 Show me the top third grade recorder players and I’ll show you the nucleus of band for the next four years.
Show me a school where they don’t teach recorder and I’ll show you a fourth grade band program with mediocre momentum out of the gate.
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 I mentioned it in another post that if you want to write music, the best thing to do is to pick up the pencil and start it moving on the blank sheet of paper.
When I write these days, I rarely use an instrument at first. I just write what’s in my head. I put the pencil on the paper and move it. How did I arrive at this point? A little backstory: As a college freshman ear training student, I noticed huge obstacle many of my classmates struggled with: using a pencil to transcribe dictations. They had used pencils for years for traditianl writing of words but the act of using a pencil to draw/write notes slowed them down. By the time I had gotten to college, I had written out full band parts for at least two-dozen jazz band charts, some arranged by others, some that I had arranged. I had spent countless hours doing what I am going to outline to you in a few minutes and my hand was an “old hand” at writing music. If you've never done this you should give it a try. There is a real easy exercise that will first focus on your hand and later, on your brain. I did it a lot as a kid. I would take a song that I knew and simply write it out. Sounds simply silly, right? The idea is to break the idea of composing on a piece of manuscript into the two crucial skills of writing music with a pencil quickly and hearing music in your head. It’s taking the raw skills presented in a typical ear training course to practical conclusions. We first focus on the skill of writing music quickly on a piece of manuscript paper. You’ll need a few supplies starting with a lot of sharp pencils, a pencil sharpener, and cheap manuscript paper. Blackwing pencils are a tad expensive but what I use when writing notes or words. There’re the best in my opinion. Once you go Blackwing, you’ll never want to use another pencil. As far as manuscript goes, I made my own by finding a sheet with decent spacing between the staves, slightly enlarging the original it to take advantage of smaller margins, adding “Holmes Music” logo with a web address in the lower right corner, printing on both sides, and three-hole punching it on both sides for convenience for potentially putting it in a three-ring binder. A few years ago, I basically did the same thing by creating a sheet in “Sibelius” so I can print them at home or do bulk two-sided at a place like Staples. Sit at a table, desk, or piano. Take a song like “You Are My Sunshine”. If you're familiar with the melody, just start writing it down note by note and singing or humming the notes without lyrics, just scatting sounds. Every once in a while, stop and sing what you written, pointing at the notes with the tip of your pencil as you sing. If you don't know or can't sing the melody to “You Are My Sunshine”, get a copy of “Get America Singing... Again! Vol. 1” at Amazon. You can use that as your source material. Your source material MUST be the best of the best melodies that society has decided to sing over and over again. Don’t work with obscure material. Stick to the hits that you will find in “Get America Singing... Again! Vol. 1”. Pro tip: just buy the book and open the hood, and examine the engine of every song, finding the commonalities among these timeless melodies. It’s an education in itself. Sit at your table with source material to your left, your blank sheets to your right, and one blank sheet directly in front of you. Copy a single melody onto your blank piece of paper while you're humming the notes as you write them. Don’t worry about chord symbols for right now. You don’t have to have a reference pitch ot perfect pitch when you sing what you have written. Just use good relative pitch. If you make a mistake with the pencil, DO NOT erase. At this stage of the game, erasing mistakes is bad appropriation of your time. Make your manuscript look “normal” and legible. Include a clef, key signature, and time signature – all on the first staff. You don’t need clefs on the successive staves. Use a fairly loose grip on your pencil or your you’ll experience fatigue sooner than later. Don’t cramp the notes. Give them space. If you are looking at source material, look at the space ratio between notes on the printed page in and try to emulate that in what you write. Keep in mind that what you copy has to be legible not to you but to another musician. Try to fit four measures to a staff and, if possible, keep that uniform look on each staff. At this stage of the game, erasing mistakes is bad appropriation of your time. We want the tip of the pencil moving, not the eraser. Simply start over by flipping your paper up-side down or turning it over to the other side. Focus on the melody and the sound of your voice. Yes, the song is going to sound slow. As you develop speed with your pencil, your singing will pick up tempo, too. Once you’ve added that skinny/thick double bar line after the last measure, don’t take a break, go to Wawa, throw yourself a ticker-tape parade, or flip the wash. Smile, stay in your chair, give yourself a pat on the back, analyze your work, identify the weakest element of your manuscript so you can improve upon that, and do the process with the same melody all over again on another sheet of paper. See if you can do it five times. The idea is not just being able to do it five times but to get better each successive time on your road to your fifth attempt. Your goal is to be faster and more legible. After your first ten, start adding the chord symbols over each measure after you complete the notes for that measure. Congratulations! You’ve got your pencil moving and given your brain a break to focus on the physical motor act of engaging a pencil on manuscript. Those who have never done this exercise might think this is a silly thing to do, but what will happen is your hand will get into the habit of actually moving and writing notes rapidly one after another as you associate a pitch with what you're writing. It's a deceptively simple idea but it will get your hand moving. The more times you do this with different songs, the more your hand will singing pitch will correlate with what melodies look and sound like. Sure, this is a sizable investment in time. But I believe it pays off. We’ll take on composing with a pencil in “The Songwriter’s Notebook: “Keep Your Pencil Moving” Explained – Part Two  I had been teaching elementary school general music for about six years when I was told I was going to direct a middle school chorus. Now mind you, I had never taught a chorus before. I hadn't participated in a chorus since I was in high school. And in college, I was not required to be in a chorus nor did I opt to be in a vocal group. Let’s not kid ourselves. I sang and played Fender bass in a wedding band, played double bass in road bands and an after-hours club in Philly, and subbed on either trumpet or bass in a band at a strip show at the Troc. My pedigree was spotty to say the least. All this is to say: I had no real concept of choral singing. The most I had done concerning choral singing with my elementary school kids was basic two-part stuff, and that was only occasionally. I started amping up my piano chops – I knew it would be a crucial need given the accompaniments I would have to pull off. Once I started doing research, I discovered a chorus I admired: the Glen Ellyn Children's Chorus of Chicago. I decided to model our sound after theirs. That led me to my discovery of Doreen Rao and her epic editorial work with Boosey and Hawkes. Her choral works for beginning choruses were just what I needed. In elementary general music, I never approached music class as just a venue where I threw out music skills, terms, goals, and performances. The music work was all ancillary to the bigger picture which was the development of the child as a whole individual. Life lessons were often the foundations of the musical choices I made when planning lessons. I found that elementary kids were ravenous for this kind of alchemy, blending storytelling, music, singing, composing, theater, character development, and ethics. But I knew that middle school chorus would be different. It would be at least a 90/10 mix of solid choral singing mixed with all the other stuff and I would have to find new ways to integrate the life lessons I felt were important in the development of a middle school child. I had two mixed choruses: fifth/sixth and seven/eighth. There were no auditions. Anyone who wanted to sing could join. The kids were a mix of students that I had taught in elementary school as well as new members who entered the school in middle school. There was definitely a buzz that they while thought they had bid a farewell to elementary school music and Mr. Holmes, they had a second opportunity to have me in music. I picked a variety of Doreen Rao editions and augmented it with some of the songs I had composed for them to sing in elementary school. There's nothing quite like a trip down memory lane for middle schoolers and they enjoyed the idea of looking back with me on a time when they were young, revisiting their old favorites, and singing them with middle school vocal power and range. Many of the Rao pieces we were doing were easy, with only minimal part singing. But some of the pieces I picked were deceptively hard. When they got disappointed learning that those pieces took more time and effort, I kept impressing upon the chorus that all important goals in music were achieved by setting small goals and building upon them, one small goal at a time. I was determined to have a real mix of easy successes, moderately challenging pieces, and some that would just be beyond their abilities. I didn't want the kids to feel that the challenge of growing up in either life or in music was insurmountable but I wanted to make sure that they knew that life – as well as music - was a challenge that would require their sustained effort when things got tough. That's how I stumbled onto a beautiful two-part arrangement of Mozart's “Ave Verum Corpus”. If you're not familiar with the piece, here is a beautiful performance by the Choir of King’s College in Cambridge, England. I played a recording of the arrangement for the kids and they were impressed.
“We're going to be performing this piece in twenty days.” They looked at me as if I had lost touch with their abilities as well as my sanity. “But this is hard! And it’s in Latin!” they yelled. I saw girl turn to the person next to her and silently mouth the words, "This is REAL music!" “Ahhhh, but we have a plan. So let's get started.” I handed out the music. They had all learned from me to silently skim, scan, and study any piece of paper that I gave them and they started quietly going over the score. In the silence, I started playing the introduction on the piano and then told the ladies to hum the first two measures of their part as I played them. They sang them back to me. We worked on the vowels for a minute or two and sang the two bars again. “Beautiful. Gentleman, it's your turn.” I played the introduction again and then played their part for just two measures, which they sang back to me. Without missing a beat, I gave each of them their starting notes and we sang the first two measures a capella. We did it again with the piano intro and accompaniment for the first two bars. No more than ten minutes after we started working on “Ave Verum Corpus” I matter-of-factly said, “Okay, put that one away and let's pull out “Do Di Le”. They looked confused. ”What? We're only doing two measures?” “Yes.” “Then how are we going to be ready to sing this in a program in twenty days?” “Remember I said I had a plan? Yes, we are going to learn Mozart's masterpiece . . . . .two measures at a time, one day at a time!” The room got even quieter. “If we stay on track, we will have learned the last two measures the day before we perform this in collection. How many measures in this piece?" Heads went down and counting commenced. Two kids simultaneously yelled , "Forty-seven!" as if they were battling contestants on "Family Feud". "And how many do I play solo, by myself?" "Nine!" "So how many are you responsible for?" "Thirty-eight!"I turned to a boy in the first row. “Scott, do you eat a whole pizza in one mouthful?” “I wish I could!”, which drew laughs from the chorus as well one kid yelling “He did last night!” “The only way I know how to eat a pizza is one piece at a time, one bite at a time. If you stick with that plan, you will eventually eat the entire pizza. That's what we're going to do with this “Ave Verum Corpus Pizza”: one slice, one bite at a time. Two measures a day.” And that’s what we did. While we worked on all our other repertoire in the traditional way, every rehearsal we would sing the measures we had previously learned in “Ave Verum Corpus” and then nail the next two measures. It was quick, efficient, and painless. We stuck with our plan until there were only about eight bars left which meant we had about four days left. Before we started our two measures for that day, I turned to them and asked, “Hey, do you want to get crazy today and do all eight bars today?” A thunderous “Yeah!” came from the kids. We blew out the last eight bars that day and were excited for the pending performance. Everyday or so as we worked on it, I would revisit the “one slice, one bite” concept and reiterate that anything worthwhile in music is worth learning accurately in small goals. They did a beautiful job with the performance, better than their teacher did. The middle school chorus had never sung in Latin before and it made an impression on our audience. When they performed it for my elementary kids several weeks later, deeply embed in their performance was the feeling of, “I was once you and someday you’ll be me, singing harder, more grown-up music.” I hope the big takeaway from the chorus members was the life lesson that an incremental, day by day approach to reaching a goal works. The easier it is for your students to visualize a goal and a confident path to achieve it, the greater the probability they will reach it. Reaching a well set goal in music is often contingent upon setting well set smaller goals that lead to the greater goal. Musical performances can be seen as a destination of a journey that started with the first steps of the first rehearsal. But just as in Life, the destination isn't always the most valuable goal. It's also about the journey, enjoying each step, compounding each success as if it were a percolating investment, savoring each pizza slice by pizza slice, and realizing that sometimes in music as in life, it comes down to nailing many little goals, one at time.  There are many ways to approach lyrics. There are many takes on creating lyrics but I find that there is one thread that has the most bang for the buck when working with beginning songwriters. Namely, play with words. One of my favorite books is “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure” from Smith magazine, edited by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith.  Even if you aren’t a songwriter, the book is a fun read.
The idea is simple – but the execution is tricky. The only rule is only use six words. You don’t have much room to get too literal. A lot has to be implied. Six-word memoirs remind me of those zen gardens that are 95% combed sand with a few strategically placed stones. Six-word memoirs is a bit of a take on feng shui with images rather than words. It makes you remember feelings and sensations from your past, a needed element of any lyric. Go ahead, I’m not looking. Find that yellow legal pad, sharpen your Blackwing pencil, and write a succinct autobiographical statement that only consists of six words. Some of my favorite examples from the book: “I asked. They answered. I wrote.” - Sebastian Junger “Cursed with cancer. Blessed with friends.” - a 9-year-old thyroid cancer survivor “I still make coffee for two” - a 27-year-old guy who just got dumped “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” - Hemingway “Followed white rabbit, became black sheep.” - Gabrielle Maconi What would your six word memoir be? You can think of think of this as a lyric generator if you feel like it. I came up with a few for me. “Three-piece, six strings, eighty-eight keys. “If memory serves correct, you smiled.” “Welcome to music. My name's Mr. Holmes.” "Welcome, Mr. Holmes. My name's Music." “It happened the way we remember.” “Remembered the best, forgot the rest.” Have one for me? Send it my way if you feel like it. |
AuthorBoyd Holmes, the Writer Archives
February 2025
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