Here’s a neat YouTube video discussing the science behind why we think music elicits an emotional response in us.
Daniel J. Levitin’s book, This Is Your Brain On Music, has some similar discussion that I recommend if you want to learn more.
Category: General Music
More Thoughts On Athletic Bands
If you don’t live in the U.S. you might not understand “March Madness,” which is just wrapping up here. March is the month when the NCAA basketball tournament kicks into high gear and college teams compete to see who ends up on top. While the teams travel around the country to play (and are excused from classes for a university sponsored event), they take their “spirit squads,” which usually include the school’s pep band.
The way pep bands are run differ from school to school. When I was an undergraduate the pep band was a class, we received (small) class credit for it and earned a grade at the end of the semester. If I remember correctly it was required for us to play in for at least one year as a music major, but since I enjoyed it I played almost all of the four years I spent at Illinois Wesleyan University. While a graduate student at DePaul University I occasionally subbed in the pep band for basketball games. Students who played in the pep band didn’t earn credit but received a small stipend to play and support the basketball team. When I subbed in the student I played for paid me directly for filling in. These days I think the stipend is more the norm, as it is a huge demand on the students’ time, with games happening almost every weekend (sometimes more) and frequently requiring travel time.
With the NCAA tournament going on, the pep bands travel with the basketball teams and like the basketball players, the students miss out on classes. An anonymous pep band member recently wrote an article on Deadspin about his experiences playing at the tournament, frequently for other schools that don’t happen to have a pep band to play for their team’s games.
What’s a typical week for a spirit squadder? If the team is placed far enough from home, we get to fly with them. If the team stays close by, which happens only to top seeds in the first round, we’ll bus in on game day. That hasn’t been my experience, though. The round of 64 is played on Thursday and Friday. Let’s say Texas is playing at the Staples Center on Thursday; the Longhorns need to adjust to the new time zone, get in some practice, and make appearances for alumni and donors in the area. So they leave on Tuesday, which means that a saxophonist in the band gets a night out after he checks in to his hotel, then Wednesday is all his. If Texas wins on Thursday, he has the rest of the day and Friday to himself before the round of 32 game on Saturday. If Texas wins on Saturday, guess what? He’s got another free trip in store.
The band members get to miss a lot of class, and I imagine most of them aren’t spending their free time studying or practicing.
When we first check into our hotel we get three days’ per diem up front, usually around $55 total, which doesn’t seem like a lot until you realize that, for a college kid, “per diem” is Latin for “beer money.” If we win our first game, we get per diem for the remainder of the weekend when we return to the hotel. A $5 tax on all 29 people in the band makes for a nice slush fund for filling a hotel suite with booze. We never finished that Everclear. Every year we end up dumping liquor down the drain. Last year it was the moonshine I don’t remember drinking.
While I never attended an NCAA tournament or traveled as a pep band member, in my experience the picture our anonymous author paints about what goes on during his experience away from school during the tourney is typical.
I wonder if this is really what our music schools should be doing with their time and resources. Of course, these bands are more and more often supported by the school’s athletic programs rather than the music programs, which is a whole other can of worms.
School Bands and Athletics
I haven’t done a lot of marching band, so my opinions about it are tempered somewhat by my lack of experiences in this area. Personally, I was always more interested in making music for listening purposes, rather than in conjunction with something that looks cool on the field. Also, I have to admit I’m not much of a football fan, so I never really was interested in going to a lot of games. At the high school and university I went to for my undergraduate degree there wasn’t even a marching band to participate in, we just did pep band and played in the stands.
But I do know a lot of musicians who had very positive experiences in marching bands and drum and bugle corps, so I understand the appeal. And I’m trying to learn more about this in order to be able to be more versatile as a teacher.
Recently NPR broadcast an editorial about marching bands and sports, which I found very interesting and have some agreement with. Frank Deford mentions his surprise in learning that many schools offer scholarships for students to play in the marching band. I have no problem with this, many schools offer financial incentives to students to play in a particular ensemble for both music majors and music minors. One of Deford’s other points I’m in full agreement with.
Lisa Chismire, the parent of a student in the Unionville-Chadds Ford District in Pennsylvania, discovered that it was district policy — as it is elsewhere — to force serious music students to attend band camp in the summer and then march in the band at football games. If music students who had no interest in the marching band did not go along and assist the football program, the young musicians would not be allowed to play in the concert band, the symphonic band, the jazz band or the orchestra.
Chismire, who is a retired lawyer, was appalled. She called this “extortion” and “institutional bullying” — coercing students in one discipline to serve as spear carriers for those in another.
In my experience, if the marching band is run well by the directors you typically don’t need to spend a lot of time recruiting your band students to participate in it. They will want to because it’s enjoyable. If anything, I feel that the concert band is the ensemble that needs to be the core group of a high school band program and this is the ensemble that should be required for participation in the marching band. It’s in the concert band where the director can most effectively teach essential musical skills that will translate to a good sounding marching band, where the marching band has too many other activities involved to really focus on making music well.
But there is some controversy about these different priorities. Many high schools really focus their band program on the marching band. It is the most visible group of the entire music program and is how many school band programs are judged by the general public.
The comments in the NPR article are also interesting to read, with good points being made by both sides of this issue. What do you think? Should marching band be the core ensemble of a high school band program or is this putting the cart before the horse? Does the real answer to this question lie somewhere in the middle?
Man Suffers Head Injury and Becomes Musical Prodigy
Derek Amato had played a little guitar when he was young, but never really was serious about music. However, after suffering a head injury Amato had an interesting experience when visiting a musician friend at home. He writes:
We were just sitting around, talking, when I felt an intense, utterly compelling need to touch his piano. I just moved over and started playing – there was no transition, it was all at once, like I’d been doing it all my life.
As it turns out, this condition is called acquired savant syndrome and there are other cases where after a head injury an individual with no particular interest or talent suddenly displays amazing artistic abilities.
As you might expect for an adult to suddenly display prodigy-like talents, Amato notes that his technique is somewhat unusual.
I’ve played alongside a classically trained concert pianist, who was fascinated by my technique – in some respects, I play like someone who has just started learning, in others my skills outstripped his.
Read more about Amato’s story here.
Landfill Harmonic Film
Here’s the teaser trailer for a film called Landfill Harmonic. In Paraguay young musicians play instruments that are made out of trash.
Landfill Harmonic film teaser from Landfill Harmonic on Vimeo.
For more information about the film visit facebook.com/landfillharmonicmovie.
Wilktone Podcast – Episode 20
Show Notes
Drop the Needle – Answer to last episode’s contest. Submit your answer for this episode through my contact form.
Music History Spotlight – Throat singers of Tuva
Tuvan Throat Singing
Huun Huur-Tu
David Hoffner
Genghis Blues
Paul Pena
Sixty Horses In My Herd
Tuva/Voices from the Center of Asia
Music Theory/Composition – Secondary dominant chords
Practice Tips – Practicing more efficiently
Download more Wilktone Podcasts on my podcast feed or by subscribing through iTunes. For more information on these and other music related topics visit http://wilktone.com
Red June “Soul’s Repair”
I’m fortunate that I live in a community that attracts artists of a wide variety. For example, my next door neighbor is also a musician (always good to have a neighbor who is friendly to the sounds of practice coming through his wall). Will plays guitar, violin, piano, mandolin, and who knows what else. However, we run in completely different musical circles so I had never really heard him perform until recently. A couple of weeks ago I went to a show for one band Will performs with, Red June. When my fiance and I arrived we learned the show had already sold out, so we hung around and listened in from outside. Afterwards, Will treated me to a free copy of their latest CD, Beauty Will Come. While there’s no brass playing on it (we can’t all be perfect), there’s some really tuneful melodies with great original song writing on it. Download a sample, Will’s tune Soul’s Repair, or watch their live performance.
Physical Therapy For Musicians
The other day I had a great phone conversation with David Shulman. Shulman is a physical therapist who specializes working with musicians who have repetitive motion injuries related to playing. He had contacted me to ask for some ideas working with brass players who have injured lip muscles. We talked for a while about some of the things brass musicians can do away from the instrument to help build (or rebuild) muscles around the lips without actually playing, which can lead to re-injuring a damaged muscle. I talked to him a little bit about free buzzing, the pencil trick, and the P.E.T.E.
Here’s a short video he has put together where he describes his practice and the workshops he presents to music students and teachers.
One of the things I asked David about was about which lip was more prone to being injured. Donald Reinhardt felt the upper lip was more likely to be injured due to excessive mouthpiece pressure. David also noticed that the majority of lip injuries happen on the upper lip. Reinhardt’s advice to keep more mouthpiece “weight” on the lower lip should help brass players avoid injuries like this.
Ben Cameron on The True Power of the Performing Arts
Ben Cameron is the Program Director of the Dorris Duke Charitable Foundation and supervises grant programs for the performing arts. In his recent TED Talk Cameron discussed the role that technology has played in how we consume performing arts today and also who participates in them. He sees a paradigm shift that blurs the line between professionals and amateurs, with less of a separation between performers and audience.
Frankly, what we’re seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the “pro ams,” amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary,while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined not by consumption, but by participation.
Here’s the video.
Pacing Your Brass Section In Rehearsals
Last weekend I had the pleasure of directing the North Carolina Western Region Honor Middle School Jazz Band out at Lenoir-Rhyne University. The students worked extremely hard for me, were very well behaved, and improved remarkably over the two days. Here’s a video that was taken during the performance.
The whole concert was taped and can be viewed here.
Clinic situations like this can be particularly challenging for the brass students. With only a short time to put together 4 tunes or so it’s difficult to get the music sounding good without doing a lot of playing, but the more the brass students play the harder it will be for them to have chops left for the concert. There are some strategies that you can use to help pace your students through rehearsals and let them save their faces for the performance.
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