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.

One that took.

Today, being the last day of finals week over at the high school, and the high school students thereby being on half days, a former member of my middle school orchestra stopped in to our class today to sit in and play with the kids. He's a sophomore now, and about as totally into music as a kid can get. He played obligatory violin in my class with all the rest of the third graders way back when, and then switched to study clarinet with me in 4th grade. He played all through elementary and middle school in the band and then the orchestra. Since entering high school he has made it his mission to learn all he can about every one of the woodwind instruments. He can play flute, oboe and clarinet with grace and ease, and sat between my 8th grade flute player and 8th grade clarinetist and jumped back and forth between the two parts. After class he asked if there was anything he could help with, like grading papers or something. I had this unsorted pile of music on my desk waiting to be put right, and I asked if he would want to tackle that. He happily took it on, mentioning that he is also the music librarian for his high school band. In no time at all, he had the music all sorted and put back into its correct folders.

As we hung out together, I asked him if he'd started to think about colleges yet, and did he think he might go to music school. Yes, he emphatically told me, he wants to go to music school. Julliard, no less. I can't tell you how happy it made me to hear him say that. In all the years that I have taught music- 15 in the public schools and many more before and still in private situations- not one of my students has ended up going to music school. I know there are many former students who still play for fun, and that is important and fulfilling in itself. But, finally, to have a student who has the passion to keep going all the way, and who has stayed connected with me is a new and wondrous lifetime achievement for me.

I can only take credit for getting him started. It's been his own drive and stick-to-itiveness that has gotten him this far. But I can't help thinking about my own high school music career, and how hanging-around-the-band- room-sorting-music-and-learning-every-instrument I was myself. I know what that's like. It's great that with all the distractions modern kids have, here is one who gets a kick out of the same things I did when I was his age a hundred million years ago. I don't know where he will end up, but I sure am going to enjoy watching him get there.