Picking Music for Contest

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Judges have often commented to me that they appreciated my music selection. Perhaps it's just something they say to everyone, but I take it as a sincere compliment when it happens regularly for adjudicated performances for both concert and jazz bands. Here are my basic guidelines and then a couple great sample programs for contest.

Be respectful of the given time and style guidelines

If there is a required music list, choose from it. If a ballad is asked for, play one. These things seem obvious, but listening to other groups at events we have attended tells me that not everyone thinks of this.

Choose music that makes your group sound as good as possible

Sometimes we directors are used to having a certain level of group, but it may not always be possible to sustain playing that level of music. While I agree that it is good to make a group stretch, music selection for a contest needs to be within the reach of the ensemble. The feedback a group receives can be uplifting or devastating based on the difficult of the music, and the students should not be penalized for a director's poor choice of music. [As an aside, if you realize too late that something is too hard, own up to it! Let the students know your own failings.]

Value variety

Your selections should provide as much contrast as possible with each other. Possible areas include: key center and tonality, tempo, style, time signature, time period, cultural influence, weight, length, and more

Sample Programming

Here are two sample programs and my considerations in picking each.

Jazz Band at a Competitive Jazz Festival

Punta del Soul
Together Houses
Better Get Hit In Your Soul

With these three tunes, we fit the requirements of the festival really well. A Latin chart, a ballad, and a 3/4 gospel swing gave us three contrasting styles. All three tunes stretched the band in different ways, but none was out of reach. Punta del Soul required a level of timing and execution (and some woodwind doublings) beyond anything they had previously played, but they really liked it and worked for it. I knew that Punta and Together gave us a strong 1-2 in the program, so I looked specifically for a closer. Better Get Hit was exactly what I wanted--energetic from beginning to end, and the 3/4 swing feel worked great with the straight eighths in 4/4 from the previous tunes.

Concert Band at State-Sponsored Contest

Prospect - Pierre La Plante
Symphony No. 4 - Andrew Boysen

I think it is really important to play a good ballad at contest. Sometimes an inner movement of a longer work will be sufficient, but I didn't think the slow movement of the Boysen Symphony would be enough for this program. Adding Prospect made the program 15 minutes long, though, and so I chose not to include a third piece! [If I had, I it would have been a march--we were working on Sousa's The Gladiator March around that time.] At this particular festival, each group has only 30 minutes to set up, perform, and receive a critique from a judge, so it seemed worthwhile to keep the program shorter to allow for a little more face time in our critique.

The Boysen Symphony was a fun work for students to dig into. Though it was technically not as difficult as some other music we worked on, it happened to fit the instrumentation of the group well and made them sound great at contest. The contrast of Prospect's simple calm and the rage and chaos of the Symphony was a big part of the program's success.

If you have a particularly successful program, send it my way! I'm right in the middle of looking at new repertoire for next year.

Book Review: Habits of a Successful Musician

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I've written before about the importance of fundamentals in band rehearsal, and today I'd like to review one of the best resources I have found for that time in the high school concert band.

Habits of a Successful Musician, by Scott Rush and Rich Moon, is "a comprehensive curriculum for use during fundamentals time." The book has seven sections:

  1. Warm-Up
  2. Chorales
  3. Rhythm Vocabulary
  4. Rhythm Charts in a Musical Context
  5. Audition Sight-Reading by Level
  6. Audition Sight-Reading by Time Signature
  7. Music-Making Exercises

The section that became the most familiar to the band was Section One, Warm-Up. We used exercises from this section nearly every day. They include activities and areas of focus like stretching and breathing, long tones, articulation, dynamics, blend, balance, timing, and more. I liked the combination of brass lip slur patterns with percussion and and woodwind chromatic scales (in eighth notes and eighth-note triplets, ascending and descending). I also appreciated the dynamic exercise that has students play a major chord in one of four patterns (ppp-fff-pp, fff-ppp-fff, ppp-fff, or fff-ppp). I felt like it was easy to select a balance of exercises that helped my concert band grow in its areas of weakness. I used the scale section (majors, two octaves where appropriate, with some extra patterns tacked on to teach key) for playing tests throughout the year.

The second section, Chorales, was one of the student favorites. Eleven tunes were harmonized (and well-orchestrated!), from old hymns to Holst, and each was a pleasure to play. It was great to make music while warming up the group as well as to have opportunities to address pitch and balance in "simpler" music that students still enjoyed. I do wish there were more chorales, but there are a lot of other options out there for that kind of material!

The third section, Rhythm Vocabulary, was the least used in our band. It is laid out in 23 lines of progressively more complex rhythms. It moves quickly through time signatures (2/4, 3/4, 4/4, cut time, 6/8, 9/8, and 5/8) and common rhythm patterns in each. The instructions in the teacher book suggest using these pages to work on a counting system. I have typically focused more on this concept (I use 1e+a) in middle school, but at the end of this year, I could see how spending a little more time on it during the beginning of the year would be helpful to the high school students. (While the strongest students had few problems with new rhythms, many of my freshmen and sophomores showed some weakness in subdividing.)

Section Four also covered rhythm, and I used this section for playing tests. There are six pairs of exercises, with each pair having the same underlying rhythm. One exercises is strictly rhythm, and its pairs has a melody. They cover the material used in section three, and I found it very helpful to require students to work on them and record them while using a metronome. They are too tricky (really just unfamiliar) for students to read perfectly the first time, and they require students to subdivide in order to play them well. Each exercise is progressive, so it worked well to assign more experienced students a longer or later section in the exercise that was tested.

Sections Five and Six contain a total of 190 sight-reading exercises. The primary difference between the two is the lack of musical markings (dynamics, articulations, etc) in Section Five. We took breaks from these sections (especially when we had a lot of other full-band music to read through), but I found them helpful for building student confidence while sight-reading. I also appreciated the inclusion of challenging keys, and I thought that, because of this, the band improved its attention to key signatures as well. The variety of keys and time signatures was excellent. The melodies are not the catchiest, but they are musically sound and serve their purpose well.

The final section, Music-Making Exercises, is a single page with some instructions on improvising musically (e.g., "long notes should have direction and shape; they should intensify or decrescendo") and using solfege to help you become more musically literate. We didn't use these sections in band, but I have said just about everything on the page during rehearsal and used some very similar exercises in lessons and in class.

Students really liked using the book throughout the year, and that is saying something! Typically they get bored with the warm-up routine (and some still did), but most appreciated the variety of material and felt like it helped them and the band make solid progress. I have students in high school band for four years, though, so the biggest downside is that I have to find something different to use next year!

Schiller Bari Sax Review

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One of the instruments I bought for my school early on was a baritone saxophone. Without enough money to purchase the standard, school-approved, Yamaha YBS-52, I opted for a Keilwerth ST-90. It was not the best choice.

Now, it is true that the school baritone saxophone is often abused, mistreated, and uncared for. But the instrument we received has never been as good as I hoped (except it did start off nice and shiny). Tone is a little thin, but pitch (especially in the upper register) is difficult to control. The keywork has been solid (getting repaired just fine after being banged around and dropped), but the thumb rest seems poorly designed (it slips and slides around the screw that is supposed to hold it). The shows more than its age (8 years)--after all, it mostly stays in the band room. All that said, I feel pretty good about putting the Keilwerth bari in the hands of a 7th grader. I'm not worried about it getting busted, and so it still serves a useful purpose.

I present all this about the Keilwerth bari to provide a contrast with the Schiller model we got two years ago. It comes in a hard case (with wheels!) and our model has a matte gold finish. I have only let the older bari players (high school) play it regularly, and so it has perhaps been treated a little better than our first bari. It has suffered some knocks and scrapes, but the finish still looks good. It has had a couple adjustments at the shop after these bruises with no problems.

The sound on the Schiller bari is the best part. It is warm, plays in tune throughout its range, and independent sources have complimented it. We used it during both jazz bands's performances at the Eau Claire Jazz Festival, and the judges who heard it in each group praised the players and the instrument itself.

At this point, I feel pretty good recommending the bari we got.