The intention of this video is to introduce you to a model for
planning instruction in ensemble settings, called
Comprehensive Musicianship through Performance. This
is a five point model.
There's five components, and I'll talk very briefly
about each one and give a little bit of an example.
I'll start today with selection. Selection refers to
choosing repertoire for our ensembles
in a mindful way. We look at a score
and we ask ourselves, "what's in this piece? What does this piece
teach? What does it offer my students?" We ask,
"does it contain elements of beauty and craft? What makes it worth
teaching, rehearsing, and performing?' If we return
to our earlier discussion of The Stars and Stripes Forever and we ask those
questions, we leave with a substantial list of qualifications and
reasons for choosing this piece of music. It's a
masterwork. It's written by John Philip Sousa. It's part of the
canon of American music. It has
design and craft. It's organized and
it has structural integrity, and the list continues.
Throughout this process then, I start to analyze the piece of music.
The kind of analysis I'm talking about I think of as a pedagogical analysis;
taking a wide-angle lens and
looking at: what are the large sections of the piece? What are the big
large font issues related to this piece. For example, what key
is the piece in? Does it change? Does it have melodic
motivic material? Does it have have harmonic
motivic material or rhythmic motivic material?
Through this process, outcomes begin to
emerge. When I say outcomes, this is not a word that was
invented by the designers of the CMP model. This is just having to do with
goals. What are my goals? What are my objectives? What
are my outcomes? What are my intentions for this piece of music?
In The Stars and Stripes Forever, it could be related to
understanding and describing the form of the piece.
It could be related to describing feelings of patriotism.
What is it about this piece that evokes those feelings?
I start to set out targets
for learning and rehearsing this piece of music. As I do this,
I'll also think about strategies
and steps towards that learning process. We refer to strategies
as the playground of the CMP model because this is where the creativity
of the teacher-conductor really comes into play. If I want
my students to describe the form of the piece of music, there are many many ways
I can imagine talking about form. We could look at form in a piece of visual
art. We could make a comparison. We could look at form
in other kinds of compositions. We could do a venn diagram comparing The
Stars and Stripes Forever to the first movement of Beethoven
Five Symphony just to see if there are comparisons and contrasts.
Strategies, in other words, are the
steps towards achieving the outcomes.
We encourage the development of student-centered strategies, where students
have a voice; where students can express their point of
view; where they're invited into the conversation. The fifth
point of the model is assessment. Those of us who
work with ensembles tend to be quite astute
at assessing and evaluating performance skills, which is very
very important, particularly if you want to play at a high musical level. In assessment,
we seek to explore the extent
to which our students did or did not
learn; what we thought we taught. If we return to The Stars and Stripes Forever,
and we recall the intention of understanding
and describing the form of the piece, I might
play a recording of another American march and ask students if they
can determine the form; if they can describe the form of that piece.
The points of the star collapse on each
other in a very fluid and dynamic kind of way.
The teaching plan and the five points of the model
allow us, they enable us, to have this
process by which students are understanding the music
that we are performing in that same kind of seamless and dynamic
way. But to get there, we start with the 73 00:05:13,320 --> 00:04:59,513 model and this planning process.