Whether your band’s instrumentation is stable or the loss of players through population mobility causes gaps in part coverage, there may be occasions when you’ll want bandsmen who can play more than one instrument.
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You teach elementary or middle school instrumental music and hear the sounds of marching band camp from a nearby field and think, "I'm glad I don't teach high school so I don't have to be preparing for school yet"! Or you teach grades…
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This is the second in a series of articles evaluating literature for band. Recently, the Wind Ensemble and Symphony Band at Rutgers started a new recording project for Mark Custom Recording of repertoire for the developing band. With this…
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Once you know the name of one line or space on any staff, you can use the musical alphabet to find the name of all the lines and spaces on that staff. On the bass clef, the first space is A. Using this alphabet, the next line up is B, the…
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I was very impressed by several statements that James Curnow made during his clinic with the students from the College of New Jersey Wind Ensemble at our NJMEA conference this past February . I think that his comments about score study were…
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What if we approached our students from this perspective? We wouldn't think of comparing one child to another. Instead, our chief goal would be to extricate the unique brilliance and mastery of each student; discovering their potential and…
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Obviously, there is really not a single correct tempo for a given work or section even though composers do provide pretty specific guidelines, either metronome markings or subjective descriptions. However these indications can sometimes be…
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My earliest recollections of wanting to conduct go back to my teenage years. Listening to the radio or to records, I found the idea of compelling musicians to "play it my way" rather exciting and would follow along with a pencil as my…
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