Schools are funny places.
One thing I have given a lot of thought to are the concepts of gigging, student concertizing, and day-to-day music teaching, specifically how or if they intersect.
First, a few questions.
Does the math teacher prioritize how students apply their skills at the top of their list?
Does the civics teacher focus on the differences of the parties or on the mechanics of government?
Is the spring art show always in the back of the art educator’s mind when they are demonstrating texture in multimedia formats to a class of third graders?
Generally, no.
They teach their subject matter, rarely put their students on display, and make an effort not to make too definite an imprint that reflects their personal taste.
Music and athletics are different.
Too many people – including educators and administrators - confuse the sizzle with the steak in Arts education.
Sizzle = concerts.
Steak = classroom.
After a while, you’ll see every permutation of the sizzle/steak paradigm with music educators and their programs.
The first eighteen years of my music education career, my elementary students did two basic performances: simple choral/instrumental performances and full-blown music theater pieces that I wrote and composed.
The first type of performance occurred several times a year and was usually put together in one or two weeks’ time.
The second type was a full stage, mega Cecil B. DeMille type of Broadway musical. It was always scheduled the second or third week of December with the classroom introduction of story line and music at the beginning of November.
It was grueling. I started writing in the summer time. When the last curtain came down, I always felt like I had been through “da mill”.
School admin see student music presentations primarily as PR: if the shows are good and create good buzz in the parent community then no worries.
On the other hand, administrators fret when there are chronic short comings in concerts because it can create a negative patina that envelops the entire school.
(A concert’s short comings in an admin’s eyes rarely have anything to do with the music; it’s almost always about preparation or some visual faux pas.)
Some music educators have their ego wrapped around these school performances; too self-serving, too much trying to educate the audience with endless introductions, too many flowers, too much “I’d like to thank the Academy” etc.
Other music directors perseverate over these concerts so neurotically with their principal that it appears not just the crux of their job review but their entire life hinges on a perfect concert. Their anxiety over their perceived job performance is unwarranted.
And the majority of these kids grow up to be kids who abandon their participation in music because it wasn’t about them in the first place; it was always about their teachers and their half-baked egos.
I find the phrase “performance opportunity” an over-inflated and over-used entity in music education. It always takes on an erudite air while purporting to be the steak when it is really is the sizzle.
My students were like most kids: they liked to perform, whether for three other kids or twelve-hundred members of their community.
They knew that performances were not my raison d'être – nor should it be theirs. I did my best not to build up expectations or give the idea that “shows” were the culmination of their growth in music; only a snap-shot of them on a specific day doing a certain thing.
The “meat and potatoes” (sorry, vegetarians) was the day-to-day music class – making music every day, not just on the “special” days when we dress up.
I looked at formal student performances like a business card or an occasional sixty-second commercial that emphasized my strengths, creativity, and consistency in music. True, they led to other gigs and revenue streams – but they were focused on students, not me. And I didn’t get our concerts get wrapped around my axel – they just weren’t that crucial to me.
Money can be a funny thing.
Too many music educators confuse an adult, monetized model of musical performance with a child-centric archetype that emphasizes sustained musical growth focusing on the day-to-day work and play that develops into a self-sustaining participation in music in their life.
Some music educators actually think of their student concerts as “gigs” and repeatedly refer to them as such to their students. It’s like they are working with the representatives of the Lollipop Guild.
These are not gigs. These are concerts.
This kind of adult approach to school concertizing reminds me of the faint odor found at child beauty contests where single-digit-aged girls are transformed into catwalk models complete with hair, make-up, and plumage; adults working with kids, trying to make them look and, more importantly, act like adults. (And yes, I was a judge at one. Just once.)
Because I am old and grew up during a time when dinosaurs walked the earth, the way I developed helped formulate my professional educational philosophy for performance.
For me, elementary school concerts and marching band parades were the norm for me from fifth through eighth grade.
In high school, along with concert band, orchestra, and chorus, I became a member of our high school “dance band”, the “De Sales Men”.
Pretty hip name, n’est-ce pas?
Just in case you thought it was a Willie Loman thing, the band was named after the patron saint of our high school, Saint Francis De Sales.
It was a full jazz band with female vocalist. Jazz still had a negative connotation and dancing was something our parents and grandparents approved of so we were a dance band.
We played concerts.
But we also played gigs.
Gigs were different than concerts.
Concerts were for our parents. As our director framed concerts, “your parents have to say you were good because they’re your parents. That’s what parents do”.
Our director actually booked gigs for us.
Paying gigs. With actual money.
Nine-to-one evening gigs where we wore tuxes.
Gigs where no one had to like us unless we were good.
Gigs where the director drove the band bus and took us to VFW halls, high school proms, parks, beef-and-beers, and PTA dinner-dances.
We didn’t drive. Our parents dropped us off at the school at 6:00PM. The director drove us on a school bus to the gig and then, after the gig, dropped us off AT EACH OF OUR HOMES at two or three AM on Sunday mornings.
He couldn’t navigate the bus up my narrow street so he dropped me off a few blocks away.
At 2:30AM.
Like I said, it was a different time.
He pulled the sets from our 500+ tune book.
But the rest of the work was up to us.
We sat up the band stands, the PAs, the band library, and ran the evening as well as when we took breaks.
While we had almost all been in the same diocesan music program since elementary school, we had been trained like little worker bees to set up for concerts. But dance band brought a whole new level of personal responsibility.
We quickly learned a big difference between concerts and gigs.
We sight-read music on gigs.
In front of living people who didn’t have to like us.
As much as we liked concertizing in high school, were never sight-read anything in concert.
We were doing things that adult musicians did.
I was also being hired to play similar sight-reading gigs with union bands.
I now knew the difference between school concerts and gigs.
And I never confused the two again.
After I became a teacher and continued gigging, with the exception of an occasional day time rock concert or evening “sock hop”, I didn’t talk about my gigging with my students. The two topics rarely intersected.
Stacking skills and developing life-long, embedded music habits was more my thing.
Teaching music to me was less Hector with a heroic day of war and more Sisyphus where year after year, you daily punch the clock and assume your position behind the boulder.
Too many kids make music in school and then stop after the curtain comes down in adulthood.
I tried to teach without the curtain.
Even if it’s just a thirty-year-old you and an instrument sitting on your back steps, it’s not that the show has to go on.
It’s that it’s on your terms and not those of your old music teachers.
And hopefully, the music doesn’t stop.
One thing I have given a lot of thought to are the concepts of gigging, student concertizing, and day-to-day music teaching, specifically how or if they intersect.
First, a few questions.
Does the math teacher prioritize how students apply their skills at the top of their list?
Does the civics teacher focus on the differences of the parties or on the mechanics of government?
Is the spring art show always in the back of the art educator’s mind when they are demonstrating texture in multimedia formats to a class of third graders?
Generally, no.
They teach their subject matter, rarely put their students on display, and make an effort not to make too definite an imprint that reflects their personal taste.
Music and athletics are different.
Too many people – including educators and administrators - confuse the sizzle with the steak in Arts education.
Sizzle = concerts.
Steak = classroom.
After a while, you’ll see every permutation of the sizzle/steak paradigm with music educators and their programs.
The first eighteen years of my music education career, my elementary students did two basic performances: simple choral/instrumental performances and full-blown music theater pieces that I wrote and composed.
The first type of performance occurred several times a year and was usually put together in one or two weeks’ time.
The second type was a full stage, mega Cecil B. DeMille type of Broadway musical. It was always scheduled the second or third week of December with the classroom introduction of story line and music at the beginning of November.
It was grueling. I started writing in the summer time. When the last curtain came down, I always felt like I had been through “da mill”.
School admin see student music presentations primarily as PR: if the shows are good and create good buzz in the parent community then no worries.
On the other hand, administrators fret when there are chronic short comings in concerts because it can create a negative patina that envelops the entire school.
(A concert’s short comings in an admin’s eyes rarely have anything to do with the music; it’s almost always about preparation or some visual faux pas.)
Some music educators have their ego wrapped around these school performances; too self-serving, too much trying to educate the audience with endless introductions, too many flowers, too much “I’d like to thank the Academy” etc.
Other music directors perseverate over these concerts so neurotically with their principal that it appears not just the crux of their job review but their entire life hinges on a perfect concert. Their anxiety over their perceived job performance is unwarranted.
And the majority of these kids grow up to be kids who abandon their participation in music because it wasn’t about them in the first place; it was always about their teachers and their half-baked egos.
I find the phrase “performance opportunity” an over-inflated and over-used entity in music education. It always takes on an erudite air while purporting to be the steak when it is really is the sizzle.
My students were like most kids: they liked to perform, whether for three other kids or twelve-hundred members of their community.
They knew that performances were not my raison d'être – nor should it be theirs. I did my best not to build up expectations or give the idea that “shows” were the culmination of their growth in music; only a snap-shot of them on a specific day doing a certain thing.
The “meat and potatoes” (sorry, vegetarians) was the day-to-day music class – making music every day, not just on the “special” days when we dress up.
I looked at formal student performances like a business card or an occasional sixty-second commercial that emphasized my strengths, creativity, and consistency in music. True, they led to other gigs and revenue streams – but they were focused on students, not me. And I didn’t get our concerts get wrapped around my axel – they just weren’t that crucial to me.
Money can be a funny thing.
Too many music educators confuse an adult, monetized model of musical performance with a child-centric archetype that emphasizes sustained musical growth focusing on the day-to-day work and play that develops into a self-sustaining participation in music in their life.
Some music educators actually think of their student concerts as “gigs” and repeatedly refer to them as such to their students. It’s like they are working with the representatives of the Lollipop Guild.
These are not gigs. These are concerts.
This kind of adult approach to school concertizing reminds me of the faint odor found at child beauty contests where single-digit-aged girls are transformed into catwalk models complete with hair, make-up, and plumage; adults working with kids, trying to make them look and, more importantly, act like adults. (And yes, I was a judge at one. Just once.)
Because I am old and grew up during a time when dinosaurs walked the earth, the way I developed helped formulate my professional educational philosophy for performance.
For me, elementary school concerts and marching band parades were the norm for me from fifth through eighth grade.
In high school, along with concert band, orchestra, and chorus, I became a member of our high school “dance band”, the “De Sales Men”.
Pretty hip name, n’est-ce pas?
Just in case you thought it was a Willie Loman thing, the band was named after the patron saint of our high school, Saint Francis De Sales.
It was a full jazz band with female vocalist. Jazz still had a negative connotation and dancing was something our parents and grandparents approved of so we were a dance band.
We played concerts.
But we also played gigs.
Gigs were different than concerts.
Concerts were for our parents. As our director framed concerts, “your parents have to say you were good because they’re your parents. That’s what parents do”.
Our director actually booked gigs for us.
Paying gigs. With actual money.
Nine-to-one evening gigs where we wore tuxes.
Gigs where no one had to like us unless we were good.
Gigs where the director drove the band bus and took us to VFW halls, high school proms, parks, beef-and-beers, and PTA dinner-dances.
We didn’t drive. Our parents dropped us off at the school at 6:00PM. The director drove us on a school bus to the gig and then, after the gig, dropped us off AT EACH OF OUR HOMES at two or three AM on Sunday mornings.
He couldn’t navigate the bus up my narrow street so he dropped me off a few blocks away.
At 2:30AM.
Like I said, it was a different time.
He pulled the sets from our 500+ tune book.
But the rest of the work was up to us.
We sat up the band stands, the PAs, the band library, and ran the evening as well as when we took breaks.
While we had almost all been in the same diocesan music program since elementary school, we had been trained like little worker bees to set up for concerts. But dance band brought a whole new level of personal responsibility.
We quickly learned a big difference between concerts and gigs.
We sight-read music on gigs.
In front of living people who didn’t have to like us.
As much as we liked concertizing in high school, were never sight-read anything in concert.
We were doing things that adult musicians did.
I was also being hired to play similar sight-reading gigs with union bands.
I now knew the difference between school concerts and gigs.
And I never confused the two again.
After I became a teacher and continued gigging, with the exception of an occasional day time rock concert or evening “sock hop”, I didn’t talk about my gigging with my students. The two topics rarely intersected.
Stacking skills and developing life-long, embedded music habits was more my thing.
Teaching music to me was less Hector with a heroic day of war and more Sisyphus where year after year, you daily punch the clock and assume your position behind the boulder.
Too many kids make music in school and then stop after the curtain comes down in adulthood.
I tried to teach without the curtain.
Even if it’s just a thirty-year-old you and an instrument sitting on your back steps, it’s not that the show has to go on.
It’s that it’s on your terms and not those of your old music teachers.
And hopefully, the music doesn’t stop.
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