up some chairs and told their story. We could tell they have told this story many times, but they were very comfortable sitting there talking to a bunch of kids not much different from them, at least age-wise. Ryan told us how, when the military family was unpacking to spend time stationed in Germany, he found the guitar his dad had bought years ago and abandoned. Ryan found a mentor in Mississppi and found his blues voice there too. Kyle told about trying to learn piano and guitar and giving up...too many notes to learn, he said. But he took to the bass because it only had four strings, and he plays it like he was born to do it.  The youngest- Taya, who is 13, and a GIRL drummer- is, in fact, the same age as many of our own students. She told of being the tamborine player when she was 6 and then finding an old green drum kit left as trash at the curb and taking it home and learning it when, I think she said, she was 9. She is self-taught, but drives that band with power and impeccable time. Finally, Dad got to tell his story and his gentle, self-effacing manner told of a man bemused and delighted with the suprises his kids showed him. He joined them on blues harp only three years ago- and admitted to learning his art on youtube, but seems to have played all his life.

The boys play guitars made from car parts, mufflers, I think. This was Dad's idea, and is a catchy trademark image for a group that needs no gimmicks. Ryan told us that his guitar actually can spew colored smoke out of its "tailpipes", but that since we were indoors they were afraid they would set off the sprinklers, so they didn't use them.

One of our missions as music teachers who follow state and national standards to guide our teaching (Yes, there are such things.) is to present music to our students as a possible career, and show them ways they can make a career of their music skills and knowledge. The kids in the Homemade Jamz Blues Band sought out instruction for what they wanted to learn and have already launched a career that will carry them through their whole lives. What an inspiration!

I hope Ryan, Kyle and Taya have a long and successful career. I imagine that they will branch out, possibly play with other people along the way. They have already touched millions of lives, and I am grateful that my students are some of those. The museum was fun, and by itself a worthy outing. But meeting and hearing the Homemade Jamz Blues Band kicked our field trip into the realm of awesomeness that the kids of Sierra Madre and Eliot Middle Schools will not soon forget.