Audition Season

This post is part of a blog project on student teaching hosted at So You Want to Teach.

With 7 weeks 'til our next concert, I'm spending my time this week away from the podium. Mostly I've been prepping packets of audition material for next year's Symphonic and Jazz bands. 

March is a long a trying month for the music department at DHS - a school where seemingly everyone who tries makes the football team, but tryouts for the auditioned ensembles require two, sometimes three callbacks - no matter the program. Whether Choir, Orchestra or Band, it's pretty crazy if you think about it. 

There's only one high school in a town of 63,000 - one standard Jazz "Stage Band," one 32 voice Madrigal Choir, only 4 clarinet spots in the DHS Symphony, and only 12 available in the Symphonic band (we have to fight for French Horns, however). The whole school's schedule is planned around making sure the kids who get into those programs can take their other classes, and therefore the administration needs to know who they'll be well in advance. The process is intense, even students in the ensembles have to re-audition and by their senior year, a lot of kids are used to disappointment and the effort required to maintain the standard of excellence.

However, this year I'm finding I have to deal with the students facing a level of disappointment for which they're not prepared: UC admissions, or rather lack thereof. I was lucky enough to work with this same band last year as a Paraeducator, and it seems like half of the Band's seniors went to UC Berkeley, and the other half to UCLA, with a few stragglers to Columbia, NYU or Puget Sound. This year, with cutbacks in admissions and hikes in fees, one person out of about 70 got into UCLA. Berkeley is sitting on their admissions still, but that outlook is grim. This fact was brought to light when their teacher excitedly mentioned that we were going to stop by the UCLA campus on our trip to San Diego in May and asked how many got in. One student tentatively raised his hand to nervous laughter from the rest of the group. I've even had kids come up to me bummed about not getting into UCD, their hometown "backup school." 

These kids are bred overachievers, 5 or 6 AP classes on their plates, SAT scores above 2000 (they're out of 2400 now?). They're special, or at least have been told so all their lives by parents who all have Bachelor's degrees, many from UCs themselves. Now it's crashing down around them and the kids don't really know what to do, and I have no idea what to say to them. 

To counteract the anxiety we're digging through new music to play on our trip. I'm learning that finding literature that's perfectly fit for a particular ensemble is one of the most important parts of being a music educator. However, the Symphonic Band my teacher has spoils him, and me by proxy. We're scheduled to play on the deck of the U.S.S. Midway in San Diego and my teacher is pulling out all the stops. Although it would be a little too blatant to dig out Midway March again (we played it last year on our trip to Victoria BC.), the director is grabbing all the "shiny" he can and dropping his own cash on scores to the Hal Leonard "John Williams Signature Series" - basically arrangements for professionals, not rearranged for younger bands. They're really just transcriptions of Williams' symphonic music to wind band parts, signed off by the composer, and the premiered by the U.S. Marine Band. 

The music we choose is not just a festival set, but also enough to put on hour long "Pops concerts" around town while we're there and then come back and perform in the park in downtown Davis during the farmer's market to thank the community for their support.

The students have locked in Raider's March - the main title to Indiana Jones but the big problem we're facing is having to decide between the 1984 and 1996 Olympic Fanfares to kick off the set. This year we have an incredibly strong trumpet section. 10 kids - 7 of which are powerhouses and 3 are, well, third trumpets by definition. But selecting music like this requires a director to play towards the ensembles' strengths, and this year it's brass.

I don't know how he manages to pull it off time and time again, but their teacher has the ability to trick his students - baiting them with amazing music, and then saying something like "You know, I just don't know if you guys are up to this... " enlisting jeers and pleading from his kids to give it a shot, challenging them and forcing them to push themselves. This time though, I think he really means to cut "Summon the Heroes" the 1996 theme. Some worry or another about not being able to handle the articulation required of the piece. This kind of tears at me inside because it's absolutely gorgeous and our 1st chair trumpet player nailed the solo today. Music is supposed to evoke emotion and this piece does just that - not just fanfare, excitement and flourish, but something much more. 

One Month Later

This post is part of a blog project on student teaching hosted at So You Want to Teach.

It's done. 

It's done, and both my students and I came out the other side feeling a sense of accomplishment. I was able to rehearse a grade four piece (I Am, by Andrew Boysen Jr.) to festival readiness with a non-auditioned high school ensemble in four weeks. 

Performing arts programs are really a special learning experience. There's an immediate sense of accomplishment gained from performances. In high school, my parents never once cared about my english assignments or my history papers, much less my Trigonometry homework, but they made it to every orchestra concert. MENC sanctioned competitions are even better, with groups earning rankings and a sense of prestige amongst their peers; improving themselves with each performance and clinic. What's more, this builds a sense of group cohesion I found lacking in my other classes, due to the individual responsibility of each student to the ensemble.

Tonight was our "Adjudication Concert" which is a tradition that has arisen out of a compromise between budget concerns and the need for validation of the band program. DJUSD doesn't have school busses. They rely on the City and the University bus system to get kids to and from school. There are special lines just for the kids, the district pays the city, the city pays the university, and everyone's happy. Except when it comes to field trips. 

Chartering a couple of Unitrans busses to Sacramento costs several hundred dollars, which when added to festival fees tops $1000 - more than double the band program's annual budget. So instead of heading to the CMEA Golden Empire Festival, we invite one of their judges to come to us. Instead of 15 minutes in front of three judges, some scribbled notes and barely decipherable taped recordings, we have one esteemed director come work with all three bands for the entire day, and return to see the concert that evening, giving comments in front of parents on everything that we worked on and improved.

It's an awesome arrangement, and it's really helpful. It's also a tad nerve-wracking - especially when on Tuesday during my last rehearsal with my students, my bari soloist was having problems subdividing and missing his entrances, and all the brass couldn't figure out phrasing and breath. Even though we'd worked these problem sections four weeks running. 

I've watched my role as a conductor change over the past month. This piece wasn't difficult by the standards that the kids were used to, but it required a lot of difficult entrances and some serious counting issues (rhythms in four against my beat pattern of three for example) and I realized as much as I strive to bring intensity and artistry to the music, what's increasingly important is that I don't just give abrupt gestures to cue my students, but provide them with confidence, welcoming them in to their entrances. They can count, they know they're right, but still, I look up from my score and see eyes pleading me to confirm that they're right. Most of the time all I have to do is smile at them and they play beautiful music, but I have to cue them.

However, to cue them, I have to be absolutely certain that we're all on the same page. 

This afternoon I couldn't have asked for a better performance from my students, we did a mock concert for our adjudicator (my teacher never once called him a "judge") and he had comments a-plenty but what stuck most were those about air stream and intonation. My trombones were trying too hard to play softly and were a wee bit flat. 

This evening, they did just as well, but I almost fell apart. We were well into the piece and approaching an important juncture in the music. There's a canonic fast section that gives way to a series of metrical changes punctuated with a syncopated bass line. That probably doesn't mean a whole lot, but it's at 2:45 on an 8 minute recording, so about a third of the way on this recording. 

My score is like a security blanket, it makes me feel safe. As long as I have the music in front of me, I don't need it. I went to turn the page, and I knew what was supposed to be on the next one, except it wasn't there - I had turned too many pages. I felt the bottom of my stomach fall away and part of my brain started screaming a stream of expletives. 

Another part of my brain however, just counted: [...&4&] [12-12-123] [1.2.] [1.2.3.] My hands cuing half the band to come in on the "and of 3" beating a bar of 7/8 followed by 2/4 and then 3/4. It was like something out of an exercise from a conducting class but the rest of me was frozen in terror. My parents noticed it, my teacher noticed it, my conducting lost all expression for about a minute but the kids somehow didn't notice, or rather, care. It was their confidence in my ability to lead them that kept me in the game. I was a little shaken for the rest of the piece, I missed some cues, but they all got their entrances, even the Bari Sax soloist that had trouble earlier this week. 

I've mentioned before my terrible performance anxiety, and the thought of choking as a conductor - with all my students counting on me - is terrifying. At that moment I was paralyzed with fear, but I had cultivated enough trust with the band that they assumed I knew exactly what I was doing  - the same expectation I have of them when they head onto the stage. It's that interdependency on each other, and on me - that sort of trust that really brings the ensemble together and makes it more than another class. 

Just another experience confirming that the one place I know where I belong is at the podium in front of my students.