Boyd Holmes, the Writer

Your Core Belief System

2/24/2022

Try this little exercise:

Imagine you’re in your music room with one of your favorite students – either past or present.

Just the two of you.

Now imagine that just before you walk into the room, you have been told that you will only have five more sessions with this student – and then you will never ever see them again.

What would you do in those five sessions?

How would you plan?

No time to get extra equipment, instruments, or music. Just what is available.

At the end of those five sessions, what would you want the take away to be for both your student as well as yourself.

Now do this exercise and instead of five sessions, make it three.

What would be jettisoned? How would you plan the time differently?

Now do the exercise as if you would only have one session.

Only one forty-five minute session with one of your favorite students, a student who you will never see again.

What would you want them to take away for the rest of their life?

“Importance” is not a work that can encompass the task.

This is beyond importance.

How carefully would you script the forty-five minutes?

More meticulously than you would have planned out the five or three session models?

What would you do?

Imagine what your student would recall twenty years later about that forty-five minute session.

For that matter, what would you do to be so memorable that your student would recall the session decades later?

Whatever you plan, I am betting that your session would reflect the core element of your teaching.

As you discover the core of your teaching, is it valuable enough to have a little bit of it in all you teach?

I hope so.

If not, why not?

Your core belief system should permeate the arc of your teaching career.

It should resonate through your work like five-octave C major arpeggio on a well-tuned Steinway.

It is this core belief that will be remembered, forgotten, or ignored by thousands of students.

It is to be treasured as much as your credibility as a musician.

If someone read your lesson plan for that one forty-five minute lesson, they should be able to recognise you by the embed core values your lesson espouses.

In the end, the students you teach might forget you but your core belief system will have an everlasting impact of the arc of their lives.

Now, do this little exercise again – but this time with a student from your future, someone who has yet to meet you.

Because it’s going to happen.

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Bet On Yourself

2/17/2022

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Music educators:

Bet on yourself.

After all, if you’re not willing to bet on yourself, why would you expect 1,000, 100, or even 1 kid to take a chance on you?

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Five Hours

2/17/2022

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After surviving high school and barely getting into college, I loved the university life.

But something wasn’t right.

It became apparent that the knowledge they were requiring me to absorb had little to do with teaching in the trenches.

During my junior and senior year, I was hired to be a diocesan band director, overseeing the music education of over two hundred students with a staff of a dozen teachers.

Nothing I had learned my first two years of college prepared me for that job.

And with the exception of the student teaching I did my senior year with Bill Byerly, the band director at Christiana High School, nothing prepared me for life post-college in the world of fulltime teaching.

Very little in college music education prepared me for a career teaching.

Yes, they demand that you attend lots of methods classes, psychology of this, foundations of that – but there is no class called “Ten Years of Experience 101”.

Classes for ONLY 30 or so hours a week? And a week contains 168 hours so that left a lot of time to pursue my own interests?

It was prelude to my concept of the 7.5 hour job and the 16.5 hour business.

I took advantage of these last for years of autocracy before I ventured into fulltime music teaching.

Hiding out in Morris Library, going through the different collections, hanging out in practice rooms, working out progressions, playing a steady stream of gigs on double bass and trumpet – there was nothing better.

How about you?

When you were in college, what was the longest time of performing or teaching that you participated in?

Not practicing (think Iverson) but actual sustained performing or teaching?

Two hours? Three hours? Five hours?

What happens when we compare teaching music to playing four to six hours a night under less than optimal conditions?

One of the often ignored educational bonuses of playing in any kind of solo setting or in an entertainment band, a rock band, a wedding band, or a society band is that you have to play for sustained hours at a level where someone is actually going to pay you money for what you just played.

I was gigging from my first days in high school so I had an understanding of sustained playing for money before I got to college. I was able to play and get a “call back” – meaning that I had done a good enough job at an affordable cost to the booker or client that I got return work.

When did you get your first “call back”? How did it make you feel?

I was getting acclimated to playing and singing for longer stretches of times in front of increasingly more discerning ears and wallets.

Playing situations in undergrad college music department were heavily sanitized in controlled environments. Student performance in a college music department, especially if you weren’t a performance major, was very much a boutique experience and one I never found tethered to the real world of employment or cash reimbursement.

“Call backs”? Yes, but that was the extent of it. With each successive year in college, I was gigging more with some of my teachers and with each successive gig, the differences between these two worlds – academia versus the world beyond - became more apparent.

University music reminded me of a terrarium and gigging was more akin to living off the grid in a jungle.

After graduating and teaching full time, I spent several years as a sideman in a variety of groups: orchestras, pit orchestras, after-hours clubs, strip clubs, wedding bands, traveling big bands, and various pick-up bands and jazz trios. Eventually, I co-founded a society band with my co-teacher, Marty Lassman.

Taking a leadership role in an ensemble is a heck of a motivator. Start with the idea of playing in a band and then add on that you're the leader or co-leader of the group and it's like “Lightning Round” on the old TV game show “Password”: the time is halved and the prizes, obligations, and stress are doubled.

Suddenly, preparation, follow-up, and clean-up are much more crucial elements in sustaining an ensemble – as well as maintaining a revenue stream for your 16.5 hour business.

I was required to be "on" for four, five, or six hours at a time with the most minimal of breaks. Add to that a two hour set up and a two hour break down and sudennly we’re talking real work and extended hours.

On summer gigs, it was normal for me to drop three pounds during a gig.

While there were other bands like ours, we saw our biggest competition was ourselves: could we be better than we were a month ago?

Today, society continues to morph the worlds of performance, competition, and entertainment into an unrealistic, synthetic representation of the musical performance arts in the twenty-first century.

Idol this, masked that, America’s got this, lip sync got that.

When kids would come to music class and talk about American Idol or The Voice I would always bring them back to earth by reminding them that those performers were only singing for three to four minutes at a time. Try doing five to six hours, several nights a week, getting paid on a consistent basis, PLUS getting invited back to do it again. Then get back to me and let me know how that's going.

I would remind my students that they performed for longer stretches of time with me in the classroom or chorus rehearsal – and I was always tough on them.

The more I taught in my 7.5 hour job, the more teaching resembled a daily, six-set gig from my 16.5 hour business.

Lucky for me, my strengthened work ethic, perseverance, and endurance originated in my 16.5 hour business perspective rather than from my 7.5 hour job perspective.

Sadly, the mediocrity and tedium that can pass for education in the classrooms of some tenured teachers bears little resemblance to the day-to-day survival of the six-hour-a-night gigging life.

As musicians, we know that we’re only as good as our last gig.

And teachers, you know that means we’re only as good as our last class – especially if its kindergarten.

And usually at least once per gig, someone in the band finds themselves saying, “Whatever it takes” – as in one more song, one less break, or one more hour. Whatever it takes for a successful outcome.

Let me frame it this way: “Whatever it takes”, as in when the Greenville dowager informs you that your playing space in her foyer is currently occupied by a potted twenty-foot tree that she wants the band to move to the other side of the room.

Whatever it takes. (And don’t think that I hadn’t considered that she hired the band just to move the tree because we were cheaper than movers.)

Too often, getting a teaching gig requires a sizable more amount of effort and ingenuity than sustaining a teaching gig. In education, getting the gig becomes “the gig” while the opposite is true when you’re working as a musician in the entertainment field – getting the next gig is second most important thing in your mindset and agenda while playing out.

Let me put it this way: every public paying gig I play parleys into another private or public paying gig. It’s this monetary and artistic vindication that validates that I have been – and continue to be – on the right track in my 16.5 hour business.

That kind of authentication doesn’t exist in the hot-house environment of a school.

Figuring out my 16.5 hour business was key to developing my 7.5 hour brand of education and leadership. Those 16.5 hours informed my 7.5 hours on the importance of what I accomplish in my next twenty-four hours rather than in my previous twenty-four hours.

The rush and rewards you get from creating your 16.5 hour business persona will often carry you through affirmation droughts that can occur in a school setting.

I you haven’t started seriously examining your potential for ongoing success in a personal 16.5 hour business, start the process today.

Yes, the hours aren’t as regimented as your 7.5 hour teaching job and some days, you’ll be working more than hours than you ever imagined you could.

It will make those five hour stints in college (as well as your 7.5 hour job) feel like a cake walk.

There is no rule book or instruction manual for the life you want to create. But hey, that’s half the fun.

After all, there is always more room for success in your life.

Whatever it takes, right?

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Things I Miss From My Music Room Days - Number 30

2/17/2022

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Focus on Efficiency

2/16/2022

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Starting as a kid in elementary school through high school, my focus was on music and art.

As I progressed through high school, music had more of a pull over me. As an only child, the social implications and connections of music had a big effect.

When did you first get the bug for music? At which age?

Lucky for me, all of my music teachers (with the exception of two) were working musicians. They taught me on Saturday mornings.

That is to say, I didn't attend an elementary week-day general music class with the Silver Burdett book put in front of me in order to learn the next song from Argentina or the Galapagos Islands.

In fact, my first through eighth grade parochial school didn’t even offer music or art.

Most of my Saturday morning music teachers were men, demanding men who had very little patience. Some were playing society gigs, some played in seedy bars, some were jazzers, and some of them played in the symphony orchestra. A few of them were WWII vets. All of them had larger than life personas.

By high school, as focused as I was on music, I was deliberately unfocused within music. I was trying everything.

As a buck-tooth fourth grader, I started out playing trumpet, moved over to baritone, and played a little mellophonium anf frnch horn in elementary orchestra.

As a high school freshman, I was conscripted into the tuba/sousaphone section because, at six foot, I was one of the tallest and biggest kids and could it up without dropping it.

My band directed convinced me that, because I was learning bass clef, I should take double bass lessons and play in the orchestra. I fought the orchestra idea until he confided with me that the boy/girl ratio was significantly leaning to the girl side of things and I would enjoy the comradery. He wasn’t wrong.

I branched out into composing and orchestration. I had a growing desire to pick up a pencil and write the sounds that I was playing on my instruments as well write music for other people to play.

As far as playing opportunities, it didn't matter to me if it was band orchestra, choir, jazz, folk mass, piano trio, tuba, trumpet, or double bass - it was all music and it was all good.

As a newly-minted teacher in an exclusive private day school, I had a similar undisciplined, unfocused approach.

My lesson plans were all over the place my first two years.

They were clever. They were eclectic. And they engage kids in the Arts.

I was constantly experimenting and learning how to capitalize on my strengths.

My career was basically a three act play. Act one and three were extended, long stints in elementary general music.

What I noticed in as I started act three was that time in the classroom with kids was more precious then it seemed in act one.

As an experienced teacher, I was now much more focused on what had worked in previous classes and finding ways to efficiently streamline it and sequence the lesson plans to make more sense and ensure more success for the kids.

It's not that I didn't have to be creative anymore. I had already created a extensive backlog of great lesson plans, ideas, and songs. Now my strength would not lie in creativity but in how to supplement my catalogue of compositions and lesson plans.

I was shaping shape my creativity and sequencing it in ways that compounded the positive results.

My focus had matured.

Just as we learn to simultaneously read multiple notes, I was learning how to accurately visualize the arc of a school year in one focused vision.

I got to the point where I realized that I did not have to reinvent the wheel every year - that I had designed an impressive wheel, that I primarily needed to focus on keeping it rolling, checking the tire pressure, and make adjustments as needed.

Try charting your focus, strengths, and areas of concentration over the span of your career.

Are there any trends or patterns?

Is your focus narrow or broad? How’s your "peripheral vision"?

If you are just starting out, keep in mind the adage “begin with the end in mind”. Try planning the trajectory of your skill sets and focus over the next few decades.

No matter where you are in your career, dial in your focus and plot your destiny.

The more adept you get at this skill, the more you’ll like what you see.

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Choose wisely.

2/14/2022

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Somedays, it’s not a question of being either the fly or the windshield.

Somedays, you’re either the standing water or the plunger.

Choose wisely.

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Last Night's gig.

2/13/2022

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The Road to Right Here

2/13/2022

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It’s easier to teach the lesson plan that’s in our brain rather than the lesson plan that the student and moment often provides us.

I always try to celebrate as well as assess a kid’s past accomplishments before I endeavor presenting new material.

So what if they don’t know _____.

Is it impeding their ability to make music in the present?

And can you fill in missing bits that will help them round out their skills to help them enjoy making music in the present as well as the future?

And while you’re celebrating their past accomplishment, take a second to celebrate a few of your own.

The “Road to Right Here” probably wasn’t a straight shot and had bumps and detours along the way.

But guess what?

You’ve made it this far!

Congrats!

You’re showing the way how to traverse this musical road to your students.

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Important things

2/8/2022

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Your Core Belief System

Bet On Yourself

Five Hours

Things I Miss From My Music Room Days - Number 30

Focus on Efficiency

Choose wisely.

Last Night's gig.

The Road to Right Here

Important things

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