Partnering with Performers to Serve Their Needs
October 2010 Newsletter
Check out our many October Half-Price Specials in each category of music.
Sy Brandon will be attending premieres and doing residencies in the Mid-south and Southeast during February and March 2011. He has a few dates open where he can present residency activities for your school or organization.
He can do presentations on a variety of subjects (Click here to see a list of residency activities). It would also be nice if a performance of at least one of his compositions could be arranged as well.
In exchange for the residency, we hope that you could offer a small honorarium to help defray expenses, but this is not a requirement. PDF files of music you wish to perform during the residency will be sent complimentary.
Here is the schedule as it now stands:
2/13-15 - Kansas State University - Manhattan, Kansas
2/16-21 - open
2/22 - 27 - Little Rock Concert Band and Univ. of Arkansas, Little Rock (some dates between 2/23 and 2/26 may be open to nearby locations)
2/28 - 3/8 - open
3/9 - Dalton State College, Dalton, GA
3/10 - 12 - Southeast Regional Tuba/Euphonium Conference, Chattanooga, TN
3/13 - driving back west to Arizona - Could do a residency on the way home.
Contact us at the link below to find out more about how you can benefit from having a composer-in-residence or if you have any questions.
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This monthly column is a place to share your stories about experiences you have had performing or rehearsing music. The stories can be serious, funny, educational, etc. Email us your stories for possible inclusion in this column.
A Snake of a Different Color
Sy Brandon
My wife, Anita, and I are both musicians and former music teachers. Our first teaching positions were in upstate New York. I taught elementary instrumental music in Bath and Anita taught elementary instrumental and vocal music about ten miles up the road in a town called Avoca.
A few weeks after the fourth graders started playing their instruments, I took a full beginning band rehearsal to teach them about care and maintenance of their instruments. I even typed out the instructions and duplicated them for the students on one of those mimeograph machines where you end up with blue ink all over your fingers that would not wash off for several days. One evening a few days later, I got a call from Julia, who had just started on French Horn.
Julia said, “Mr. Brandon, I cleaned my instrument like you told me but now I’m having trouble holding it.” Julia was quite small and the French Horn quite large, but we figured out a way for her to sit and balance the instrument.
I replied, “That sounds strange Julia, because there is nothing that I know of that would cause that. Are you sitting the way I showed you?”
Julia responded, “The Vaseline you told us to put on the instrument makes it so slippery.”
“Where did you put the Vaseline, Julia,” I asked innocently.
“All over the outside of the instrument. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” was Julia’s response.
I then understood the problem and answered her while trying to hold back a chuckle. “I showed you how to put Vaseline on the inside of the tuning slides so they can move easily, not all over the entire instrument. You need to take a rag and wipe off all the Vaseline from the outside of the instrument and then you should be able to hold it without any problem.”
I also showed the students how to use a “snake” to clean out the inside of their instruments, but obviously this lesson did not always take. A snake is a coil of wound wire that is covered in plastic and has brushes on each end. It is used to clean out any food particles that accidentally get inside a brass instrument while playing it.
During one of Kevin’s lessons, he complained about his valves being very sluggish. I asked him, “ Have you cleaned your instrument lately?” All I got in return was a blank stare. I knew we were in trouble but the result was nothing like anticipated.
Instrumental music lessons and band were held in a two story white house that was across the parking lot from the main school. The lower floor of the house was renovated by removing the walls so that it could hold a seventy-five-member band. But since it was a house, it also had a kitchen with a large sink.
So off Kevin and I marched to the kitchen with his cornet and my snake to see if we could solve his problem. When I removed the valves of his cornet, there was a fuchsia colored film coating his valves. I filled the sink with water and rinsed the sticky film off of the valves and wondered where did that come from.
I asked Kevin, “Are you chewing gum while playing your instrument?” and received a denial as his reply. The next thing I did was to submerge his cornet and run the snake through the tubing. In short order, the water in the sink turned dark pink.
“Are you sure you didn’t have gum in your mouth while practicing?” I asked again while we both stared at the irrefutable evidence. Once more Kevin’s response was “No.”
It took eight changes of water before we finally got the rid of all the pink goop and probably as many denials about candy or gum from Kevin, but I think he learned his lesson. His valves worked perfectly for the remainder of his time in elementary school.
If you think snakebites are venomous and can cause nausea and vomiting, try cleaning a trombone that hasn’t been cleaned in years with a snake. One of Anita’s trombone students in Avoca was having difficulty getting a good sound out of his instrument so Anita removed the outer slide from the inner slide to peer down the tubing. What should normally be a space of about half an inch was reduced to about a quarter of an inch by accumulated food crud.
The elementary school in Avoca did not have a band house like Bath. In fact, it didn’t even have a band room. She had to give lessons in a storage closet that was emptied out to accommodate two chairs and a music stand. The only sink large enough to clean a trombone was the janitor’s sink in the basement. By now you should be getting the sense that having a snake is part of the arsenal of repair equipment that every band director has with them. After taking the snake from her repair kit, Billy and Anita headed to the basement.
While my experience with the snake was very colorful, Anita’s was less than pleasant. She found pieces of spaghetti that looked like worms, dried chicken, and an assortment of unrecognizable morsels that were green and fuzzy. It was all she could do to keep from loosing her lunch right there on the spot. But the snake devoured all this and left a sparkling inside of the trombone and Billy’s tone improved immensely.
I recently read a post on a trombone news group that I subscribe to about a trombone player who was having lung problems. After seeing the doctor several times, he was finally diagnosed with a bacterial infection caused by inhaling bacteria from the buildup of food particles in his instrument. So my advice for any brass player is to brush your teeth before playing your instrument and to use your snake often. Your dentist will love you and so will your music teacher.
Composing Thoughts - A Monthly Editorial by Sy Brandon
We welcome your comments regarding our editorials. You can also read about Sy Brandon's musings about composition and other topics and follow along with his creative process at his blog http://www.composinginsights.blogspot.com/
The following is an excerpt from Sy's book, "A Composer's Guide to Understanding Music"
Symbiotic Relationships Part 1
When asked what their music means, composers often respond “it is about the music”. While this statement is true, it is not very helpful to interpreters and listeners. Educators and authors have taken on the responsibility of explaining and illustrating the meaning of music with varying degrees of success. This chapter will examine several broad perspectives in order to illustrate the interrelationships of music.
Relationship Between the Artist and his Environment
Throughout this book, unity and variety have been the common denominator in examining how composers approach musical elements. Unity and variety become more complex when interrelationships between all the elements are considered. Adding to this equation is the fact that composers, like all artists, do not exist in a vacuum. Their art is influenced by many external factors that go beyond the relationship of the notes themselves. Doris Van de Bogart, in her book “Introduction to the Humanities”, has an excellent summary of the relationship between the artist and his environment. She states in her introduction:
“We may examine a work of art as the record of a particular artist’s vision. He has selected something he has seen, felt, or thought and has recorded it in an arrangement of design, color, line, mass, tones, or words which satisfies his aesthetic purpose. Hence, it is the product of his unique personality. But the artist has also been influenced consciously or unconsciously by many other determining factors: his environment, traditions, national traits, religious beliefs, economic condition, his patron, and even geography and climate have influenced him. Hence, each work of true art represents the individual genius of its creator, and the general character of the age and locale in which it was born.”
Classicism and Romanticism
Throughout musical history, the balance between the classic (of the mind) and romantic (of the heart) modes of thinking has alternated. The center of the pendulum can be thought of as equal treatment of intellectualism and emotionalism. The pendulum swings that occurred prior to the twentieth century have not eliminated the other mode of thought. They have just changed the emphasis. During the early to mid-twentieth century, the swing towards classicism went to extremes by over emphasizing the intellectualism and rejecting anything associated with emotionalism. The composer, Igor Stravinsky, stated that “music is powerless to express anything at all”. He later retracted that statement, but it clearly illustrates the rejection of emotionalism in music. The intellectualism that dominated much of twentieth century music, and still exists today, has been a contributing factor to alienating audiences and performers from new music. The majority of the relationships between unity and variety are mostly perceivable through in-depth score study, rather than by active or passive listening.
Science has illustrated the importance of integration of the right brain (intuitive) and left brain (analytical) to maximize human creative and factual perception. The “Mozart Effect”, where math skills increased after listening to classical musical, is a clear example of this. Small to moderate swings away from the central balance of intellectualism and emotionalism still involve both sides of the brain and propel music into the exploration of new understandings. Radical swings in either direction, as in the mid-twentieth century’s over emphasis on intellectualism, or as in the late-twentieth century’s equating vernacular music with art music, in this author’s opinion, are detrimental to the progress of music.