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I visited a preschool, elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. The biggest impact I received was from the high school so I will focus my post on that experience. Some of the cool things I observed in the younger groups of kids was how willing all of the kids were to explore and put themselves out there even if they weren't going to play it perfectly. They also sing a lot more in preschool and elementary school. Teacher use songs to help guide activities and to get the children focused. Over Thanksgiving Break I observed Herndon High School as they prepared for their performance in the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Parade. I thoroughly enjoyed watching and analyzing the balance of teacher and student leader responsibilities. I observed three sections primarily; the trombones, the trumpets, and the baritones. First were the trombones. The student leader of the trombones was very dedicated. The first thing they did was tune as a section. Some of the comments I found interesting and helpful were; we can't be in tune if we have drastically different intonations, lets try for a warm, open, dark sound. Just like that they were in tune. The next thing they worked on was balance and memorization. They worked on intonation and balance simultaneously. The memorization was the cool part. To memorize the music they worked on small chunks of the piece and split into a few groups of three (one on each part). They had each group play the section and then one or two of the groups would make a comment. This took some time but had a great pay off. Onto the trumpets. the trumpets had a different balance of student leadership to teacher responsibility. The trumpet student leader didn't seem to car about band as much and let everything slide. This put more responsibility on the sectional teacher. The sectional teacher asked them to play with a lot of air. They didn't change anything so the teacher had them do some breathing gym exercises. After the breathing gym exercise he had them play a section of the parade music and it was about 1/4 louder. Small improvement but still improvement. Lastly I visited the baritone section. They were working primarily on articulation and entrances. The student leader of the baritones had them try one part of the parade music with a Toh articulation, then with a tah, then with Du, and lastly loo. They all decided that the majority of the parade route would have a toh or du articulation. When they ran their music once through again it sounded much cleaner. They clapped rhythms and sang their parts to help line up entrances. They also briefly mentioned staggered breathing. So that their was always a full sound coming from their section. The biggest thing I took away from this observation was that student leaders can be a huge help or a huge burden. The other small things I took away from this experience were different ways to memorize music, and some new breathing techniques that can be used to optimize the sound of the band/section.
Their Performance is listed below https://youtu.be/bXAzfvkUIFQ?t=45m7s https://www.herndonband.org
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