Learning To Let Go:
Give Your Ensemble More Control! Mark Stickney
Plymouth University
mastickney@plymouth.edu
Reprinted from the Utah Music Educators Journal
career choice, and conducting in general. I started to develop this idea of the poor conductor/edu cator caged and held down. I wanted to visualize this situation and I reached out to my talented niece Alessia and asked her to draw my idea. This is what she sent to me: At first I was focused on the actual caged conductor and wanted to write about how I sometimes feel trapped inside a cage of paper work, meetings and everything nonmusical about my job. But hon estly, that is something we all must deal with and to be blunt, that isn’t going to change. I put the drawing down and started to wonder about what it was that was really bothering me. A day later, I came back to the drawing and focused on the ball and chain holding the conductor down, and how she used mu- sical notation as the chain. Then I realized this picture represented how we can feel, musically, from time to time, and the steps I have taken over the years to give up some of the musical chains wrapped around me. As conductors, we take on way too
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much responsibility. I hon estly feel that in some ways, we have become shackled by all the things we feel we need to control while in front of the group. It is time to let go of some of what we feel we need to over- see and give some of the responsibility to the students in the ensemble. Isn’t our goal to teach the students and not teach to the concert? This arti cle contains several exer- cises and techniques you can use to help give your students more say in the music and will lead to greater student responsibil- ity for more aspects of ensemble playing. These are long-term teaching tools that will take some patience and time. Don’t give up
TEMPO
n one of those overstressed mo- ments that tackle us from time to time, I started to think about my
on them! Take a leap of faith and help your ensemble learn how to create music. I have made a conscious decision to
give up two aspects of con trol over my en- semble. Those two aspects are intonation and pulse. That is not to say that I don’t have expectations for ensemble intonation, and there have been growing pains. How- ever, I no longer spend much time tuning my ensemble at the beginning of rehearsal.
Intonation
Honestly, once you have tuned your ensemble to a wonderful B-flat or A, you have managed to prove that for one shining mo ment, you have one note in tune. That does not do a lot for the rest of your re- hearsal unless your ensemble members have some funda mentals already in their grasp. The first is that instruments have a wide variety of flaws in their intonation, and the musicians in your ensemble need to know these. Do you or your students know what these are? Shelley Jagow’s Tuning for Wind Instruments is a very good guide to the into- nation tendencies you need to know. The next step is having your students complete intonation charts as out-of-class assignments. Have each student explore the tenden cies of their own instrument. Have them work in pairs with one manning the tuner while the other plays a note. It is very easy for the player to subconsciously “adjust the needle” if he or she looks at the tuner while playing. A tuning partner can keep that from happening. During your rehearsal, you will have to stop to tune pitches from time to time. Resist the urge to tell your students if they are sharp of flat. There are two better and more educational ap proaches to help teach intonation that will have long lasting posi-
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tive effects on your ensemble. You can have the student determine their own intona- tion, or you can have other students help. When a student plays a note out of tune, have their neighbor correct the intonation. The worst-case scenario is that the student is wrong and it becomes obvious when the player makes the wrong adjust ment. Will this take time? At first, yes, but in the long term you will have to tune your ensemble less and less as students learn to hear and adjust on their own.
Pulse
Ensemble directors should consider giving students responsibil ity for the pulse of the ensemble. To play together, they must do more than just watch the conduc- tor flail his or her arms around in a futile attempt to keep the group together. Teach your ensemble to feel the pulse, and teach them to feel the rhythm. Discourage foot pounding in rehearsal. I have heard far too many indoor sitting marching bands pound their feet to keep time, and it rarely works! And even if it does, the foot stomping takes away from the music. Have them develop a sense of internal pulse. We all play with a metronome, and sometimes a loud pulse through the sound system can be used to keep an ensemble togeth er. Does this help your ensemble develop a sense of pulse, or is this just the easy way to get them to follow the loud pings blaring over the sound system? Have you ever tried playing with a metronome on silent and after giving your ensemble a count off seeing where it goes? You know what will happen the first few times. The ensem ble will not hold together, because they don’t hear that loud pulse to lean on. Will that loud pulse be there for the per-
JANUARY 2018
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