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that administrators, parents and students put on concerts, it’s understandable that many directors are hesitant to undertake new musical styles that both they and their students may find more difficult to master in time for the big concert. I would like to suggest a way of reframing the challenge of new music cultures: you and your students are native speakers of (at least) one musical “language,” to which you devote the majority of your class time. Devoting part of your class time, part of the year, to a substantial study of a different musical style is akin to studying a second language. When your students go to their Spanish, Japanese or ASL class, no one expects them to come out speaking the new language as fluently as they speak English. Yet we still value second language study as a fundamental part of a complete education (and one that often improves our understanding of our native language as well). Studying a “foreign” musical style in depth probably will not yield professional-quality musical

performances within the confines of the school curriculum. That does not mean the experience in itself is not a valuable learning experience and meaningful way to develop as a musician. Plan meaningful curricular experiences for your students. If they lead to concert performance, great. If not, that doesn’t mean they weren’t worthwhile.

3. Think of arrangements as translations or adaptations.

The first place we often look for new ma- terials are the major publishers’ catalogs of new works for our ensembles. These, of course, are an important resource, but it is important to remember that an arrange- ment of a Martian folk tune for symphonic band by a North American composition professor is not itself Martian folk music. We need to be honest with our students about how we make decisions about stylis- tic interpretation: issues of timbre, tuning, instrumentation, performance behavior

and any number of other factors may be very different in these arrangements than in the original. This does not necessar- ily make them bad pieces of music. The march section in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is not Turk- ish Janissary music, nor did Debussy write “authentic” Javanese gamelan music, although both of those composers were influenced by those sources. It would be irresponsible to lead students or audiences to believe that the Ninth was Turkish, of course; but learning that movement could be a great entrée to a class exercise in lis- tening to, comparing, and writing about, the differences between the source in its original cultural context and the music it inspired. And of course, as anyone who’s seen their favorite book ruined on screen, or sat through a poorly subtitled foreign film knows some translations and adapta- tions are better than others.

Continued on page 34

Wisconsin School Musician

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