Building an Audience

Maintaining a dedicated audience is a concern for all music educators. When I attended University of Rochester, our Chamber Singers concerts rarely got more than 25 attendees. Here at the University of Bridgeport, the audience is largely composed of friends of the performers, and they seem to predominantly appreciate the jazz and gospel ensembles, rather than traditional choral music.

The key to audience-building, of course, is publicity. Relying on word-of-mouth is a start, but that is very ineffective, because it can bring about the situation mentioned above: only friends and family will show up. Who do we want to be our audience? To gain outside listeners, we need to reach out beyond the performers' immediate circle of contacts. The standard and most common way, of course, is to post flyers, at school, at cafés, houses of worship, libraries, and so on. To be effective, those flyers must be attention-getting and aesthetically pleasing. Some groups also advertise in local periodicals. More recently, ensembles have started using social media to advertise, which can be an effective way to reach people who would otherwise have no way of hearing about the concert, or even that such an ensemble existed.

It is important to build an audience, not just for the self-esteem of your performers, but so outside listeners are able to enjoy your performance as well.

Love for Performing

There are many ways in which music educators can inspire passion in their students, and encourage more than a passing interest in their performance programs.

The first is to instill music as a core value from a young age. In Chops, we meet two students who have been lucky enough to learn their instrument from an early age. Darren, a saxophonist, has been playing since he was barely big enough to hold the instrument. TJ, a trombonist, had been inspired by his grandfather, who was also a trombonist. TJ's parents helped him follow that inspiration all the way to the top of the Jazz Ensemble at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, a magnet school for students who excel in the performing and visual arts.

At DASOTA, we meet Ace Martin, a jazz ensemble director who well exemplifies how a music educator can guide young adult instrumentalists. While Mr. Martin's ensemble is a special case, being an auditioned ensemble within an auditioned school, he still faces pressures that all music educators face. For students who have not grown up with music like Darren and TJ, passion must come from the director and from the ensemble as a whole. Additionally, many students are under parental pressure to participate in a musical ensemble just to pad their resumés with an extracurricular activity. For those students, we must provide additional incentive to want to be there.

When a student is in an ensemble, and her friends are excited about performing, it becomes more likely for that student to become excited as well. But how do we foster that excitement?

Set a goal; something to strive for. Mr. Martin's jazz ensemble recorded an audition for the prestigious Essentially Ellington festival in New York, and were accepted into the competition. All year, members of the ensemble worked hard, fundraising for their trip from Florida, and practicing the music they would perform at Lincoln Center. While in New York, the performers met jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, who was the emcee of the festival. This added an additional layer of incentive, showing the students what could be possible if they kept pursuing their art. When the competitive spirit gets involved, each player has a personal stake in the success of the ensemble. For the DASOTA Jazz Ensemble, the hard work paid off. They won the competition, earning recognition and prestige, as well as a grant for their school. The ensemble would then keep that euphoria of winning in their minds, bringing it back to their lives in Florida, and beginning to think about the next challenge.

I highly recommend this documentary as required viewing for any jazz enthusiast or music educator.

Reflecting on General Music

Once again, I was really not sure where to begin when planing a general music lesson. I was a student in general music during elementary school, but that was many years ago, and I only remember bits and pieces. Plus, this was a lesson for 8th grade, not elementary school. But I am interested in national anthems, and musical traditions in different parts of the world. So I did a bit of digging, and I took bits and pieces from various locations.

I think the lesson went decently well, although I think I went over the 10-minute time limit. That problem may have derived from the fact that I played a YouTube clip for each of the five anthems I discussed, which ate up a fair amount of time (including two YouTube ads that couldn't be skipped). And given the topic of national anthems, it seemed to become less of a music lesson and more of a lesson in history and literary analysis. It also was mostly lecture-style, which I know can easily become boring for younger students, even when YouTube is involved. I tried to keep the students involved by providing handouts with the lyrics, and asking them questions throughout. However, only some students responded to those questions, and as the instructor pointed out afterward, the only way I can be sure that the entire class is involved is to ask specific questions to specific students. When repeating this lesson, I will try to draw more parallels among the anthems discussed, and also to keep it more musically oriented. I also may cover less material superficially, in order to dig deeper and more adequately cover the material that is still included (cover less to cover more).

Unrelated to my lesson directly, I very much enjoyed my classmates' lessons. Since I never took general music past fifth grade, I never knew how broad the spectrum of topics could be. It was very interesting to see the different directions everyone took. I especially liked Kurt's demonstrations of how we can observe sound waves, and the overlap of music and physics.