You can't take the "Band" out of the "Band Geek" but you can take the German and French out of Zimbabwe

I've found a way to continue shepherding along the next generation of band geeks. I should mention here that it was now my own idea, nor is it particularly unique as I know there are many elementary schools that do this. My school has a marimba band (I guess that makes me the marimba band director!). I inherited the ensemble from my predecessor who inherited it from her predecessor, but I am just now starting up our regular rehearsal for the year. Now that I'm into it, next year we'll probably start sooner!

The trouble with the label "marimba band" is that most of the instruments we play are technically xylophones. Orff xylophones to be exact. Stranger yet, our Orff (who was German) xylophones are actually made in France! We play music that is in the style of Zimbabwean marimba music. It gets more twisted, all of our "Zimbabwean" music is written by a guy from Seattle. That's right: we play Zimbabwean music by a guy from Seattle on German instruments made in France. How's that for a "multi-cultural" lesson plan?

Our school is actually lucky enough to own one home-made marimba that was made by last year's HXB elementary students with the help of a local dude who does that sort of thing. It is indeed the nicest sounding instrument in the room. I say, "Great idea! what could be more band-geeky that building your own instrument?" I think back to my college days while the double reed players (and lets face-it, they are some of the geekiest in the band, are they not?) spent hours in and out of rehearsal hunched over their mandrills, plaques, hollow ground reed knifes and the like making reeds for every situation that they might encounter in a performance. My students instead will be hunched over chunks of African hardwood with safety glasses, mallets, and chisels to tune the marimba bars.

I made a small marimba at home for practice a couple of weeks ago. It actually looks an awful lot like an Orff soprano xylophone, but has a bit of a rounder tone with longer sustain (I presume it is because the bars on this instrument are much longer than the bars on my classroom xylophones that produce a similar pitch. My students were impressed, although some seemed more impressed with the marimba's resonator box which was made of scrap plywood I had sitting around the basement rather than the fact that it took a fair amount of patience to tune the 13 bars to the correct pitches!



The next step is to build the real deal with the students help. About half of my current students were in the group last year and assisted in the first build. I'm going to be a bit more ambitious than my predecessor as I am doing it all without the help of her expert (I'll save a load of $$ that way) AND my plan is to build 2 instruments instead of just one. If I can build a couple of instruments each year it will only take me a a couple of years until we can all play on our hand made marimbas and save the Orff instruments for class (which is good, because they take a bit of a beating with the enthusiastic playing of the marimba band).

We'll still be playing Zimbabwean style music from Seattle on instruments made locally, but at least the design is authentic and the wood if from Africa.

By the seat of our collective pants

Have you ever stopped to consider how much different the job of a music teacher is from the job of any other? I'm not trying to say that one job is easier or harder, they are just very different.

Imagine that you were hired to teach 7th grade math. Chances are, you would find in your classroom a nice fat text book that was officially adopted by the district's or state's school board. Open the book to page one, and there is the first lesson. What do you do when you finish lesson one? Turn the page and you move on to lesson two.

Now let's take a look at the music teacher. Unless you are teaching beginning band, chances are there isn't such a curriculum for you to rely on. Yes, there are method books that are used at levels above beginner, but you certainly couldn't rely on such a book as your soul curricular resource.

I'm now off to begin my career as an elementary music teacher, and I realized, that while I had no trouble as a band director with this void of curriculum that I had to make up as I went (a band class can easily be defined by its performances) Music is a very broad subject. My state has some very vague standards that need to be met by certain benchmarks, but leaves all of the intermediate steps up to the educator. For example, the first rhythmic concept found in our standards in at grade 3 in which students are supposed to be able to read patterns of quarter notes, pairs of eighth notes, and quarter rests. It is left to the teacher to figure out when and how these concepts should be introduced so they are mastered by third grade. I am excited to start this new career, but a bit nervous that my job is so vaguely defined.

P.S. I, in no way, mean to imply that the jobs of other class room teachers are easy. Just that they are better defined than the job of the music teacher. Also, I realize that the experienced math teacher (or any other subject teacher) is not likely to just go from page to page blindly following the lesson plans in the book. After all, we are all experts at teacher and our respective subjects and can tell when supplemental instruction, beyond what is found in the book, is needed.