Thomas J. West Music

Even before the final strains of the December Winter Concert float into the air, I am already contemplating repertoire selection for my spring concert. Choosing concert repertoire is one of the most important decisions that the director of a public school performing ensemble has to make. You spend countless hours working with your students on that material, and the technical and aesthetic content of those pieces comprises the bulk of what they will learn about musicianship and skill building this school year. Add to that important notion the obvious need to carefully consider the difficulty level, instrumentation, and orchestration of the repertoire you are selecting to make certain that it meets the needs of every section of your ensemble. Is the French horn part out of range for your young horn section? Is the cello part challenging enough for the veterans in your orchestra? How much polyphony is really going on between the upper woodwinds and the mallet percussion?

Choosing repertoire is an extremely important process that I discuss in more detail in this article.

In "the old days" (say, 10 years ago), an ensemble director would have to resort to relying on their own prior experience with repertoire, study scores at a music retailer, or listen to demo CD's from publishers and the J.W. Pepper catalogue. When listening to those recordings, however, you often did not have access to the score, so determining the difficulty level of inner parts could be difficult. So, you make some hard choices and hope for the best.

Man, that method is so 2002!

In 2012, you can peruse thousands of titles for band and orchestra for all ages and ability levels using the Smart Music library. The best part: every title has a quality recording of the full ensemble and will display on screen every part in the score! You can listen to indivieual parts played back by midi piano as well, both with or without the ensemble recording. Want to see if there's enough to do for your percussion section? Call up the percussion 1 and 2 parts. Check the technical demands being placed on the upper woodwinds? No problem.

For this spring, I needed two to three pieces for string ensemble.  I have 6th through 12th grade strings, some of whom are new to the instrument, so repertoire in the J.W. Pepper "medium easy" category is about the right level. So, I searched the Smart Music library for string ensemble pieces at the ME level and got a list of about 7 or 8 screens worth of repertoire with 50 titles per page. I was looking for a grade 2 string ensemble piece with percussion that I could use with my combined high school and middle school strings, and I found it in Robert Sheldon's "African Adventure". Perusing each part revealed that my most inexperienced students would be able to master the violin 2, 3, viola, and cello parts by concert time. My high school and advanced middle school students could easily hold down the violin 1 part.

Second, I needed a "stretch" piece for my high school and advanced middle school strings students. I found the perfect piece in Richard Meyer's "Geometric Dances", grade 3. This three movement work was the winner of the Texas Orchestra Directors Association Composition Contest in 1996. A meaty first violin part for my strongest players, accessible yet challenging parts for other voices, and some percussion in the third movement made this piece a home run. Plus, Richard Meyer's music is incredibly well-crafted and a lot of fun to play and listen to.

Smart Music made it possible for me to listen to each of these pieces, view the parts, and make my important choices for the life of my students this winter and spring. On top of that, since both pieces are in the Smart Music library, students can use Smart Music as a practice tool to help themselves prepare and master their parts. This will be particularly handy for the fiddle music the first violins are called upon to perform in movement 1 of the Meyer piece, which is entitled "Square Dance" (geometric... square... get it?)

To gain access to the Smart Music library, you need a year's subscription. For the amount of time and energy Smart Music is saving me, it's worth every penny.

This article (c) 2012 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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