For some, the end of the school year means it’s time to prepare for final exams and start planning summer vacations. But for high school and college band directors, the end of the school year means it’s time to start finding music for the fall sports season.
Your concert is coming up; you and your students have been working on the selected repertoire for a while now—things are coming along nicely and the time for the performance is close at hand.
In all areas of the country, marching band is a vital part of the high school fall experience. While the type of band your school enjoys varies from performing at football games and pep rallies to high-level competition, marching band is a traditional key to a successful spirit-filled fall.
You have decided on the trip, made all the preparations, and your students and parent groups have been hard at work raising the funds to ensure that every student can participate. Now it is time to choose the repertoire that you will be presenting.
Concert season is right around the corner and, chances are, you have been preparing for it since your last concert ended. You spent the summer looking at repertoire and the fall teaching it to your students. Now, it is time to prepare for the big night. At Pepper, we pride ourselves on helping our customers in any way we can. With that in mind, we have compiled three blogs aimed at helping you with your final concert preparations.
Look around your music room. Is anything missing? If your students are sitting cross-legged on the floor amidst piles of music, there might be some things you need. Even if they’re not, every music room needs furniture items like chairs, music cabinets, podiums and more.
Traveling with your school ensemble can be a wonderful experience for your students and your program. It can help deepen the social ties within your ensemble and it can help grow your program. It is also a marvelous and fun way for the director to receive some important musical feedback and observations from exceptional clinicians and adjudicators—something that is usually missing during classroom observations.
Listening to a master speak about their craft is one of the most enlightening experiences one can have. That was the thinking behind Pepper’s video interview series, The Inside Voice. Our place in the music community gives us the opportunity to speak with many of the best known and most beloved musicians active today. We realized the best way to use this opportunity was to share it with our customers.
Composer Brian Balmages’ sheet music can be found in music rooms across the nation. He has written music for every skill level from very easy to advanced. This, coupled with his ability to write music for both band and orchestra, is a big part of his success over the years, but there is something in his compositions that delves far deeper into the emotions of musicians and listeners alike.His ability to touch on raw emotion with his music is akin to many of the most notable composers throughout history.
With the nation’s birthday approaching, it is appropriate to celebrate the men and women of the United States military, without whom we would not have the many comforts and freedoms we often take for granted. It takes all kinds of people to make our armed forces the elite presence it is in the world, and we honor each of their contributions, thanking them for all that they do for us.