Call me Maestro

In the movie Dead Poet's Society, Robin Williams character, the English teacher, told his students, if they were really brave, they could call him "Oh Captain, my Captain." And his students did. I have thought it would be funny to insist that my students call me "Maestro" instead of by my surname. I have never been brave enough however to ask this of my students.

Why not though? Maestro is just Italian for teacher, which I am. Maestro is the traditional title for a professional conductor, and aren't I a conductor too? I can just imagine a parent getting upset that I insisted their child call me Maestro, and just who the heck do I think I am anyway?

Titles aside, conducting is a very important part of the job of a band director and something that needs to be taken seriously whether you're conducting the AAA High School band that wins all kids of contests, or the hokey pokey elementary school band that's playing one liners out of the beginning band method book.

When I was a band geek fresh out of high school and beginning my career as a music ed. major (which is really just another way of saying band geek) those in my cohort all had the same goal in mind: we wanted to be big time high school band directors. We spent our time perfecting our conducting gestures and thinking of the day we would conduct First Suite in Eb by Holst and Variation on America by Ives with our own award winning high school band. As we got closer to graducation we came the the realization that most of us were going to hokey pokey elemntary school or home on the range middle school and not AAA high like we had always dreamed. No matter where you end up, those conducting skills you worked so hard to acquire by spending time in from of the mirror while listening to Fredrick Fenell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble will not have been spent in vain.

Like so many of my classmates my first job, and my second (which I still hold today) were at Home, Home on the Range Middle School HHOTRMS (not it's real name). While in both of those jobs I had my top concert band, but most of my job was teaching beginngers (at my first HHOTRMS job I actually spend half of my day at Hokey Pokey Elementary School HPES). When conducting the HPES or the HHOTRMS beginning band in their performance of Jingle Bells, or Mary Anne I decided that I had two choices: I could stand there and wave my stick "floor, door, wall, ceiling" over and over while the students ignored that I existed, or I could actually conduct and lead the students. Why settle for the former? It relegates my role as the conductor to a mere back ground dancer, and, as I have pointed out to my students before, I am a lousy dancer.

Even from the first three note songs that can be found in any beginning band method there are musical elements that the condcutor can and should bring to the attention of the musicians in the band. How else will they now that it's more appropriate to breath at the end of the fourth bar of jingle bells rather than breathing every bar, or worse, between every note! How else can we demonstrate the stylistic difference between the stacatto notes in Polly Wolly Doodle and the lyrical style of a warm-up chorale.

I realized in my second or third year of teacher that I conducted my beginning bands with as much gusto as I did my concert bands and it made a difference. I team taught with a colleague 2 years and there was a difference in how the band played under the different direcotrs, even when playing one liners out of the method book.

Perhaps this would make a good topic for a disertation or thesis. I could collect video tapes of various conductors leading their groups and to some sort of analysis on both the quality of the condcuting and on the quality of the performance, but perhaps there is to my subjectiveness in that reasearch.

For now I can call myself Maestro in my head and I'll continue conducting my beginings like they're AAA High School or the New York Philharmonic for that matter.