An Audience

How can I build an audience? You know, I haven’t actually thought about it much. I’m not there yet, but I do have an idea of what I should do.

            Timing and the date are always essential for planning any event. Every day varies for families and friends, so giving the date and time of the event in advanced is being kind and prepared. Usually a nighttime concert, during the week, has the best turn out between 7 and 8 PM. Weekend concerts are a bit easier to plan since it’s the time of the week were most people don’t have work. In my past experience of concerts, a concert at 3 PM on a Sunday has the best crowd. However, don’t expect these times to work for you because everyone is different and this is only from what I’ve observed. I think it’s really trial and error when it comes to planning an event; you cross off what doesn’t work and keep what does.

            Another way to get an audience is through social media. Why wouldn’t you? It’s the best way to contact people nowadays. At WCSU, most of the students who were involved with an upcoming performance promoted the event via Facebook or Twitter. If you were teaching a high school band, would it be a bad idea to encourage our students to create a way to promote their concert? Would it be bad to ask for their input on how they could get a big audience? OF COURSE NOT! If you get your students involved, the more likely they’ll be excited for the concert.

            As the teacher, you could always send emails or newsletters to parents asking them to spread the word and reminding them about the concert. Parents are a great connection, too! The concert is free to all to come! We all know that families come to concerts so the more the merrier!

            One way the opera performance grew a crowd was inviting local schools to come watch them. I got to experience playing an opera once and it was great to see the excitement the students had to see the show and then ask questions at the end. The 5^th graders at my internship school just went to see the New Britain Symphony Orchestra. Getting schools to come watch you perform not only increases participation, but also it could expand your audience as well.

            Flyers aren’t a bad idea either and it would be awesome to collaborate with the art department to ask students to design and create some flyers. You would then ask teachers throughout the school if it would be okay for them to hang up at least one in their classroom in a spot that will be seen by all.

            In my internship school, the 4^th and 5^th grade bands performed their short concert this past winter for the whole school during the day. At night they performed again for their families. I would highly suggest doing this because not only are they playing for their families, but they’re performing for their peers as well! It sounds like a lot of fun and it’s good exposure to performing for younger students. As for the older students, I wouldn’t suggest performing the entire concert, but perhaps a song or two that the students like the best.

Overall, I am not worried about an audience for now. When the time comes, I will be and then I will scramble for advice, however I do have an idea of what can help me. It may not be enough, but I can always ask for help to get a better idea of what I can do to make an audience.

“Chops” Trailer:

What are they: A high school jazz ensemble from Florida coming together to prepare for the prestige Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival.

Synopsis: This documentary primarily follows a jazz band from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Florida on their journey to the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival and winning the competition as well.

Highlight: During the actual festival/competition when the bands perform or whenever a student is performing in the movie. The amount of talent is amazing. The Dixieland combo Douglas Anderson pulls off during the competition.

After watching this video, “Chops” gave me a rejuvenated feeling about jazz music and how much fun it was to be a part of an ensemble such as that back in my younger days. I was most impressed with the dedication and talent these students possessed and it definitely made me jealous. Wynton Marsalis said in the video that jazz music shows that “it’s alright to be me.” To him, jazz music is “celebrating creativity.” He’s right! What other genre of music allows you to be just that? Improvisation is all about you and how you feel in the moment when you’re performing. For jazz music, there is no right or wrong. To sum it all up, in order to gain a love for music and performing in a program, jazz band can do just that. There are just three factors I think you need to have which are: a nurturing environment, a sense of community, and exposure.

Nurturing environment. I’ve heard it before that if you do not have a nurturing environment, then learning cannot take place. The teacher must be able to establish his or her classroom as a safe haven where learning can take place through risks and mistakes. In the movie, the director of the jazz ensemble, Ace Martin, came across as a strict guy that I first got bad vibes from. He laid down his rules immediately on the first day and corrected students to what he wanted them to be. The students responded almost immediately, but eventually grew to respond to his demands. Mr. Martin worked his students hard and the students met what he was asking of them. When the ensemble was invited to the Essentially Ellington Competition, it was great to see Mr. Martin’s turn-around behavior because he was so excited for his group. When the teacher is excited, the students can feel it. Actually it should be, whatever the teacher is feeling, the students react to it as well. To create the sense of love for music, the teacher must always be willing to support and encourage his or her students in the learning process.

A Sense of Community. The students in the movie said it best that Douglas Anderson was like one big family. It was great to see when the students were accepted to the festival/competition that the other faculty were supportive as well, even though the movie showed only one other teacher, it was great to see the community the school had built. This gave the students a sense of pride and it made them even more excited for the music that they were going to be learning and performing at the festival. Another way a community can help create a love for music is having peer-to-peer feedback. It’s one thing to hear from a teacher on how you did. It’s another thing to hear from a peer. I don’t know what it is, but I feel that when you’re performing in front of your peers, it can be a bit nerve wracking than performing in front of a teacher. By bringing that into a classroom, it gives the students ownership over the learning that is done during that time. It would be the teacher’s job to monitor what is going on and it can certainly help create a love for performing since students will want to improve for their peers.

Exposure. This word can mean two different things and I see both of those definitions as helpers to creating the love. The first meaning I see exposure as is showing students different genres of music. Jazz is just one, but what about classical, funk, or even hip-hop? How can we create a love for music when we just focus on one genre of music? It would get boring real fast. The students need to be shown everything! The other definition I see exposure as is performing in various places. In the movie, Mr. Martin had his students perform at the Lakeside Jazz Festival. I thought that was really clever considering it was close to the time when Essentially Ellington was about to take place. I felt like it was a sort of warm-up before the big show, but in any other case, it’s just fun to perform for everyone to hear how much you have achieved. It’s even more fun when you’re performing with a close group of people who have become your friends. Performing so many times also helps students grow accustom and helps get rid of nerves a bit so there can be more fun on stage than anxiety.

“Chops” was a wonderful movie and up lifting. It made me find my love for jazz music again and wish that there had been more opportunities for jazz clarinet during my years in high school. It would also be great to expose students to the jazz world because it allows for so many risks to be made and there is no right or wrong answer.

I highly recommend this video, it's on Netflix and well worth the watch. The students from DASOTA are very entertaining and an example of what hard work can do.

Ten Minutes Ago.

After completing my general music lesson to a mock 8^th grade class, I realized that I probably gave enough information, but not enough elaboration. I felt as though I needed to review the major scale briefly to show the learner’s background and to at least review a bit before moving on. Perhaps I could have focused a little on the whole step, half step motion, but how much time could I spend on it with only ten minutes? My point with the stepwise motion was to show how it was done in a minor scale so then students could see how the two types of scales intertwined.

My labels on the board were composed of solfege and scale degree numbers. I explained that to my students, but I should have labeled it on the board to help the students. Though the labels would have thrown me off even more because during my lesson I was thinking too much and it got my brain all scrambled. I kept saying out loud, “I’ll go back to it.” I think I was getting too excited and too ahead of myself that I needed to just relax and continue slowly. It didn’t help at one point that a student had turned my focus to him. I do realize that is poor management and therefore a domino effect would happen, but I quickly got the students to turn their focus back on the board. Another time the students confused me even though my students were my colleagues who were trying to help me, it’s still a disruption to the teacher’s train of thought. Although it is nice that they were trying to help, it can be difficult to control after. However, the harmonic scale was something I did not intent to teach during my lesson, I thought I would just proceed with the rest of the lesson. Therefore I believe I need to make sure my lessons reflect on the time allowed instead of a HUGE lesson.

I know I talked a lot during my lesson, but when I finally got to the “activity” in my lesson, that was pretty good. I know it took me a while to get there, but I needed to explain what was happening in the scale. This was an 8^th grade class. Give if I knew I could have worked with a younger grade, I would have and obviously done a lot less talking. I should have done a lot less talking here, but it would make sense to do that when the material is more familiar to the students.

Aside from singing a scale, perhaps I could have done another activity such as taking a familiar song such as “Mary had a Little Lamb” or “Happy Birthday” and make into minor. That would have been fun, but with such a short amount of time. Looking back though, I wish I could have done that just to show how incomplete it feels to be in a minor key. Perhaps next time I will.