Princeton High School Concert Band, March 23, 2016

     My first day observing was over Spring Break (March 23rd) back at my old high school. I was at Princeton High School in Princeton, Illinois, observing the concert band, who is under the direction of Mr. Brandon Crawford. Being on a block schedule, band is every other day, first thing in the morning from 8:00 until 9:15. The band began by playing a warm-up called Band Basics in D, which consisted of different tonal and scalar warm-ups in the key of D major. Following that, they did the last half of a warm-up called Warm-up in Four Keys, exercises 17 through the end. The last half of that warm-up has to do with being precise on articulations and rhythms because the whole band is in unison. The last three exercises are mini chorales to focus on intonation. Then the band did #1 and #12 from the 16 Bach Chorales, along with the Remington Scale Warm-up in both the keys of concert F and concert Bb.

     The band was getting ready for a concert, so they were fine tuning the beginning and endings of their pieces, focusing on getting them clean, crisp, together, and expressive. They played three pieces, With Every Winter’s Breath, In Storm and Sunshine, and Symphonic Overture. Before each one they played the concert major scale that the piece was in, Eb, Ab, and Bb respectively, followed by the exercises that the Warm-up in Four Keys had for each of the scales. They began by playing each piece all the way through, then Mr. Crawford focused on the musical transition from measures 23-64 in With Every Winter’s Breath, the opening articulations of In Storm and Sunshine, and the grandioso ending of the Symphonic Overture. Being such a small band, almost everyone in there enjoys playing in band or else they wouldn’t be there, so the atmosphere was a positive one. I could tell though that there was a lot of pressure on them though because they were a week away from a concert so the director was being very picky with their performance of the music.

     I liked the concept of Mr. Crawford working diligently on the opening and closing of the pieces, because the first and last sounds that an audience hears are the sounds that they remember. It is important that you start you performance off on the right foot. I thought that doing a ton of warm-ups in the key of each piece before playing it was helpful, but for the time restrictions of the class, I thought it took away from the amount of time that they could have spent working on the piece. I probably would have played each major scale and then moved onto working on the fine tuning of the repertoire. I like the fact that Mr. Crawford has the students sing many of their parts in class along with playing them. He is a vocally trained teacher, but being able to sing your part means that you can hear what is supposed to happen next and should help you perform your part with better intonation. Not being a vocalist, I would still like to have my students sing their repertoire before playing it. Music ensembles usually have aspects of them that relate to other music ensembles, especially when the same teacher teaches all of them, so the concept of singing and working together to make music similarly resembled my choir that I was involved in at the same time in high school.