Last February, my music team put on a Faculty Recital to raise money for our program. You can now watch the entire thing on YouTube. Aside from a fairly stressful week or two coming up on the date, it was fairly easy to put together. Note: we had a lot of parent support and leadership. It turned out to be a great way to share our passion and musicianship with our students, all while making money to support the program in the process. Nothing beats hearing your colleagues practice in the rare five minute gaps between classes, planning, and putting out one of the 600 fires that come up each day as a teacher.
đź”— 8 Ways to Spend a Lesson when your Student has not Practiced – Carlos Gardels, pianist
8 Ways to Spend a Lesson when your Student has not Practiced – Carlos Gardels, pianist:
Unless one has the luxury of teaching only the most devoted and driven of music students (or children of the most devoted and driven of parents), a reality that must be faced by teachers is that at the majority of lessons, week after week, month after month – the amount of practice we hold ideal for our students is simply not met. When I started out teaching, during such lessons I would plunder with as much enthusiasm as I could muster as the student plodded through their piece, asking “What note is that?” for what felt like the 33rd billionth time that week. (My apologies to my students at the time!!) As the years went on, however, I came to realize that – in a certain light – a student coming to a lesson with virtually nothing to show was an opportunity that could be capitalized on. Since we have a certain number of minutes to fill, we might well fill them to the extent our imaginations will allow.
The following are a list of activities that have proven fruitful and interesting in most circumstances, and I hope that they will be able to aid you in dispelling the inevitably occasional boredom that accompanies our profession, and enrich the minds of any students who could benefit from them. I’ll state that not all of the things on this list are mine – some have been adapted from ideas by wonderful colleagues I’ve had the pleasure to know from around the world (both in person and in cyberspace), and I’ve attempted to give due credit where merited.
Some great tips in this list. Be sure to click the link. As is usual with articles like this, some of these are just good teaching practices in general. I actually include a little bit of “practicing how to practice” in every single lesson I teach, even if in small bite sized pieces and for short periods of time. I would add to the list that there are a lot of things you can do with equipment management and maintenance. And in the world of percussion (my area) there are infinite little niche instruments and styles to dig into that don’t always get weekly attention. Tuning a drum head, learning hand drum basics, auxiliary instrument technique, etc. all fall into my regular rotation of things to do when a student didn’t come prepared. It goes without saying that some of these essentials get taught no matter what, I just change their place in the sequence when a student is obviously not ready to progress on the weekly assignment.
Of course, these strategies, or any I have devised on my own, always come paired with the inevitable parent conversation afterwards, paraphrased rather cynically below:
“I love working with your child and I love making money, but it isn’t valuable for you are your child to practice in my basement while I check my email.”
Past student, Evan Chapman, gets interviewed for Modern Drummer magazine
Read the interview here: Evan Chapman of Square Peg Round Hole: Juniper Album, “Name Not One Man” Video World Premiere | Modern Drummer Magazine
Wow! Check out past student of mine, Evan Chapman, in this interview with Modern Drummer Magazine.
The interview celebrates Evan’s band, Square Peg Round Hole, their new (and fantastic) album, Juniper, and the world premiere of their “Name Not One Man” music video.
Square Peg Round Hole combines the best of electronic, post rock, and contemporary percussion idioms. I can tell Evan is totally nerding out explaining some of the grooves on the record (which are just as inspired by the band’s classical/contemporary percussion background as they are modern rock and electronic):
MD: In “A-frame” off of Juniper, there’s a groove around the three-minute mark with single hi-hat hits that first occur a 16th note after the backbeat, and then during the second half of the phrase they sound like they come before it. It almost creates this push-pull motion, or feels like the groove is swirling. Do you have any specific approach to writing patterns like this?
Evan: This kind of writing draws from my love for process music. I’ll admit that I’m a total nerd when it comes to math in music, and I’m fascinated with permutations and serialism. On a larger scale, the group will often throw in compositional processes like addition, diminution, and phasing. But on a smaller scale, I’ll occasionally throw permutations into my drum parts. The “A-Frame” groove that you’re referring to is a subtle example of that. A more obvious example is the ending of “Unraveling,” where the bell of my ride cymbal cycles between every fourth 16th, then every third, then every second, then every downbeat, and then back again through the cycle in reverse. Like I said, I’m a nerd.
The SPRH sound has the rich expanse of a modern rock ensemble, all coming from just three percussionists. Rock music can be straightforward and often improvised. Likewise, a lot of SPRH ideas don’t strike the ear as very complex at first, but the sound is very intently composed.
MD: At certain points it feels like standard drum grooves are dropped in favor of creating more of a percussive approach. For instance, using floor toms almost as a melody instrument. Is there any concept behind this approach?
Evan: I’m generally drawn to drummers who think more like composers and percussionists. Glenn Kotche is a perfect example of this. He’s expanded his drumset to be more like a multi-percussion setup, which causes him to think about his parts differently. I think along those same lines, using different drums and cymbals as different parts of the melody. I use a non-traditional setup with SPRH, which also inspires me to come up with more unique parts.
Our floor toms are a very large part of our sound and the drum patterns that develop between Sean [M. Gill] and me. Sean plays a floor tom in his setup as well, and we’re often coming up with patterns that work together to create something that no single player could achieve. During the section beginning at 6:07 in “Unraveling,” the two of us build a hocketing drum part in an additive way. With every repetition, Sean builds his part note-by-note from the back to the front, and I build mine from the front to the back. The result is a section that gradually evolves from seemingly chaos to a powerful groove.
Not to mention, it is very gracious for Evan to list me as an influence during his musical education, of which I am honored to have had any part in.
After John Gleason retired from teaching drums, I went on to study with several other wonderful private instructors—Grant Menefee, Scott Tiemann, and Robert Burns—who each taught me a unique set of skills including orchestral, Brazilian, and Afro-Cuban percussion, four-mallet marimba, chart reading, sight reading, and more. All of this prepared me for a degree in music.
Check out Square Peg Round Hole. Congratulations Evan!
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