Concert Band curriculum

Aside from learning the repertoire, band students should also be learning about rudiments and practical theory. Most bands across the United States use the first portion of rehearsal as a "warm up," where the director develops the fundamentals of playing. What then should be included in the curriculum?

First, my band is combined 7th through 12th grade band. This poses some problems with designing a curriculum, because some students are going to have up to 5 more years of experience than other students. I have tried using Essential Elements books with the combined band, with limited success. Some students easily become bored and want to move on to the next exercise, while other students may be struggling and unable to play a certain exercise without multiple repetitions at slow tempos. This predicament adequately portrays the major dilemma of teaching a combined band: finding a balance between challenging the advanced students without leaving the beginning students behind.

This brings up the idea that there are some fundamentals that are practiced daily even by professional musicians. These things could be included in the curriculum, like breath control, articulations, tone quality, dynamics, scale patterns, and other etudes. Ensemble concepts such as balance and phrasing are also important. How do you teach these concepts over the course of 40 weeks in a way that keeps the students interested?

One other idea to consider before planning a curriculum is that most of these fundamentals are required from the very beginning to make good music. In other words, you can't save dynamics for the fourth quarter because you'll need them during the first quarter. The same thing can be said about tone quality, balance, rhythm reading, breath control, and several others. Of course, you can't teach all of these things in the first week, but perhaps there is a way to design a type of spiral curriculum that briefly addresses each fundamental (or a few) each week, and then returns a few weeks later to develop that fundamental even further. For example, you can't just focus on breath control for the first quarter. You could, however, work on breath control and tone quality in the first week, dynamics and articulation in the second week, phrasing and style in the third week, posture and technique in the fourth week, range and dexterity during the fifth week, and then return to the beginning of the cycle during the sixth week (although I know I'm missing a few fundamentals in this list, but it is just an example). This could be implemented in a such a way that the curriculum essentially restarts at the beginning of each midterm or quarter, and the fundamentals can be expanded based on the progress of the entire class.

In summary, the warm up portion of the class should be devoted to developing the fundamentals in a logical, cyclical progression so that the students become well-rounded performers on their instrument. The repertoire can be used to teach specific concepts in context.