Last Weeks Star

Last Friday was a bit busy, so I didn't get a chance to post my star of the week.  This star comes complete with a story about my day teaching band.

I have a bit of a musical background.  I took piano lessons from my grandmother pretty much from the time I could sit upright on a piano bench through junior high.  This foundation in music prepared for high school and now church choir with basic theory and note reading skills.  I've usually been able to work through my music substitute positions on these skills alone.  The upper level teacher's generally assume a random sub won't have much musical background and either assign a student to take charge or schedule non-music things for the students to do like watch a film.  Sometimes I've had to direct a choir through a few warm-ups or exercises, but I never had to do anything that I felt was over my head.

Until last Wednesday.  I substituted for a junior high band and choir teacher.  The day I happened to sub the teacher only taught one class, but it was band.  A huge seventh grade band.  Oh, and I also had them in class for an hour and a half.  They were practicing for a concert in a few weeks and couldn't afford to have the day off of practice.  So I was given the score for their three songs and a little information about warm-ups.  I was terrified!  I've never really conducted anything, much less conducted a band through several songs I had never heard before.

The bell rings for class and the students troop in.  They then noisily set up their instruments, and after a reasonable amount of time, I step up to the conductor's podium and begin the class.  I tell the students we're going to be warming up with a B flat scale.  I am then told I need to conduct them through it using the solfege sign language symbols.  Great!  I at least know that this exists, but I have no idea what they are.  A helpful student pulls out his chart and I attempt to make the correct hand signals throughout the scale.  The students somehow figured out when to play the next note!

Next, I jump into the songs.  I pick one of the three to start with and ask the students sitting closest to me to give me an approximation of the songs starting tempo.  They thankfully let me know that it speeds up in two different places of the song and then give me the starting tempo.  I then gripped my pen as if it were a magical wand that would somehow give me conducting prowess, and I flapped my arms imitating the movements I'd seen my choral conductors use.  Perhaps my pen did have magic because the students began to play.  We made it through the song without any major incidents, though I did get a little lost in the score halfway through and kept flapping my arms for a measure after they finished playing.  I decided they needed to practice the song again, just for good practice and I repeated the same movements with my magic conducting pen.

Then we moved on to their second piece.  I once gain had the front row students give me the tempo and swished my arms through the song.  Miraculously, I even had tips for the students to work on in our second time through the song.  The brass section was pushing the tempo too much when they joined the clarinets in the middle of the song.  We tried the song again, and they took my advice; the song was much more in control.  Finally, we moved on to the last song.  This is where my magic wand failed me.  The students obviously did not know this song as well as their other pieces.  I was also told the tempo was fast, but changed a few times throughout the song.  Even worse, the time signature changed from 4/4 to 3/4 for random measures throughout the piece.  Well, my three attempts to get the class through this song dissolved into utter chaos after the first random time signature measure.  Finally, my helpful tempo-keeping student volunteered to try and conduct the class through the song since she was more familiar with the piece.  She somehow got the class through the song, though it was quite rough.  After that, the class wanted to play through their pep band songs.  I obliged, and we played through some classic pep songs like "Louie Louie" and some non-traditional ones such as "Bad Romance" (Yup, bands are playing Lady Gaga, took me by surprise too).  After we played through all their pep songs, there was about ten minutes left of class.  I figured the students worked very hard and they told me they rarely played the entire class period when they had a long period.  I gave the students the time to pack away their instruments and just hang out.

As for my star of the week, I couldn't have gotten through this class without the wonderful clarinet player that gave me the tempo for all the songs as well as a few tips for getting the class's attention.  She totally stepped up and gave conducting a try, which was probably as terrifying for her as it was for me.  So, tempo-guru clarinet player, you're my Star of the Week!