Thomas J. West Music

A music stand Chritmas tree created by my Digital Music Composition students

This past Tuesday was the Winter Instrumental Music Concert for my school. Our instrumental concerts are 5th through 12th grade students performing on guitar and orchestral instruments (including winds and percussion).

The guitar repertoire was primarily original compositions written for guitar ensemble by our guitar teacher expressly for the experience level of each individual guitar class. They were, in my opinion, some of the best performances from our guitar students to date. Definitely a success.

My students performed in duets, quartets, small ensembles, and two numbers for the combined 5-12th grade Chamber Orchestra, a 30-piece ensemble. Our repertoire was a grade 2 string ensemble version of Verdi's Anvil Chorus and a grade 3 string quartet version of Handel's Hallelujah from The Messiah. For these string arrangements, I write the wind and percussion parts myself.

My high school strings students (only five of them) also performed the Latham quartet arrangement of one of the movements of Handel's Water Music along with my own arrangment of Lift the Wings from the Broadway show Riverdance. My two high school cellists, two very accomplished young ladies, also played their own concocted arrangment of Carol of the Bells. Excellent stuff.

Challenges, Successes, and Revisions

Programming for my students is very challenging. With such a small ensemble and such a wide range of ability, it is virtually impossible to find something that works for everyone. There are students in my middle school classes who just started on their instrument for the first time this September playing in the same class with students who have been playing their instrument for 5 or more years.

Playing string ensemble arrangements with the combined group means that the wind instruments have to play in two, three, and four sharps on a regular basis. Any kind of polyphony is extremely challenging for the younger musicians. If I go the other way and get concert band arrangements, the string parts I write are in flat keys with inherent intonation problems for novice string students.

So the question becomes, is the experience of playing in a larger ensemble important enough for my young musicians to experience to justify giving them repertoire that presents them with challenges that they really have to stretch in order to accomplish?

Currently, we only have a single 150 minute rehearsal  as a combined 30-piece ensemble outside of the concert dress rehearsal to put the ensemble together. The students work on their parts are separate classes throught the fall, but really don't hear the full piece until this rehearsal. I wrote watered-down parts for the winds and the beginner strings for Hallelujah, but they still stuggled to get them played.

The results?

Anvil Chorus was perfrormed well from an ensemble standpoint. It still lacked the dynamic contrasts written and had to be taken below performance tempo, but the students felt successful with it. String players were moderately successful at observing bowings. Wind players were moderately successful at playing the correct key signature.

Hallelujah was less successful. We had several ensemble tears during the performance but managed to make it to a solid ending. The more polyphonic sections of the piece were muddled at best. The homophonic ensemble sections went well. Needless to say, dynamic contrast was necessarily neglected.

The small ensemble duets and quartets performed by my middle school students varied in quality. I allow the students to have class time to rehearse the pieces themselves. I serve only as coach, so ultimately the quality of the performance is up to them.

A Learning Experience

For many of my students, performing in these small ensembles and the combined Chamber Orchestra was quite a learning experience. Having to function as an ensemble member is definitely a valuable experience.

I do believe, however, after this experience, that the beginners need a more rudimentary experience. The beginner strings did play some of the Suzuki Twinkle Variations as a small ensemble, and my middle school winds class, including the beginners, played In Dulci Jublio as a song in the round, which was in concert Bb and at an appropriate level of difficulty for the new performers in this class.

And what did the teacher learn? It's time to diversify more and to increase the level of expectations for all parties involved, including the teacher.

So, unless the students commit to more after school rehearsals for the Chamber Orchestra, I am going to rethink my game plan for the spring. Some choices I have made:

• Only one combined chamber orchestra piece: a grade 2 full orchestra arrangment of Sibelius's Finlandia
• A piece for only my 7th and 8th grade students combined with my high schoolers that has more technical challenge to it.
• Every student will be required to memorize a song from the level 1 or 2 Suzuki books. They will perform them from memory in small groups for the spring concert
• I will write an original arrangement for the middle school winds class. They requested something jazzy.
• My high school students will be performing some of their own compositions along with a few other ensemble pieces and also a piano trio piece for my top violinist, one of my cellists, and the second cellist who is also an accomplished pianist.

By the way, the parents and my administrators thought that the concert was excellent and couldn't be more pleased with the results. After making these adjustments and increasing the level of expectations, they will hopefully find the spring concert to be even more of an accomplishment.

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