[Dixielandjazz] Required reading for ALL bands

[Dan Augustine]

>Subject: This should be required reading for all Band Officers
>Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 20:12:26 -0500
>
>by Peter Greene
>One of the great challenges of band leadership is concert
>programming. Many well-meaning directors suffer under the quaint
>notion that programming is somehow related to informed andintelligent
>choices based on an understanding of quality music. This sad
>misconception is the product of excessive education and has led to
>more than a few directors (actually, these poor guys are just as
>likely to call themselves "conductors") to find themselves facing a
>silent audience, staring out like a young doe caught in the
>headlights of a van full of Metallica fans. Don't blame these guys;
>no doubt they also watch PBS and have never even owned a lava lamp.
>
>Band concerts were never meant to be Major Cultural Events. Culture
>is for orchestra-goers, who neither expect nor desire to be
>entertained. The strength of the American band has always been a
>relentless mixture of kitsch and class and eclectic middle-brow
>culture-mulch. Nowhere else in the world of performance can you
>expect to find the works of Beethoven, Jerome Kern, Michael
>Jackson, and Kenny Rogers side by side. Bands
>cannot be programmed like anything else in the universe. Even Sousa
>spent a few years playing to indifferent response before he mastered
>this arcane and barely scrutable art. However, I offer
>you the following system to help, at least a bit. This scale is
>designed primarily for your basic hometown adult band, but can be
>applied to a school concert band as well. It may not be applicable to
>anything calling itself a wind symphony. I call this the Binmore
>scale, named for my grandparents, who didn't know music, but they
>knew what they liked.
>
>First spot the potential program piece five points just for good
>luck. Then consider the following.
>
>PULSE: Add two points for a strong two or four beat pulse. You may
>also add two points for or 3/4 time if it is a nicely gliding one-beat. One
>point for 6/8 if beaten in two. No points for a pulse so slow that, in a
>human, it would require CPR. Minus one for exotic tempi such as 5/4. You
>cannot hold your audience's attention if it is distracted by 
>spasmodic foot tapping.
>
>FAKE ENDINGS: Subtract one half point for each false ending. Few
>things can discourage an audience more than a clear and convincing
>cadence followed by the whole damn thing starting up again.
>
>STYLE: Subtract two points for any work whose main appeal is that it's
>"pretty." Let's be honest. There are only a few bands in the country
>that can pull off pretty, and yours probably isn't one of them. Subtract
>three points if the program notes refer to instrumental color or use the
>term "tone poem."
>
>FAMILIARITY: Add two points for recognizable themes or melodies.
>This is where knowing your audience is vital and educating them is a
>lifelong project. There are certain sure bets. Few audiences won't to
>recognize the stirring strains of "The Lone Ranger Theme" or Wagner's
>famous "Kill the Wabbit." Other pieces can become familiar to an
>audience through sheer, dogged repetition.
>
>REAL DIFFICULTY: Be honest. If you have a grade two band playing
>grade six music, subtract one to three points depending on the degree
>of mutilation.
>
>PERCEIVED DIFFICULTY: This involves a principle well known to
>performers in the world of dance. Twenty dancers can perform
>intricate,extensively rehearsed maneuvers of great difficulty and skill,
>but the audience will only applaud wildly after eight girls stand side by s
>ide and kick. If your piece goes really fast with lots of notes or involves a
>trumpet player turning purple and popping a lung out of his bell,
>give it one point for each awe-inspiring passage.
>
>GENRE: Here you need to know your material and your players, because
>there are someoutstanding exceptions to this rule. However, in
>general, when a concert band attempts works from the realm of rock,
>jazz or swing, it works about as well as when Cousin Mell's
>barbershop quartet attempted Handel's Messiah. If you have to explain
>swing to your clarinets, or your Dixie ensemble has to read the
>music, you're in trouble. Subtract up to 3.
>
>MONOTONY : Subtract one point for every repeated section over
>twenty-four bars. Subtract two if the section is over sixty bars. You
>may give yourself a break if you do something substantially different
>the second time through. Anything longer than one page of player
>music with no noticeable variation in dynamics, tempo, or style must
>give up one point. This may be the fault of the composer, the
>players, or the director, but it will not matter to your audience
>who's to blame for boring them.
>
>NOVELTY: Any extra special touch will help, however small or corny,
>as long as you don't go completely berserk. A real fire engine beside
>the band stand blaring away on "The Midnight Fire Alarm" is good, but not
>if you start to hose down the audience. Add one point.
>
>VOCAL SOLOIST: This is a completely subjective, non-musical call (and
>yes, I hear you out there saying, "Of course, because vocalists have
>nothing to do with music"). The vocalist will not be judged on
>quality, but on community popularity. In the average small market,
>everyone's beloved Aunt Minerva, who sings those lovely solos over to
>the Methodist church, will always be a bigger hit than the most
>gifted pro. Add two points if Minerva can really sing; one point if
>she's merely beloved.
>
>ENTHUSIASM: The band's, that is. If your band really loves to play a
>particular piece, their enthusiasm will transcend a large number of
>technical flaws. Live audiences love to watch performers having a
>good time. This is one prime reason that Regular Folks don't flock to
>the symphony. Americans respond to people who love their work, and
>orchestras generally give the impression that they have all been
>rushed to the concert at gunpoint from an afternoon of root canal.
>Yes, it may be a distraction if the trumpets share a spontaneous 
>high five after a
>series of difficult runs, but your audience will love you for it. 
>Add two points.
>
>TONALITY: Or lack thereof. Maybe your audience will like a modern
>composition like "Fantasia on a Tone Cluster," but I doubt it.
>Subtract one point. Score each individual piece and then check your 
>score against
>the following scale.
>11 and up: Stars and Stripes Forever with fireworks
>and the piccolo section on a hydraulic lift; a definite winner.
>
>5-10: Workable, but unlikely to risk the health of any weakhearted
>audience members.
>
>0-4: This will make a good popcorn break during informal concerts;
>generally referred to by audiences as "that whaddyacallit you played
>last week I think."
>
>Negative numbers: Now we're in the realm of pieces
>such as John Cage's arrangement of "Prelude to Afternoon of a Faun"
>and other works guaranteed to make your audiences beat a hasty
>retreat to the mall.
>
>Once you have the individual works scored, work out your total program
>score. In addition to the scores of the individual works, make the
>following computations.
>
>DURATION: Subtract one point for every ten minutes over an hour that
>your program runs. If it runs over two hours, subtract all your
>points.
>
>70 and above: Now would be a good time to start that fund raising
>campaign.
>
>45-69: The audience won't dislike it, but they may not
>remember having been there, either.
>
>25-44: Publicize this as "An Evening with the Chinese Water Torture."
>
>0-24: Not even the players in the band want to be there.
>
>A final important note. Good announcing can cover a multitude of
>sins and enhance any number of strengths. Announcing can, for
>instance, raise the audience's perception of a piece's difficulty 
>("Folks, we'd
>just like to take a moment for silent prayer before we attempt this next
>piece") or help them spot the interesting features in a work ("In the
>following piece, you'll hear the oboe make a noise that can actually 
>peel paint
>off walls") Announcers can help clear the audience's palate. They can
>personalize the members of the band so that the Aunt Minerva effect
>kicks in. And they can help educate the audience so that the
>familiarity of works can grow over the years.
>
>Announcing actually deserves its own separate article, but I do have
>to pass along one piece of critical advice: DO NOT LET THE DIRECTOR
>TALK TO THE AUDIENCE. There's only one Leonard Bernstein, and he
>probably isn't working for you. Okay, maybe you got lucky, but in
>general directors fall into the "interminable babble," 
>"incomprehensible babble,"
>condescending babble," or "babbling babble" categories. I have seen 
>a real live
>band present a two hour concert containing 45 minutes of music and 75 minutes
>of director-speak. This is not a band concert; it is a lecture with
>musical interludes and that's not what your audience signed up for.

-- 
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**  Dan Augustine  --  Austin, Texas  --  ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu
**     "Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors
**      and several miles away." -- Sir Thomas Beecham               
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