Teach Them How to Watch (4/19/2023)

Teach Them How to Watch

Ed Dumas

Recently I was leading a class of young musicians who told me that they were to be playing in a festival the following week and would be adjudicated in this performance. Hearing that, I decided it would make sense to teach them some of the more well-known “performance etiquette” things that bands do to improve their adjudication.

To my surprise, the students loved the suggestions and performed admirably with them when I expected they might resist some of the changes. What I found most heartening was that these students were very interested in how to change their patterns of attention to gain the most in the performance. I have not always found this to be the case during my career as a music teacher.

At the end of the day, while I was driving home, I had a bit of a revelation. A few months back while sitting in on a Professional Development session in Coquitlam, I was asked a question to which I did not have a great answer. The teacher was asking about ways to overcome some of the behaviour challenges that seem to have grown substantially since the beginning of the pandemic. There was some discussion around the room that followed the question which was to be expected, but I felt the best I could offer was a suggestion that there are no teachers that have ever before experienced anything like what current teachers have experienced during the Covid shutdowns, so if they are feeling kind of overwhelmed, that is a reasonable, albeit undesirable, expectation.

After the Coquitlam ProD session, I felt that my answer was insufficient, even if it was truthful. I wanted to help but did not know what to suggest. As usual for a question like this, the question kind of percolated in my brain for a while. Then I had an “Aha” moment when I started prepping the above class for an adjudicated performance concentrating on concert etiquette. The students themselves showed me what was missing.

Concert Etiquette

This topic of concert etiquette is not so much about what the audience should do, but rather about what the musicians should do in performance. The first thing I thought of with that beginning band class was that it would be best if they were not “counted in” during a performance. It kind of looks poorly to be counting “One, two three, four,” or conducting when there is no sound emanating from the band. Worse is to be doing both of those before the band starts to play. Mature groups just come up into the “playing position” following the conductor’s stick, they watch the conductor, breath together, and then simply start.

Knowing this, we determined what their “rest position” was, and then we practiced coming up into the playing position following the conducting stick. The students needed to know that being the first up was not important, and not being the last up was also important. They needed to know that this movement needed to be done as one group, not as 30 players. Once they mastered that, I then showed them how to wait at the bottom of their breath cycle (ie DON’T hold your breath!), look directly at the conductor, breathe with the conductor & stick, and then just start.

Now to accomplish this, the students also needed to be directly taught that they should memorize the first 1-2 measures of music so that they do not look down at the music again until AFTER the downbeat from the conductor. So, we practiced that skill a few times as well. Given a few attempts to work it out, these first-year students completely rose to the occasion and mastered the start quite well.

We then played through their piece of music and I then attempted to end it in the manner I usually have taught first-year players. That is, they are to not put their instrument down until they see the conductor’s stick moving down into the rest position. I explained to the students that they should not abandon the conductor and “leave me hanging there” with a raised conducting stick and no musicians looking at it, as this again looks less than satisfactory. So, the ending then is just a reversal of the beginning with the students taking their cues of movement from the stick, and for this, they needed to make sure they were watching at the end.

After the students had some practice on this a few times, they seemed to master the ending concepts reasonably well so that their endings looked more like a mature group in performance. The students appreciated very much that this would improve their acceptance by the adjudicator, and that they just needed to make sure they were watching at the beginning and end.

When to Look Up

The class of beginners had some challenges remembering to look up at the endings each time before bringing their instrument down, so this naturally led to a larger discussion of other times that students should physically look up to “check in” with the conductor. I have asked this question of my beginners for years, and so I also asked it of the group I was leading that day. Their answers were very much like the ones I have heard during my entire teaching career.

When asked “When should student musicians look up at the conductor while playing a piece of music?” Someone always answers “All the time!” out of the idea that since sometimes are good, more must be better. My response to that is along the lines of “While all the time might be good, it is only possible if you have the music 100% memorized. Since I doubt you folks do, you must look down at the page sometime, so tell me the precise places where you need to be watching the conductor to ‘check in’ that you are in the right place and all is well.”

The next answer undoubtedly comes as “The beginning!” Then comes “The ending.” Yes, and yes. Now the students are beginning to think of real solutions and break down the problem rather than just gloss over it. “During rests.” “On long notes.” “When you breathe.” Yes, yes, and yes. At this point, I usually have to add the last couple of them which are “Whenever there is something different presented in the music, such as tempo changes, meter changes, key changes, etc.” Also, “At the beginning and endings of phrases,” which they soon find out is when they also should be breathing.

Now, all of those things are very true and good, so I then asked the class to try practicing breathing at these places while we run the piece of music from top to bottom one more time. My intention for this run-through has always been now to reinforce the students who are doing exactly those things and “checking in with the conductor.” To reinforce what they are doing correctly, I simply say a “Thank you” to every student that looks up at me while they are playing. I cannot catch them all, but I try to catch each student at least once.

Now I tried this exercise one time early in my teaching career when I was teaching Itinerant Elementary Band. I had recently watched this same experiment once in a post-secondary class and wanted to see if it would work on younger students. Each time my students, while playing, looked up and “checked in” by catching my attention, I thanked them for it. I spoke out loud while conducting, or nodded my head in a way that they knew I recognized their achievement individually. I also made a point of looking them in the eye as I thanked them.

Years ago, the first time I tried this, I was completely rattled by the rather sudden change in my student’s behaviour. I found it to be a bit disconcerting that they were looking at me so intently almost like they were begging me for the thank you as if it was some kind of weird competition. Since then, though, I have run this exercise each time I need to clean up and prepare their concert etiquette for a performance coming up. While I have become accustomed to the students responding rapidly to this, the exercise has maintained its usefulness throughout the years. Even using this reinforcement to a group of young players as I was filling in for a day still had its effect of strongly encouraging the students to watch the conductor more closely.

Other Positive Benefits

Now for experienced band teachers out there, what I am suggesting is probably nothing new to you. Though, if you have never tried the “Thank You Method” of eye contact reinforcement before, please feel free to do so. But what I found when I used this strategy again recently gave me a possible answer to the Coquitlam Music Teachers’ question of how to return education to what it looked like before the Covid pandemic.

While driving home that day, I realized that something else very profound was happening to those students during that band class that I have not seen in a long, long time. That is, the students looked at their cell phones remarkably fewer times than they were used to doing in the past, and the best part was that I just did not need to say the words “Cell Phone.” It just happened, and it was not a “Don’t” kind of thing.

Now you should know that I consider cell phones to be the greatest scourge to hit the world of education in my lifetime. Cell phones cause the largest number of distractions in class today, and also cause the students to focus their thinking “far away” on something that is not currently happening in the room with them at that moment.

It need not be that way, but it is this way simply because the education system has failed to teach and enforce with the students any kind of “cell phone etiquette” for new phone users. To be fair to the education system, I am not even sure if the wider society has finished developing these “cell phone etiquette” rules, as adults seem not much better at this than students.

I remember hearing a police officer talking to a driver in a restaurant about how they detect that drivers are “on their phone” while driving. The police officer was explaining that a typical driver using a cell phone while driving would be looking down towards their crotch area and smiling, while someone not using a cell phone would almost surely never do this! While I agree that this is a sure-fire cell phone detector, I also worry about the drivers that are “back and forth” to a cell phone mounted on the dash. These drivers, while having hands free of cell phones, still might have their brains focused elsewhere even though they are not “two-thumbing” the screen.

What I saw during the beginning band class last week taught me something else related to cell phones. While those students were completely engaged in “heads up, eyes up” musicianship, they were not looking at their cell phones nearly as often. There were a few, and though I did quietly mention to a couple of students to remove the phone from their music stand, it was still significantly better than before. By drawing their attention to not dropping their head, and physically watching the conductor, the temptation to be on their phone was reduced.

Now the part that I found to be so pleasant was that I mentioned the words “cell phones” substantially less in that class than before. It was simply not part of our discussions. I attribute that to using positive reinforcement with the students to do something contrary to the general use of cell phones. That is, I reinforced looking up at the conductor with a simple thank you. Cell phones encourage the students to lower their heads, and the music was encouraging them to raise their heads and look at the conductor. This time, the music was beginning to win, and this is important in many ways.

First, this signals to me that there is another hugely important reason for keeping music classes alive and actively subscribed. If a simple thing like watching the conductor more can have the benefit of less cell phone use during class time, there is likely to be a good spillover into better overall education scores. Second, this change came about in a positive way, rather than a negative way. Students were told what to do without mentioning the words cell phone, rather than being told what not to do, as in “Don’t look at your cell phones.” Just by mentioning the word cell phones, students will want to look at them. Third, if reinforcing students for watching closer in class works for preparing them for their performances, maybe it can also work to improve overall general focus in your band classes throughout the school year.

Teaching your students how to watch you closer should help you overcome some of the behaviour challenges that everyone seems to be facing right now. Maybe it is time for a return to more strict “up and down” with the conducting stick. While I am not a fan of a military approach to conducting our students, maybe there is still something there regarding following the stick closer in band class to help fix some distraction issues

I have never been a fan of the military approach to our concert band classes. I just find it too rigid to always be in a formal rest position, or playing position, and then only move up or down at the movement of the conductor’s stick. I am also not a fan of placing flutes, clarinets, oboes and trumpets upright on one knee with the mouthpiece rising above the student’s head. This level of formality, to me, draws more attention to itself than it is worth, and therefore distracts away from the audience's appreciation of the performance.

Now, though, I may have to admit that I was wrong, or at least that I am wrong today. Maybe it is that today our students, after all their Covid difficulties, are actively looking for more fences around their classroom behaviours, and want to be controlled more in a positive way with where they have placed their eyes. The amazing positive reception that I received from these students about following the conducting stick up and down would suggest that this is so.

Now I do not think they want this control to be aggressive and mean, but more like something that is presented as fun for them with a direction of performance in mind. My high school band director often told us that “What you practice in the bandroom is what you get in the performance. So if you are practicing not watching here, that is what you get in performance.” The beginning class that I filled in for last week certainly seems to agree with that sentiment and certainly seemed eager to learn how to watch as a musician does. I encourage you to try this for yourself and see if it helps with these new “Covid-Brain” distractions in school.

Ed Dumas is a retired band director who taught his entire career in the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows School District. Ed is now living with his lifelong partner Laurie in Parksville, BC.  Ed & Laurie also work as Mid-Island reps for Tapestry Music while enjoying making music in retirement.

You can find Ed’s other writings for the MusicED Blog at: https://www.tapestrymusic.com/news.aspx

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