Teaching Students to Teach Chorales and Repertoire Excerpts in the Band and Orchestra Classroom

During the second half of the semester after our work in music theory and conducting, I have students select a chorale or music excerpt , and ask them to research it, give some background information about the segment, and begin to prepare it for conducting it in front of the group. This has a multi tiered effect in the class. First, along with the gradual release of responsibility and teaching them to be in front of the group, it also offers an opportunity to teach many different pieces of literature and composers that would not normally happen in the traditional band environment. I use the 36 Chorales by Aaron Cole from Rochester, MN (http://aaronmcole.com/chorale.html), but there are other examples out there, including other warm up books and resources over the years. There's also a few places with free downloads where there is flexible instrumentation. This is key, because it needs to be easy enough to play yet substantially relevant to the source material. Once these are selected, students take the score and begin a semester of score study. Basic information about the piece and the composer are required. A big part of our literacy initiative is annotating the text, whatever that may be so that there's a clear and concise idea that the student is making notes for future review and reflection. After our final concert of the year, students sign up for time slots, typically around 5-10 minutes (this depends partly on the length of the segment). During that time, they will share their piece, the historical and composer information and give the musical comments and ideas they want to do with their selection. This includes breath marks, phrasing, crescendos, decrescendos, identifying tricky parts or accidentals, key signature, and other musical elements. In our environment with Apple TV and iPads, they typically share this over Airplay so that everyone can see the notations at once and make their own notations in Notability. Students typically come at this trepidatiously, even after a semester of conducting warm ups and other activities designed to give them an idea of the musical knowledge and background necessary. It builds off of the traditional ideas we want our students to have for the pieces they play, when they sightread, and learn elements about the pieces we are doing other than they are a part of our repertoire. In short, I typically do about 4 of these a day, times 4 days a week with class, during the last 3 and a half weeks of the year, and use the rest of the time during the hour block to go over graduation band music.