Making Flexible Musicians

My experience in middle school and high school band, as best I can recall, did not make me a flexible musician. It is also possible that I just wasn't looking for music at school to be anything more than what it was; a mostly academic experience. I had bands outside of school that were always practicing and performing, and I never felt much a kinship between the two experiences. I was writing, performing, changing, and arranging things on the fly in my basement. I was part of a musical community that valued Do-It-Yourself ethics. In school I marched in strict formations, played Mozart, and strived to emulate the style of Duke Ellington's drummers to the letter. I never tried to make that music mine. It didn't need me to.

I was one of the kids that Brandt Schneider, a music teacher and author of Creating Musical Flexibility Through the Ensemble, would say "floated" through music class. This does not mean I did not enjoy the experience, or that I didn't receive accolades for my playing. I just wasn't that personally invested in what I played in school. There was never a common link. Well, not until I heard John Coltrane's Giant Steps while at a record store. After that, I made the connection, and fell in love with jazz. Unfortunately, by this point, I was a senior. I had played jazz for 6 or 7 straight years in school and never heard Giant Steps. How could this happen?

I was in a public school system that had a very good music program, and therefore performed annually in festivals and the like. I had the experience that Schneider refers to in his article as being a member of a "repertoire machine". And I really didn't learn a ton about music. This absolutely cannot be entirely laid at the feet of the music program I was a part of, but it certainly does speak to Schneider's thoughts regarding redefining what a music program can, and maybe should, teach its students.

When considering core standards, music education does need to be rethought, or at least rearranged, significantly. Schneider puts forth a wonderful example of integrating concepts like composition and exceptional technique into his lessons to the point that his band really did "own" their music and the instruments they used to make it with. To me, this is a very inspiring and heartening testament to all the ways in which we can enrich the lives of our students and community with music. A plaque from a competition doesn't have to be the ultimate goal.

As someone looking to become a music teacher, my public school musical experience sometimes defines what I feel I'm expected to perpetuate. That scares me a little. Not because I feel like it didn't work, but because if music wasn't so important to me personally, would I have kept digging until it all made sense? That being said, I had some fantastic role models as music teachers, and they did what they did well. I feel like I need to find the common connection, much like I did as a senior in high school, that will allow me to integrate myself into what I feel should be taught as well as what I'm expected to teach.