Video Reflection
February 12, 2008
Today I had the chance to observe Mr. Chris Taylor’s Wind Ensemble rehearsal at Pendleton Heights High School. Mr. Taylor was the assistant band director at Highland High School up until this school year, when he took over as the band director at PHHS. He told me that this is the beginning of a rebuilding; apparently, the whole township has new band directors as of this year, and he’s leading the way to rebuilding the program township-wide. Thus, his Wind Ensemble (the top of three concert bands) is still not quite up to the level of many other schools’ top ensembles, but he’s looking forward to the future of the program.
The first thing that I noticed, at the beginning of the rehearsal, was the presence of a director’s podium to stand on. This is something that, conversely, I noticed the lack of on my first day at Highland. The podium provides a tangible “I am ready to start rehearsal” indication to the students. Mr. Taylor began with breathing exercises – I have seen these done with marching bands, but not very often with a concert band, especially an upper-level concert band. However, it made sense for these students – Mr. Taylor was telling me that these students did not have very sound fundamentals; apparently the middle schools did not emphasize fundamentals at all, so Mr. Taylor has made it his mission to first give the students a handle on the fundamentals before they simply start working on performance issues.
I will not copy my notes at this point, but suffice to say I wrote down most of the warm-up exercises that Mr. Taylor led, because I liked them all and had actually not seen a lot of them before (at least not done quite the same way he did them). I am considering using several of these with Highland’s Symphonic Band, because they are similarly deficient in some fundamental areas. One thing that I did find interesting, though, was that at one point he told them to just take one minute on their own and focus on long tones; interestingly enough, they did! I saw nearly no talking during this minute, and the students all actually did some long tone exercises for this time. One reason for the success of this exercise, I think, is the fact that he was walking around so much. Though he started rehearsal with a definitive stepping on the podium (thus quieting the students and focusing them on him), he then soon after left the podium and began walking around the room and between the rows during most of the rest of the warm-ups. This is a very important idea, but one that I just am not comfortable doing yet myself. Furthermore, I found it absolutely incredible that the warm-ups took a little over 30 minutes! It’s a long rehearsal (more than an hour), so it makes sense (especially for these kids and their deficiencies), but just the fact that they warmed up for so long and didn’t seem to mind at all was astounding.
The rest of the rehearsal was relatively straight-forward. While the students’ collective playing ability isn’t terrible incredible, they played well, and rehearsed portions of three songs. The warm-up process, however, was something that I have many, many notes from and learned a lot from watching.
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