Building an Audience

Should music educators be concerned with building an audience for their music program?

This is an incredibly important question, and I think that however one answers it philosophically, the reality prevails: the benefits of generating an audience or "fanbase" for your music program are too great to be ignored.

As arts teachers in today's world, the more support there is for our programs the better. We cannot possibly have enough support. While it is unfortunate that we must constantly look for outside support to justify our programs, there is also a benefit to this: we can generate support. Not just a little, but a lot. We can generate a thriving fan community if we work hard enough. Other disciplines have no opportunities to generate community support in this way. Sure, they are reliably funded from the district, but parents and community leaders rarely turn out to show their support of the math program, no matter how good it is. With an effective music program and marketing strategy, concerts and shows can become important community events whose value is evident. And what more could we ask for than the value of our programs being evident?

I'm sure that there are thousands of opinions on how best to generate an audience, but I am going to suggest some methods that come from my background in dealing with rock and indie bands that I think would be both unique and effective for a secondary music program.

1. Quantity. Play as often as possible. Book the maximum amount of performances. Bands need both exposure and performance practice to become community staples, and this gives them both. There will obviously be limitations for a high school group, especially if it is large- but it isn't necessarily one specific band that you need at every event. You simply need groups of students (big or small) that represent the music program.
2. Get online. And I don't mean have a website, or have a YouTube page. I mean actively cultivate the program's social media. This is how people find things these days, and you need to be easy to find. Post things the band is working on, take polls and suggestions from parents and non-music students, do social media raffles, get people following you because they want to access your page's content. Make your social media presence such that someone in California would want to follow your page simply because it's a great page to follow. Get students involved in this process, they know better than anyone what works.
3. Play music that people want to hear. Cater to your audience. Surely you should make your own artistic decisions as a group as well, but always consider what the audience wants. The more you give them what they want to hear, the more they'll come back to hear it. Also, play covers! Cover pop tunes and put them on YouTube- maybe even regularly. Nobody is on YouTube searching for the name of your band, but they are searching the name of their favorite song...
4. Entertain people. Music is entertainment, and I don't think there's any shame in playing that up. Make sure that concerts and shows are enjoyable places to go with plenty to do. Combine events with other performing groups and other disciplines entirely. Teach people how to dance to the music you play. Have people participate. Break down the wall between performers and audience. 

These are just a few ideas, but I suppose I could boil it down to one overarching concept. If one wants to generate and sustain an audience, they need to engage with that audience as much as humanly possible. Seek every way to engage with the community, parents, and other kids. Most of all, give that audience something tangible to engage with, not just a seated performance twice a year!

Creating a Love of Music

In the last year of my life I have done a great deal of thinking on the subject of music education. Topics of interest have ranged from the very purpose of education itself to the costs and benefits of different solfège syllables. But perhaps the most important discussion I've had so far was a quick one in our Secondary Methods class about defining a singular objective for one's music program. Discussion progressed around the table as we each came up with one idea that we felt was most crucial to pass on to our students. Said in other terms: if our students were to leave our program with just one thing- what would it be?

Since that conversation I have started to apply this way of thinking to all of my thoughts on education. How often in our schooling (music and otherwise) did we leave the room with a take-away that was totally different than what the teacher wanted? How much of what I remember from high-school represents teacher-planned objectives? When you multiply this sentiment across the 180 or so classes you take in a subject per year, the question is only magnified. What was the one thing my sophomore U.S. History teacher wanted me to take from her course? Did I get it? Did I leave with "the point"? Or did I leave with something entirely different? Did the teacher think and plan for this, or did I simply leave with the unplanned, culminating result of the individual classes I sat through?

Personally, as I enter the field the education, I find this concept simultaneously daunting and encouraging.

On the one hand, it means that we as teachers must be purposeful in everything we do. Too often we teach things disparately without thinking about the fact that what truly matters is what's left 10 years later when the student has forgotten the specifics.

On the other hand, it's liberating to remember that the true goal of your program can be singular, simple, and something that- with enough effort- you are sure to impart on your students.

So what is that goal for me?

I want to pass on music's power, influence, and above all- accessibility. 

I hope that my students will leave my class understanding harmony. I hope that my students will improvise effectively. I hope that my students will feel comfortable composing. But I need my students to see music as something they have the power to interact with.

So what does an ideal world look like if this is my guiding principle? I would want every student to leave my class self-identifying as a musician. I would want every student to leave with a love of music, and I would want every one of them to continue interacting with music on some level for the rest of their lives. I recognize this as idealistic, but I truly believe it to be possible in theory- particularly if supported through the entirety of a child's education.

How does one cultivate this love of music and desire to continue "musicing?" I believe by handing music over to the students.

A great teacher allows students to take ownership of what they do. A great teacher fosters an environment where students learn on their own. A great teacher serves as a model and resource for students, demonstrating what students didn't even know they were capable of.

As much as I want to share my love of music with students and transmit it to them- I have never fallen in love with something because someone asked or told me to. I have fallen in love with things I have experienced and done. I fell in love with music because I fell in love with doing it.

While watching the inspirational story of Conrad Johnson and the Kashmere Stage Band, I recognized many of the qualities that I think will help me to achieve my aforementioned objective.

"Prof" Johnson understood that handing the music to his students was necessary to foster the love and lasting power of his music program. He worked tirelessly to bring their music into the curriculum and give them ownership of the music they played. He showed them that they could achieve excellence- and he carried that concept as far as he possibly could. He mentions in the documentary that he wanted to show his students that they could play just as well as any professional musicians- and he really did show them that.

This is what I want for my music program- to show my students that they have control, and they can interact with music on a real level. I want, as so clearly modeled by Johnson, to break down the barrier between "school music" and "music." That's a barrier that I don't think should exist.

One of my favorite parts of watching Johnson in Thunder Soul was that he never sacrificed the integrity of his music program. If they were going to play funk and soul, they were going to play it with the highest possible standards. The mere fact that he wrote charts to incorporate those elements into existing traditions shows his dedication to the craft and willingness to let the students lead while still educating them to the highest possible degree.

There isn't any reason that a high school band teacher couldn't do exactly the same thing today- and while I don't plan on being a band director I hope to use the same principles to inspire my students and hand music over to them. I can't wait to see what they do with it.

Verse/Chorus/Lesson/Reflection

My experience teaching a ten-minute demo lesson on verse/chorus song form was hectic, but a lot of fun.

While I understood that the underlying process of the activity (assigning rewritten pop lyrics to a new melody and chords to create a new song) worked very well, I honestly had no idea if it as possible to do it in the time allotted. I'm extremely excited that it worked as well as it did, though I suspect it would be difficult to pull off in 10 minutes with 8th graders.

Before analyzing my lesson I should note that this activity did not come directly from my brain. There is a book I've had for years that I consider indispensable to anyone who has any interest in song writing- and you'll have to please excuse it's corny/flashy cover and cheesy title. You know what they say about books and covers...

Click the picture to see it on Amazon!

This was a book I've treasured for a while, and I only recently came back to it looking through a teaching lens- and I would honestly recommend it highly for anyone who thinks they might ever teach songwriting at all. The book contains all sorts of activities to prompt the reader to write songs more effectively (or at all...) and almost all of them can be easily adapted as activities for a general music class.

Ok, that being said on to the reflection:

What I think went well

• The students of my lesson were, more or less, engaged for the entire 10 minutes. This was my number one goal going in to the lesson and I think (though I would love to hear from the other side of the glass if I'm wrong...) that I achieved it.
• I think that everyone left the lesson with the main objective. It might be all they left with...but I think everyone could repeat back at the end that you can write a song any way you want so long as it has structure.
• I think that, for the time period allotted, I balanced student autonomy and teacher choice relatively well. I thought a lot about which decisions should be pre-determined and which not and I had to compromise on many such as the song choice (giving only two options instead of more) and deciding to pick the topic for everyone rather than brainstorming a list of topics. Ideally with more time I would have even more student autonomy, but hopefully everyone still felt as though they were in some control of the lesson from the beginning.
• I think the lesson culminated in a "moment." I don't exactly know if I can pinpoint the value of that (or if it even has true value at all) but I think there is something special about seeing disparate parts come together to form something at least menially interesting- especially if the students feel as though they directly contributed. This is one of the things that I thought was so powerful about Wesley's lesson on Bach, and I hope I attained some form of the "climactic ending" with mine.

What I think could improve

• Clearer, more scripted directions. I think that both lyric groups started out with a lot of questions as to what I wanted them to do. They certainly picked it up really quickly, but I think I could have done a better job explaining what they were going to see on their papers and what I wanted them to do before they got them.
• I think that time (because it is at such a premium in the lesson) should be posted the whole time. A simple countdown timer on the smartboard could have let groups better manage their time and understand the expectations.
• I want to give the piano group better direction that allows them to have a more concrete influence on the final product. In the time that it took the lyric groups to do their task, the piano group had enough time to tinker and rewrite their chord progression several times, and all of that could have been time spent creating rhythms, groove, or melody if I had better outlined their ability to do so.
• The premise of my lesson was "Verse Chorus Song Form" and I think that I could be slightly more ambitious with the objective. I definitely boiled the lesson down to my one main objective on purpose, because I think that in ten minutes it's fine if that's all you learn- but there is probably some room to introduce what the form is and how the verse leads into the chorus. Along these same lines I could explicitly tell the piano group to write an A and a B section (something they did anyway but I did not plan on until they finished early).

What I'm not sure about

• I hope that everyone felt like they contributed in some tangible way to the final product. If not, at least hope that everyone felt as though they could repeat the process themselves if given the time. Part of my goal was to show everyone how easy it can be to start the creative process of songwriting/composition- and I think most people probably left the lesson feeling like they could easily do what we did as a class if given the chance. I would love to hear anybody's thoughts on this.

In closing, I honestly I more look forward to hearing what you guys have to say, I would love to hear your ideas on a lesson like this, especially since you were the ones who sat through it! Please don't hold back thoughts and comments!

Lastly, this feels like an appropriate place to share a YouTube channel that is a great resource for songwriting stuff- below is a video series called Door To Door from the channel where the host (Judy Stakee) interviews famous songwriters. Definitely worth checking out!