You step up to your podium, facing a classroom full of students ready to start playing. You finish your tuning routine and then think “Now what?” Shouldn’t you do some sort of warmup before you jump into rehearsing the pieces? Do you just run through some scales and method book exercises and then move on? How much time do you need to spend on warmups anyway? Are they even necessary?
If you’ve ever had this kind of conversation with yourself, you’re not alone. I know I was never taught what to do for an orchestral warmup. In high school, my orchestra director had one sheet of warmup exercises that we repeated every day for the whole three years I was in his class. We had them memorized. In my college orchestras, we never had any sort of warmup; we tuned and then started rehearsing. So when I started teaching my own orchestras, I had no idea what to do to warm up my groups.
My epiphany with warmups came after a few years of teaching high school and realizing that most of my students didn’t take private lessons and never would. I needed them to know skills that were simply beyond their ability level because no one had ever taught them. That was it! I needed to take that time at the beginning of class to teach my students to play, to teach the skills that they might have learned from a private teacher if they had one.
Fast forward several years and lots of classes, books, and mistakes, I now spend a significant part of my class working on what I now call “fundamental time.” We spend anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes every day learning the basics, and it’s made a huge difference in how my groups play. Just the other day I was looking around while my students played, proud (and honestly, somewhat surprised) to see every single student playing with a beautiful vibrato, matching bow strokes, and comfortably shifting up into the higher positions, in an orchestra where only a handful of students take private lessons and some of the students have only been playing for a couple of years.
I’ll be writing a whole series of posts about warmups and exercises to do with your students, but here’s an example of what I might do with a class:
- Rhythm exercises: We work on rhythm almost every single day of class. Most of my students come to me horrifically bad at rhythms and I start at the very beginning with everyone every year. I consider a thorough rhythm curriculum an absolute necessity.
- Left hand technique: This covers a wide range of skills, from intonation to vibrato to shifting and scales. I don’t work on every left hand skill every day, but we do some sort of left hand technique exercise every class.
- Right hand technique: Again, there is quite a bit that goes into right hand technique. We start with bow hold and tone production, then move on to dynamic control and overall bow control while learning the main bow strokes they’ll need to know, like detaché, martelé, spiccato, etc.
- Ensemble skills: Ensemble playing is a whole separate set of skills for students to learn. We don’t work on this all the time, but we often spend time learning to follow the conductor, how to match bows, and how to start and end together. We also sight read together almost daily.
- Improv practice: I’m fairly new to teaching improv, but I’ve found a lot of my students really love it and it’s great for developing their ear and musical awareness. For now, I only do this with my more advanced students, but I’m hoping to do more of it as I become more comfortable with it myself.
I also try to adjust our warmups to specifically address some of the issues in our current repertoire. If we have a piece that uses a lot of dynamic contrast, we spend more time working on dynamics, bow control, and tone quality. If we have a piece that requires 4th position for the violins, we spend time doing 4th position exercises. Later during class when we’re working on that piece, I can refer back to our warmups and help the students apply what they’ve learned to the music.
If you’re just starting out, there are so many resources available to you if you know where to look. The ASTA curriculum helped me figure out what skills I needed to teach my students and how to sequence it, and ASTA has a lot of other great resources as well. Finding a good method book is a must. There are lots of good method books out there, but there is no method book that covers everything. You will have to supplement any method book you choose. YouTube is a wealth of ideas. If you aren’t a native string player, I highly recommend starting there and using videos with your students. I love the String Technique videos made by Michael Hopkins. I also have found a lot of resources on YouTube for teaching improv, especially Christian Howes’ videos. There are also several websites with great ideas, like the bowing exercises on orchestrateacher.net, the games and ideas from Angela Harman’s website, or the rhythm curriculum from stringskills.com. I’ve also written my own book of warmups that is available on Teachers Pay Teachers, if you’re interested.
Remember, it will take time to figure out warmups. Take it in small chunks. Also, be prepared for some complaints from your students. When I first started doing more fundamentals, my students complained that we should be spending more time on our pieces. That’s gotten better as my students have seen how much they’ve improved by practicing the fundamentals every day. Good luck on your journey, and don’t give up!