April 2006

The joys of being a section leader

April 20, 2006 16:35

So, today in orchestra we had a short sectional. And to put it plainly, about 2 thirds of my section is just bad. Ant least the remaining third tries to play the music. Anyway, I've come to the conclusion that:
1) going through the part note by note
2) encouraging
3) lecturing
4) ignoring
and 5) everything else I've tried
doesn't work. And so after rehearsal, I talked to the conductor... and they will be in for a bit of a surprise tomorrow. We decided to (randomly - starting tomorrow) have the rows reversed some days. So that the problem students will be in the front row, completly exposed... Maybe that will get them to try a bit harder.

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April 19, 2006 14:36

Some people just don't get it!
Today in orchestra I was trying to be a nice, kind section leader by tuning someones violin for him (he had been trying to tune it for 20 minutes, and it wasn't getting any better. (And I'll also mention that this is a 3/4 violin when he needs a full sized violin...) Anyway it very quickly becomes clear why this violin won't tune - the strings are several years old... So, I told him not to bother, and to get new strings (not to mention a new instrument) as soon as possible. At this point, he asks me if he should just throw te strings away; I told him yes but not till he had a replacement set on (seems clear enough to me). To end this story, he spent the last 30 minutes of class unstringing his violin..................

Changing topics, I'm currently not going to go into music education. Instead, I'm looking into criminal justice. (Yeah, I know, big change...)

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More entries: June 2006 • March 2006