This past week Drew Forde (aka ThatViolaKid) sent out a bold message: There is no money in classical music.
His article is hard to argue with, and he makes a lot of really great points. I have no doubt he’s ruffling some feathers, but he’s right. If you want to make money from music, classical music is NOT the way to go, and the way we train classical musicians leaves out a lot of the main skills that make musicians valuable. (If you’d like to read the article, click here.)
Drew isn’t the first person to point this out. I’ve heard musicians make the same arguments and propose the same solutions for years, so why are we so slow to change? Why are we still teaching music the same way we have for decades? I’ve been thinking about this a lot for a while, but after reading Drew’s article this week, I think it’s time to start talking about what this means for us as middle and high school teachers.
In his article, Drew lists five skills that musicians need to have to be valuable and competitive in today’s market. I’d like to take a minute to brainstorm some ideas on how to teach these skills in the normal high school orchestra and band classes.
Improvise over chord changes
As a classically-trained violinist, I never learned to improvise until I sought it out on my own a few years ago. Improv was never even mentioned by any of my teachers, even through college. I know I’m not alone in that. How are we supposed to teach students to improvise when we don’t even know how to do it ourselves?
We learn.
Improvisation is a skill, and there are more and more resources out there every day. We can reach out to our colleagues and friends who know more than us and ask for help. We can learn right alongside our students. We can be honest with our students and tell them we don’t know everything but that this is an important (and maybe even fun) part of being a musician.
Compose music
How do you include composition in addition to preparing concert music and teaching technique? It’s tough. If we’re going to start incorporating composition in our performance ensembles, it’s going to take a lot of thought and careful planning – and a ton of sharing between teachers. If you have any ideas, please comment and share them! Here are some things I’ve either done myself or seen other teachers do.
Start small! Composition can be as simple as adding rhythms to different notes of a scale, or coming up with a 4 bar melody that portrays an emotion. Angela Harman (Orchestra Classroom) has some fun, easy composition assignments for her beginning orchestra students that I would encourage you to check out.
Write a film score. This may seem overwhelming, but I’ve done it a couple times with my classes and it’s actually quite accessible and a lot of fun. I choose a short clip of a black and white film from the 1920s or 1930s. I try to choose a clip that either has a lot of action or a couple good characters. We watch the clip as a class, then I break the class into groups and have them come up with a melodic or rhythmic motif, ostinato, or sound effects for different sections of the clip. If you have a couple of strong characters, you can have them come up with a melodic theme for each character. Slapstick humor lends itself well to sound effects. Ostinatos are great for background music where not much is happening.
I’ve done this activity several different ways. One year I actually took all the students’ ideas, wrote them out and harmonized/orchestrated them into a full score that we played at our concert. That was a lot of fun, but also the most work for me. I’ve also done this as a 20 minute activity only using toy percussion instruments. This doesn’t have to be hard or time-consuming.
Last year my orchestras did a collaboration with the drama class that was basically the same idea. The drama class came up with silent skits acting out a myth or fairytale, then my students wrote and performed a score to go along with it. That was a big project that took a few weeks for us.
Allow (and encourage!) your students to compose. Some students want to compose anyway. Just this December one of my students asked if she could write a harmony part to the violin solo in one of our songs. I allowed her to do that and gave her some feedback, and she came up with something that sounded pretty good. We added the harmony part to our performance.
Add a music theory or music production class to your schedule. I know this might not be feasible for everyone, but I love teaching AP Music Theory. I incorporate composition projects throughout the school year, and at the end of the year we do a composition benefit recital where the students perform their own compositions and raise money for a local charity of their choice. It’s so much fun having a class where we can focus on theory and composition in a way we’d never have time to do in a performance ensemble.
Perform as a member of the rhythm section, using extended techniques to add percussive richness
I wish I was better at this. Again, us classically-trained string players just don’t have this kind of training or experience. Because we don’t know how to do this, we don’t teach it. Luckily there are more and more people like Tracy Silverman and Christian Howes out there online providing free resources and paid classes and workshops on this stuff.
I’m also starting to see more and more compositions that include chopping and other percussive effects. Let’s seek those out and start programing more of them.
Adapt to different genres of music
Can we please lose the classical snobbery? Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are amazing. Their music is complex and emotionally moving, but so is music written today. I know this is changing already with more people talking about diversity and equity in music, but we still have a lot of work to do here.
When I take my orchestras to region and state festivals, I still hear the same 10 pieces played over and over again. My state requires solos and ensembles to be “high-quality published music,” and the list of recommended pieces is filled with Mozart, Vivaldi, and Telemann. When my students have chosen to play something more contemporary, the adjudicators have commented on how that is not appropriate for festival.
I want my students to play classical music, jazz, Latin music, film scores, folk songs, and everything in between. Contemporary music has just as much complexity and technical difficulty as classical music – sometimes more. Can we please acknowledge that and embrace it?
Tell compelling stories that capture audience’s imaginations
Okay, so I feel like this might be the area I’m lacking in the most. Most of my students don’t write well or know how to tell compelling stories. Heck, a lot of them struggle to write a complete sentence. I know we’re not English teachers, but I believe it’s important for us to teach students to talk about music. Let me brainstorm some ideas here on how we could incorporate this into our performance classes.
- Regularly listen to different genres of music and practice describing the music using academic vocabulary. (Ex. The composer uses dissonance on the down beat and resolves it immediately after.)
- Have students research the composers and compositions you perform and write performance notes. Include the best ones in your program for the audience to read.
- Have students share their favorite songs with the class and talk about why they like that song and what it means to them.
- Have students introduce each piece in your concert by sharing what was difficult about the piece, what they learned from it, and why they like it.
Whether our students decide to go into music professionally, or just keep music as a side hustle or hobby, these skills are only going to help them be more successful. Change is hard. I know I’m not going to be completely overhauling my program anytime soon, but I am going to try to be a little more intentional about incorporating these skills into my curriculum. Maybe someday “extra-classical musicians” will be the norm.