General Information
Happy Easter! He is Risen! I hope everyone joined their long break this past weekend! Despite the shorter week preventing me from having B Band twice this week, we still are making excellent progress with our pieces. Please continue to encourage your students to practice at home as Fine Art Night is coming up quick and any extra practice done at home will be extremely beneficial.
Private lessons: I have had a couple people ask what these are. Private lessons are an excellent way to help support your student’s growth on their instrument. They are an opportunity for them to learn from a licensed teacher of their specific instrument. These teachers are able to meet your student where they are skill wise and provide additional support and techniques to help them improve outside of band. Various music stores offer lessons, my college MidAmerica Nazarene University has a program, and there are various individuals across the metro that teach out of their homes as well. Please let me know if this interests you at all!
Announcement: Fine Art Night is at 6:00pm NOT 6:30! Also please look at the added in school rehearsal days.
Advanced Band
Practice logs will be tracked from Tuesday-Tuesday. I gave them out next Tuesday and would like it back filled out and signed by the following Tuesday. 30 minutes minimum a week is a place to start. Please encourage your students to fill these out!
This week we continued to work on listening across the group to each other. Learning how our parts fit with the group can help the ensemble sound more balanced and together. This is very noticeable and beneficial in Down to the River. We did make slight adjustments to the piece by cutting a measure out in 3 different spots. These measures were cut because they only featured percussion, which we do not have. In order to keep the piece from losing momentum and style, we simply will jump over those measures and move on to the next one. I did make the decision to cut the section of One Last Shot in Pirates. The students will now jump from measure 77 to 95. The students are aware of the idea and are okay with it. We have also been doing periodical runs of Zig Zag and may add that piece in for Fine Art Night as well.
Beginning Band
Practice logs will be tracked from Monday-Monday. I gave them out next Monday and would like them back the following Monday. 30 minutes minimum a week is a place to start. Please encourage your students to fill these out!
This week we only had one class period and we spent most of our time working on Procession, our piece for Fine Art Night. This piece challenges them through rhythms and more independence so please have them work on it at home too! We really focused in on measures 21-28 on Wednesday as that section has the most independence for each instrument. It also challenges them to count longer chunks of rests and to enter back in at the right time. Notes and rhythms are starting to become more accurate, but we still have a long way to go to be able to play the piece without stopping every 4 bars. PLEASE ENCOURAGE PRACTICE AT HOME! Long tones also will continue to be a great way to build up their playing muscles when practicing. This is seen in exercise no. 42. This will really help out brass players specifically. They can also practice just sustaining their buzz on a mouthpiece to help maintain their sound.
Upcoming Events
05/6- A AND B BAND- IN SCHOOL REHEARSAL AT 12:30
05/3- A AND B BAND- IN SCHOOL REHEARSAL AT 12:30
05/13- A AND B BAND- IN SCHOOL REHEARSAL AT 12:30
05/15- A AND B BAND- FINE ARTS NIGHT AT 6:30 PM