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.
Free Introduction to Improvisation Online Course by Gary Burton
Coursera offers online courses taught from over 60 universities for free. I recently learned of one offered by Berlkee College of Music an Introduction to Jazz Improvisation, taught by one of the greatest improvisers ever, vibraphonist Gary Burton. All you need to take this course is a basic understanding of chord symbols and improvising over basic progressions (blues, etc.), have an intermediate ability on your instrument, and have the ability to record yourself and convert the audio to MP3 format.
The next 5 week session starts up next Monday (April 29, 2013). If you want to participate in this one you’ll need to sign up soon.
Why Deflect Student Questions?
A recent forum discussion has gotten me thinking again about the practice some private brass teachers have of deflecting student questions about embouchure. In some cases I think this is unintentional and unconscious. It’s easy to be dismissive of something that you don’t have a good handle on and if you don’t think something is important in your own playing you’re likely to not consider it important for your students. I think this is particularly tricky the more accomplished a performer the teacher is. It’s hard to remember that effortless playing was the result of a particular process and not the method itself. Great musicians often have trouble taking a step back and helping struggling students when they don’t remember (or never knew) what it was like to have difficulty.
More interesting to me is the practice of intentionally deflecting a student’s questions because you don’t think offering an honest answer is going to be helpful. The example from the forum discussion was that one participant felt that informing a student that it the embouchure muscles must work harder to play higher would encourage unnecessary tension.
I think answering this one question hinders more players than could be helped because telling them it is OK to tense up isn’t serving them well as a teacher. I often answer most of a post a[nd] not 1 question because I don’t think it is in their best interest to answer it.
This does seem to be a fairly common practice from what I’ve seen in a lot of brass master classes and texts. A good teacher needs to set priorities for students and help focus their work in an order that is going to provide both immediate and longer term benefits. For example, fixing a brass student’s breathing can make improvements in their playing quickly and then set them up for work on more difficult challenges later. But this isn’t really the sort of non-answer that I’m curious about. When a student asks a direct question is it really a positive to fend off their inquiry or is it better to answer it directly and then move on as needed?
Of course there are situational factors that need to be considered, but I think we need to think about why a student would ask a question in the first place. While I’m sure that some students pester a teacher with questions for attention, most students ask questions because they are confused or curious. If the student is confused about a concept, I feel it’s best for the teacher to answer the question clearly. If my answer is going to confuse the student even more then it’s my responsibility to find a different way of explaining the concept. Sometimes this involves taking a couple of steps back and laying a foundation so the student can scaffold the more difficult to understand concept. This can take time, perhaps more time than is allowed in a particular lesson or class, but in the long term I think it’s best to address it eventually. Most of the time I think we can offer a simplified answer and explain why we’re glossing over it for later.
If the student is simply curious then avoiding the question is going to teach our students that curiosity should be stifled. Regardless of whether I’m personally interested in a student’s question, I don’t want to discourage them from asking honest questions. At the very least, we can make a positive teaching moment out of the question by helping our students learn how to research the answer themselves. Usually when I’ve taken this approach I ended up learning something new myself. In an article titled “Teaching Students to Ask Questions Instead of Answering Them” (may be behind a paywall) Matthew Bowker argues:
[Q]uestioning involves speculating about possibilities both real and unreal, given and hypothetical. To question is an immensely creative act because questioning requires that an object be not just as it is. If every object were just as it is, then questions would serve no purpose, for the only answer we could give would be to point at the object and say, “But here is your answer.” On the contrary, questions are designed to probe, to find something that is not already there, to discover relationships and possibilities that are not given.
Curiously, I’ve found it difficult to find much academic research or pedagogical discussions on deflecting a student’s question. It’s almost as if this practice is unique to music instructors, but teachers of other subjects almost universally want to answer student questions and encourage them.
Want to read a bit more about answering student questions? Check out “How To Answer Tough Questions” and “Responding Effectively to Student Questions.”
Guess the Embouchure Type – Wild Bill Davidson and Ashley Alexander
It’s time for another “Guess the Embouchure Type.” This time I’m going to take a look at trumpet player Wild Bill Davidson and trombonist Ashley Alexander and see if I can guess which embouchure type they have. Take a look at the below video and see what you think. My guess after the break.
Wild Bill Davis Davidson is a tough one, while Ashley Alexander’s is quite easy to spot.
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.
Guess the Embouchure Type – Danielle Elsinghorst
Here’s another quick “Guess the Embouchure Type.” Watch this video of trombonist Danielle Elsinghorst and see if you can guess which embouchure type she has. This one is a tough one. My guess after the break.
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?
Waltz of the Two Lips
I just came across the below YouTube video, coincidentally a couple of days after bringing this research up to Paul T. and not being able to remember the name of the author. Jay Bulen, now professor of trombone at Truman State University, filmed trombonists’ embouchures using a camera and strobe light set up inside the mouthpiece to study the lip motion while buzzing. This video shows the lips of Peter Ellefson, who teaches trombone at Indiana University.
One of Bulen’s test subjects, whose name I’ve forgotten, sent me the video footage of his embouchure while I was researching for my dissertation. Because you don’t get to see the embouchure formation from the outside, it’s hard to put these videos into context to determine a player’s embouchure type, but in the case of Ellefson’s embouchure it looks like the upper lip predominates, so his embouchure must be one of the downstream types.
Bulen’s research, titled Synchronized Optical and Acoustical Measurements of Trombone Embouchure, was published in the The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Here’s the abstract:
Outward striking‐ and inward striking‐reed models have been proposed for representing brass players’ lips [Sanoyesi etal., Acustica 62, 194–210 (1987)]. The models differ in the predicted relationship between mouthpiece pressure and lip displacement. To investigate this, Yoshikawa measured the phase relationship between mouthpiece pressure and lip strain as indicated by a strain gauge taped to the upper lip [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 1929–1939 (1995)]. However, the relationship between strain and displacement have not been experimentally established, and Yoshikawa’s assumed correspondence ‘‘is still a hypothesis which needs refinement’’ (p. 1931). Optical measurements are required. Synchronized optical and acoustical measurements of a trombonist’s embouchure have been made under performance conditions, using an adaptation of techniques described in Sercarz etal. [Am. J. Otolaryngol. 13, 40–44 (1992)]. Using strobed videoscopy, individual video fields are coordinated with mouthpiece pressure by means of timing signals. The phase relationship between mouthpiece pressure and lip displacement will be reported for a variety of fundamental frequencies and intensities. In addition, estimates will be presented of the aperture area and the mouthpiece volume swept out by the lips.The goal of this informal workshop, a continuation of Session 1aSC, is to bring together several researchers working on various aspects of voice perception. Historically, the study of voice has been treated as a more‐or‐less autonomous area quite distinct from other research problems in speech and hearing sciences. In this workshop, some of the traditional problems of voice classification and perception will be discussed and reviewed and then these efforts will be related to recent findings in speech perception and spoken word recognition which have shown important dependencies between traditional voice parameters and perceptual analysis of the speech signal.
J.S. Bach Crab Canon
Here’s a neat video showing one of J.S. Bach’s “crab” canons. The melody of this piece in retrograde produces a very clever canon. This video by YouTube user Jos Leys shows how this works very clearly, including showing how the melodies line up on a mobius strip.
Even though it’s a short piece, it’s really amazing that Bach was able to compose a melody that created harmonious counterpoint when played in retrograde like this.
Just to warm up myself to work on a composition project I decided to try writing an 8 measure crab canon myself. You’ve got to keep in mind the harmonic motion must work in retrograde as well as keeping track of the intervals and melodic motion. As I wrote the first measure I went to the end and filled in the bottom part’s final measure and worked a couple of measures this way. Then I worked on composing the bottom part for the first couple of measures and filled in the top part towards the end, modifying the melodies as I needed to in order to make the harmonic and melodic motion fit the rules of baroque counterpoint. The middle four measures were the most challenging for me. I wanted to get away from being completely diatonic here and it took me a little work to get everything to work out.
The results, well, not quite as good as Bach’s. Here is what I came up with and a MIDI realization. Try it out yourself as an exercise and see how you do.
Guess the Embouchure Type – Kurt
Kurt and I were involved in a discussion on the Trumpet Herald Forum a while back and we got sidetracked into a private discussion. I had asked Kurt if he would be willing to video tape his chops so I could take a closer look at them and he sent me the below video. Take a closer look and see if you can guess his embouchure type. My guess after the break.
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