WASBE Resonance - Quality Repertoire

As happens with any good conference, there are concepts, conversations, and ideas that continue to resonate for a significant time after one's returned home. The one discussion that has resonated with me, and I suspect a number of conference delegates is the one introduced by the journalist, Stephen Budiansky.

As I reported a few days ago, his session was entitled The Problem with Band Repertoire in Music Education; or, First, Shoot All the Composers. Mr. Budiansky discussed his frustration and disappointment with his own children's music programme as they went through high school. He is not a music educator or professional musician, but he does have enough of an amateur background in music to be interested and informed when it comes to music. In fact, I was lucky enough to find him in the hotel bar at dinner. He has a particular affinity for Ives and a thorough knowledge of music history in general.

His frustration revolves around the fact that the curriculum and content of the music program that his children went through was centred around substandard repertoire. They graduated with very little knowledge of music and have not picked up their instruments since the day they played their last concert at school. They have not developed a love of music that has carried them into their adult lives. This is despite the fact that they were both quite competent players on their instruments and, I assume, graduated with respectable marks in the course.

Mr. Budiansky is a respected journalist and as such, did not simply write the article that started all of this discussion without checking his facts and finding out if the school his children attended was unique. Unfortunately, it was not. He has since, written articles for the WASBE Journal with retired conductor of the US Marine Band, Timothy Foley for which much research was done. You can find the original article, the WASBE journal piece and a follow up to the original Washington Post article on his web site.

He observes that much of the music that is written and played in the US - and I don't think Canada is any different - is written by composers who exist within an industry that is interested in making money by creating material that will make bands sound good so that they can win festivals. He notes that many of the composers of these pieces have advanced degrees in music education and are concerned with relating music across school curriculum and tend to be highly formulaic "cookie-cutter" type pieces. He goes on to make the comparison with English teachers and remarks that if the high school English curriculum replaced Shakespeare with "the winner of the 1991 Iowa English teachers' novel-writing contest," parents would respond with a vengeance.

I am very much in agreement with Mr. Budiansky's stance but I wonder if there is any value in the music being written by contemporary composers of school band music and how we rectify this situation.

The issue of the value of the compositions is a tough one. In Bach's day, there had to be many composers that we have never heard of. Composers who wrote a fair amount of mediocre music for specific purposes. Not every church or court composer was a musical genius. It has been time that has filtered out the work of the best. I am continually in a quandary as I try to encourage Canadian composers to consider the wind band medium as a vehicle for their expression. I think that there are times when we have to endure the mediocre in order to allow young composers to learn and to sift through the talent to try and find the next potential Beethoven or Stravinsky. Perhaps the educational market is no different. The issue is that these people get paid a good salary to write and are placed on pedestals by music teachers. There are a few of the composers that Budiansky attacks that do have the occasional good piece of music. I think that some are genuinely in the position of writing a quality piece of music early in their careers and publishers hire them to duplicate their success. But maybe they only had the one good piece in them!

The second issue is harder. How do we rectify the situation? The education system is in a situation not that different than many arts organizations found themselves in with cigarette companies. The music publisher often are very supportive of conferences, festivals, and honour groups. They donate music and help pay for their composers to conduct and adjudicate. The buy booths at conference. We had a number of publishers in the trade show at the WASBE conference. I sincerely doubt that they made enough from sales at the conference to pay for their expenses, but they came in support and for that, I am truly grateful. I think that issue lies with the teachers. It is easy for a young teacher to go to a reading clinic or go on the JW Pepper web site and be told what is a best seller or editor's choice. This is surely great repertoire, correct? It takes time, energy and money to research repertoire, to buy CDs and to attend concerts and conferences. I would be surprised if many school band directors actually listened to band music for pleasure. And if their knowledge of band repertoire is the greatest hits of the Hal Leonard catalogue, it is no wonder.

If music teachers were to spend the time listening and studying the music that they work with, they will find the great repertoire and won't buy the crap. The latest, isn't necessarily the best. As much as I'm a proponent of developing the wind repertoire, a school music program is about teaching music, and that means playing quality transcriptions of the great composers in addition to playing contemporary repertoire written for the wind medium.

Mark Fonder of Ithaca College in New York, responded on his own session the day after Mr. Budiansky's that the occasional formulaic piece is good to teach form, but a steady diet is inexcusable. I wonder about that statement. Can we not find great repertoire, original or in transcription, that teaches what we need it to teach? He also states that we should not inflict adult tastes on children. They are not equipped to handle the more advanced repertoire. He reminds us that we learn to read with Dr. Seuss and Eric Carle not James Joyce. I agree heartily. We just have to work very hard as music educators to find the Seuss's and Carle's in amongst all the cheap imitations.

I don't think that we need to shoot the composers (at least not all of them!) In some cases it is the publishers and sometimes it is the teachers that need to re-examine what it is they are doing. But whatever the solution is there certainly is a problem that needs to be fixed.

There is a comment button below and I would very much like to hear responses on this. I don't pretend to have all the answers and maybe I am way off the mark. But I think that this is an important issue to discuss and debate.