The Voice

There are lots of famous speaking voices in the world. They’re usually famous because they’re distinctive, either because of their tone and timbre or their unique cadence … distinctive enough that you wouldn’t mistake them for anyone else.

Such as?  Right off the top of my head, I think of people like Groucho Marx … John F. Kennedy … Woody Allen … Carol Channing … Johnny Carson … William Shatner … James Earl Jones … probably most of the cast of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” … and for those of us in the marching band world, there’s nothing quite like the voice of Chuck Henson.

… And, certainly in western Massachusetts, there was nothing like Jim MacRostie.

 

Jim MacRostie passed away this weekend.  He was a lot of things (I certainly learned some things from reading his obituary!), but perhaps his most public “gig” was, during the 1990s and much of the 2000s, as the voice of the UMass marching band. “Annnnd nowwww… please welllll-come… the POWERRRRR [just a bit of a growl to that word] and CLASS! [an ascent of at least a major sixth, in pursuit of that word] –of New England … … the University of Massachusetts .. Minuteman .. Marching .. BAND!”

There were those of us who thought his “AND NOWWWWW…” could be a wee bit over-the-top. Certainly, any time anyone holds forth in a booming voice, any mispronunications or halting turns of phrase are similarly amplified. Occasionally, particularly if it sounded as if perhaps MacRostie was improvising a bit toward the end of his post- postgame remarks, I would find myself murmuring with a combination of sympathy and embarrassment, “…ah, Jim…”

But if ever there was an organization that was a bit over-the-top itself, it would be the Minuteman Band. One might be forgiven for getting stentorian. When MacRostie began his UMMB intro, you couldn’t miss it. Sometimes it seemed he didn’t need amplification, so large was his voice.

The Jim MacRostie memory that makes me smile the most … is in fact a MacRostie impersonation. On a Drum Major Academy summer afternoon, one of my learned DMA staff colleagues unleashed his MacRostie impression on a dorm hallway full of other staff members — and it was so good and so funny that it cracked everybody right up, and caused one particular staff audience member to laugh in such a way that she almost literally couldn’t draw a breath. Part of the ferocious impact of his impersonation was thanks to his own rather humorous self — and surely part of that impact was due to the fact that the impersonator looked NOTHING like his source material — but if Jim MacRostie’s voice had been less distinctive, the impersonation might have fallen flat.  Or … he might never have ended up as the Voice of the Minuteman Marching Band to start with.

 

Perhaps when we next hear a rumble of thunder in the distance … it might be the start of a marching band show, up yonder.

Professional Development is Where You Find It

The teaching profession requires its participants to do many things. Obviously, teaching children is foremost, but there are responsibilities not always mentioned in a job listing.

Once I heard an anecdote that claimed that the most-regulated professionals, the people who are most required to update and refine their professional knowledge and techniques (Professional Development) – other than medical doctors – are us teacher types. (Aside: I can’t believe that first responders aren’t somewhere in the top two.  I gotta look that up again sometime.) Teachers keep up with the latest developments. We avail ourselves of workshops having to do with pedagogy, classroom management, new technology, all kinds of things. Music teachers are often persuaded to attend workshops and lectures about arts advocacy – i.e. here are all these great reasons why you should please not cut my program or my job. (I suspect math teachers have to deal with this somewhat less often, no offense meant to math teachers.)

So, late last week, I made my annual pilgrimage to my state music ed association’s all-state conference, with the intention of getting more professionally developed. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I attended five, six, and three workshops respectively. They addressed topics like “Social Media in the Music Classroom” and “The Jazz Guitar is a Four-Stringed Instrument” (i.e. get your young guitarists off the lowest two strings: this is jazz, not heavy metal) and “Getting Started with Digital Audio” and “Vocal Health for Music Educators” and “Teaching Beginning Percussion”. Fun stuff; informative sessions for the most part; and presented by people who knew their stuff.

Knowing your stuff and being able to communicate your stuff, however, are two separate things. We’ve all had teachers (elementary-school through graduate school) who could make an hour-long class seem like ten minutes … and we’ve all had teachers who could make an hour-long class seem like the Rest Of Your Natural Life. The latter was not in great evidence this week at All-State, but every so often I bumped into a session presenter who didn’t have everything they needed to make their session “come alive”.

(“Come alive” is an overused and under-defined phrase. But I can pretty swiftly identify a session that is being made to “come dead”.)

Before I get too down-in-the-mouth about this, I ought to note that there were plenty of presenters who hit it out of the park. Using the right combination of knowledge, organization, sense of humor, and empathy for / understanding of their audience, many presenters made me wish their session had been allowed to go on for awhile longer.

But as much as I strive to find helpful bits of information or creative ideas to bring back to my classroom or rehearsal room, I equally take note of the presenting style — effective or not.  I suspect that one or more of a number of factors may be on display in the case of ineffective.

 

Among them, first: Sudden Self-Doubt.

A number of eons ago, as a graduate student at All-State, I attended a lecture session which was being presented by a veteran music teacher whose name I recognized, even though I was merely a graduate student and new to the state association. It was one of those names that members of the music ed profession in my state absolutely were familiar with: experienced teacher, head of a successful school music program for many years, active clinician and performer, well-thought-of … and within the first minute of the session, I thought to myself, “he’s nervous.” Which was a really unexpected thought, at least to me, in the context of how big a name he was. For the balance of the session, his delivery was fraught with stammers, and with incomplete sentences, and with me wishing his voice projected better; and the whole experience was surreal and disconcerting. Why was this particular gentleman nervous?

It took me a while to figure out that sometimes the teachers who can knock you out if they’re working with a group of public school students can be anywhere between jittery and terrified if they’re running a clinic for other teachers. Peer leadership is really hard, it’s been said … but I’ve mostly heard that phrase uttered in the context of young people leading other young people. That session made clear to me that the challenge of peer leadership extends to adults leading adults, too. I can imagine the subconscious thought process: am I really the expert in the room? Could there be people in here who know this subject as well or better than I do? And it’s possible they’re looking at me with raised eyebrows right now, mentally muttering, “yeah, I could do this better than you.”

Yeah, that might be daunting. And now, as then, I felt kinda badly for the man. Heck, I started my time as a church choir director in my mid-thirties, hoping to lead choristers who were ten years, twenty years, thirty years older than I. “He’s half my age,” I imagined them saying. “I should listen to him why, exactly?”

 

Next: Technical difficulties.

At one of this year’s All-State sessions, the technology failed. The wireless connection between the computer’s Powerpoint presentation and the overhead projector worked for a time and then quit. The session was about cool new technology that can be applied to music classes. At a recent faculty meeting at the school where I teach, the school’s Internet connection just never kicked in – either the server was down, or some darn thing. The whole meeting had been reserved for a guest presenter whose talk was about, you guessed it, Internet-based curriculum aids.

This stuff happens. But what was it that was drummed into my head by my teaching methods professors, by my sister who is an experienced teacher herself, by my colleagues who have taught for a long time and know the drill? – Be Prepared. Be ready with extra activities and be ready to change strategies at the drop of a hat. In last week’s technology session, while the room awaited the arrival of the conference center’s media crew with a new projector, the presenter hoped aloud that the crew would arrive soon (and we smiled patiently) … and at that faculty meeting, the presenter sweated and we felt badly for him (even to the point that a couple of us called out things like, “hang in there,” and “we feel your pain!” Very charitable; it wasn’t his idea to crash the online connection!). But in both cases, not as much material was presented as could have been. I was desperately hoping that either presenter would look out at his audience, clap his hands together, and in the style of a Vegas standup comic, smile and purr, “So! How many of you are from out of town?” And then shift into a discussion with his audience: “Really though. While we’re waiting for the Four Horsemen, let me take a poll here: how many people here have actually tried some of the apps we’ve talked about so far?” Or something! Engage your audience and get them to help you not sweat so much! Alas, no such luck.

(The conference center AV guy did arrive in time to get the rest of the session in, and the clinic was worthwhile. But that was a long ten minutes – a full one-sixth of the allotted time.)

 

Next: Words Fail Me … -or- … Show, Don’t Tell.

By this I mean, I’ve been to sessions presented by musical conductors that were anywhere from somewhat tolerable to borderline incoherent when they were using the English language … but who were ten times as eloquent when they were on a podium communicating with an ensemble using nothing but body language, gestures and a conducting baton. I’ve also been to sessions presented by – forgive me – people who were ten times as comfortable interfacing with a computer as they were speaking to live humans. And how often have you seen an interview with a justly-famous artist in which they couldn’t explain what it was they were doing because they were so mired in jargon or terminology that only another justly-famous musician would have a hope of understanding? Whether it was a jazz musician or a ballet dancer or a sculptor or (gasp) someone Inside The Actors’ Studio … you knew there was brilliance in there … but it just wasn’t gettin’ out.

 

Finally, and most excruciating: Lack Of Awareness.

I’m going to try to be humane about this. I just read an online review of, well, never mind what the writer was reviewing, it doesn’t matter, except that whatever good points the writer made were entirely overshadowed by his/her arrogant and clearly inflated sense of his/her own self-importance. It wasn’t pretty, and I don’t want to be that guy. Girl. (Whatever he/she was. The username was unrevealing…)

But I attended a session one afternoon last week during which, about thirty seconds in, I thought, “nothing good is going to come of this.”

The session’s title had been attractive. Could be lots of interesting discussions going on in this one. I might walk out of this one with lots to think about; with lots of ideas, possibly, to apply to my classroom – and that’s certainly the point of the conference, so – perfect! The presenter was a college music education professor, and while I’ve certainly experienced my share of college professors in the field of education that betrayed scant evidence of having been in an actual classroom for quite some time, I tend to give genuine collegiate-level instructors the early benefit of the doubt. And this one was probably a fine person.

Ah, well.

Half of my frustration (aside from being unable to sneak out and go to a session nearby that I thought was just as attractive) came from the fact that the material presented in the session didn’t come anywhere close to my great expectations of borderline-controversial issues being debated back and forth. I walked out at the end muttering to myself, “we could have summarized the last hour’s exposition in ten minutes and then spent the next 50 minutes digging into how we can do this, why we need to do it, what’s the best way to do it, step out of our traditional-music-ed stuck-in-the-mud-ness, figure out how to blaze some trails!!”

The other half of my frustration sprung from the presenter’s style. Slow. Pedantic. Seemingly convinced that people were hanging on his every word out of sheer suspense (when in fact we were hanging on to see if he would get to the end of a sentence some time soon). And … with apologies, but there’s no other word for it … it was just lame. By the time the session was five minutes old, I was keeping myself entertained by observing the rest of the audience. Audience members were trying. They really were. “Well, we’re here,” their body language seemed to say; “might as well make the best of it; take notes; be a polite audience and look attentive,” … but it was (to my eye, anyway) a struggle and a half.

A couple of Starred Thoughts® struck me as quite applicable in that moment. “Look around occasionally to make sure they’re following you.” “The first job of a teacher is to get a response.” And the killer: “The instant you stop entertaining, your audience starts evaluating.” I can’t speak for anyone else in that room, but I was evaluating that presenter immediately.

 

Again, let me be clear: to be fair, next I should post thrilling accounts of the truly great presentations I witnessed last week, as well as the truly memorable and effective teachers I’ve studied with. And I’m going to do that. I promise.

But those Starred Thoughts® of my college band director were really echoing loudly in my head. I freely admit, I’ve been spoiled. I’ve been around great teachers. Example: for the last thirteen summers, when I’ve assisted with the instruction of the Drum Major Academy clinics at West Chester University and UMass-Amherst, I’ve been surrounded by some truly great teachers, whose techniques I have been inspired to aspire to. One day, maybe, perhaps, I’ll be that good a teacher – that good a presenter – that good a communicator. And it’s going to take work. And if I get even half as good as some of these people I’ll be thrilled. And I don’t just mean the George Parks-, Heidi Sarver-, Tim Lautzenheiser-, Jamie Weaver-caliber people (and with a set of role models like that, I have been truly spoiled!) – but teachers and band directors from across the country whose names are not universally known but ought to be. They engage and inspire their students right from the get-go, from word number one. They remind me not just how to teach better, but why I teach in the first place.

So, for better or worse, and at least by way of comparison to Great Moments In Teaching that I have watched, I can spot lame a mile away. And on the occasions when I’m experiencing that sort of presentation, at least I can try to imagine what I would do differently to make it more engaging, more enjoyable, more motivating, more accessible or comfortable to my audience, better somehow.

One of those occasions that sticks with me still, and likely will never entirely leave my memory – and this is a good thing – happened a few years ago. As it was happening, I knew it was hands-down the worst professional development clinic I would ever be part of. It was a “bring-your-instrument” session with a Midwestern band conductor. I sat on a stage, on a summer afternoon, in the midst of a concert band full of music teachers (with no graceful way out) who were being led in relatively little actual playing of instruments, and suffering through spoken thoughts from a clinician that I’m pretty sure nobody else on that stage felt was offering anything useful. All I wanted was supper. And – stunningly, and with the largest pile of irony imaginable – the clinic was entitled, “What Is Done Without Joy is Zero!”

The exclamation point is not mine. It was in the clinic title. Which only made it that much less joyful, somehow.

The main thing I took away from that awful two-hour, twenty-minute Excursion Through The Gates of Professional Development Purgatory … was that I would never, ever, ever want to conduct any class or rehearsal or presentation of any kind in such a way that would cause my students or audience to think thoughts about me that I was thinking about this conductor.

 

The very most of the time, professional development opportunities give me good concrete ideas to take back to the places where I teach – public school, church gig, or wherever else. Even if I take just one new idea or thought away from a PD event, it’s been worthwhile … even in the uncomfortable moments when that thought is, “shoot me if I ever teach like that.”

Perspective

The slight delay in blog posting hereabouts has had mostly to do with my month of July, which featured a whole lot of travel, at least half of which had to do with professional development.

First: to New Hampshire, for the New England Band Directors Institute, a three-day affair in which band directors from New England (and elsewhere) gather – with instruments – to attend workshops, to read new band literature, to be conducted by one or more massively influential band conductors, and to have our attitudes (unofficially) adjusted. We’re a relatively small group – people who are pretty passionate about a topic that maybe not a lot of other people may quite understand. If you’ve seen the movies “Mr. Holland’s Opus” or “Drumline”, at least in my opinion, you still might not understand it.

Then: to Gordon College, for a similar gathering of choral directors from Massachusetts. Same idea; same level of “the rest of the world may not quite embrace this subject nearly as tightly as we do”! Off the top of my head I can’t come up with any movies that have been made about choir directors, either. “The Choir”, maybe.

Then to the mid-Atlantic, for some professional development wrapped up in a vacation: my annual pilgrimage to the American Shakespeare Center, in Staunton, VA. Tucked away in the mountains of Virginia, this little theater is modeled after the one in which William Shakespeare his own self put on his, um, skits. And it’s populated by some really fine actors. This year I saw “Hamlet”, which is perhaps a bit less light than the plays I’d seen there previously – “Much Ado About Nothing” (in which the ASC made me forget Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson and Denzel Washington and Kate Beckinsale, and instead remember Sarah Fallon and Rene Thornton, Jr.), and “The Taming of the Shrew”. With all due respect: Shakespeare enthusiasts are passionate but they don’t usually get nearly the attention that Tom Cruise and things blowing up do, on the big screen. Sometimes for good reason: the English Department professor who taught the Shakespearean Lit course that I took during my sophomore year at UMass seemed just plain deranged sometimes – in his view, every single element of a Shakespearean play represented some sort of sexual imagery. (Sometimes, Doc, “the dagger I see before me, the handle towards my hand” is just a dagger!) Anyway, if you tell the average American someone that you adore “Twelfth Night”, they may wonder if you mean some sort of winter holiday celebration.

Most recently: my annual two-week total-immersion course in the art of the drum major, courtesy of the West Chester, PA and UMass-Amherst versions of the George N. Parks Drum Major Academy. Now, talk about a gathering of rather passionate and relatively not-understood people: not only are they what the media would condescendingly call “band geeks”, but these young people will be their bands’ “head band geeks”! And they’ll be taught by people who have made band directing, and also drum major instruction, a large and important part of their lives. A documentary about this activity may not guarantee a major TV network knockout ratings, exactly.

But for 13 summers, I’ve participated in what is, for me, arguably the most professionally and personally enjoyable fortnight of the year. Until this year, I got to work for George N. Parks, who may not have been well-known outside the marching music industry, but inside of it he was the top dog. How lucky I was, for 12 years, to be able to look over and say, “hey, Mr. Parks, how do?” while most of the students and other participants in the West Chester and UMass clinics would see him coming and whisper, “–that’s George Parks!” with a certain amount of hero worship audible in those whispers. He was a genuine Hall-of-Famer, after all. And following his passing this past year, the DMA company took a deep breath, gathered itself and continued on; and during my two weeks of immersion this summer, I got to watch another master teacher, Heidi Sarver, gather up the reins and lead students – and staff – through this experience.

More than once, we DMA staff members have watched the kids go from being slightly bewildered new DMA students to being truly passionate student leaders, and we’ve heard their explosive cheering and nearly-foaming-at-the-mouth reactions to the goings-on, led by Mr. Parks … and we’ve quietly remarked, “it’s a good thing they’re on the good side of the Force.” To an outsider, the exhortations of the staff and the responses of the kids could easily seem right on the edge of, or maybe further into the realm of, a cult. No one is speaking in tongues, mind you; but when 300 or 400 high school students suddenly bellow “Together! In! Out! Frozen! Up! With Pride! With Pride!” and the listener has no idea what any of it means, I can imagine that it can make for some nervous wondering.

(The kids are just describing how various body parts are, in the attention position, but it may not be totally obvious.)

 

It’s occurred to me that I actually belong to a number of groups that fit this description: they … WE … are passionate about a particular topic; we commit a great deal of our personal time to it; we don’t always understand why the outside world doesn’t also treasure that topic; and we get a little miffed when the outside world says things like, “…I don’t get it. It’s weird.”

I will of course list these.

[] Marching band. (As is partly chronicled above; as is surely chronicled in most of the posts in this blog since last September.) This is an activity that can create marvelous sounds and images; and, taught right, it can yield philosophies for life and strategies for dealing with people and events that can be used in a lifelong way. (“Band is a place for everyone.”) Or … it can be the silliest-looking thing on planet Earth. As my DMA colleague Jamie Weaver once said to a roomful of student leaders, “let’s be honest, gang, we’re running around a field playing instruments that shouldn’t be outside, waving flags, and wearing chickens on our heads.”

[] Musical theater. For the love of heaven, please let’s set aside the stereotypes about theater people and their particular orientations. Statistically speaking, most activities in the world feature one person out of every ten who’s not facing the same way as the other nine, and does that excuse abusive behavior? Sorry, no. … Anyway, musical theater: done right, it gives young people the chance to discover the fun of performance, in an environment where they don’t have to decide it’s what they want to do forever, but could! Done wrong, it sounds like the “Whose Line Is It Anyway” activity where two actors play a scene in different styles suggested by the audience: when someone calls out “community theater!”, the actors get stilted and awful and break character and giggle.

[] Curling. An intriguing sport that I don’t play, I just watch, probably for lack of opportunity – and the fact that if I crouch down to play catcher in baseball, at least I’m using two feet; if I go to launch the curling rock and have to slide along the ice, I’m quickly going from one foot to one backside and an elbow, and zero dignity. It’s a sport, but it doesn’t look like the four major spectator sports at all, and I certainly understand why other people might look at someone standing on a sheet of ice with a little broom in their hand and might cry out, as commentator Charlie Pierce has done, “…SPORTS?!!!?”

[] Left-leaning politics. Thanks to my upbringing and my observations during the later years of my public and collegiate education, I see certain issues certain ways. I have to work really hard to read right-leaning political essays and comprehend how anybody could view the same issues in such a different light. (My suspicion, based on some recent historical non-fiction that I’ve read, is that the radical, reactionary right-wing politics currently in vogue are only distantly related to the beliefs put forth as “classic” Republican platform planks.) That said, I have a few friends and colleagues who are Republicans and occasionally they’ve said things and I’ve seen their points. I like those people because sometimes they’re mystified by my politics but we’re still friends anyhow.

[] Star Trek. Enough said. … Although I will say this: in fourth grade, I wore a Captain Kirk shirt on school picture day. I do not do the equivalent thing now. I went to one Trek convention, in Boston in 1992, mainly because it featured Patrick Stewart as the keynote speaker and I’d go to the ends of the earth to listen to that guy improv for an hour. (On the subway, heading into Boston, I sat next to a family of four, also going to the convention … and Mom, Dad, Jimmy and Jane all wore full Starfleet uniforms. I decided it was okay for them and that I was okay where I was.)

So, once in a while you bump into a group of people, enthusiasts regarding a particular topic, who are so passionate that it blinds them to the possibilities that [1] their activity may not be the best thing since sliced bread, and that [2] other people who “don’t get it” should be allowed to “not get it” and not take abuse for it.

For example, I’m a big ol’ fan of “A Prairie Home Companion”, which may be the only remaining weekly variety show left on American radio. Every week, as my dad would have said, “I have my folksy humor batteries fully charged”. Late in the two-hour show, Garrison Keillor largely improvises a twenty-minute monologue purporting to chronicle the recent week’s current events in “the little town that time forgot”, Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average – and where all the characters are right on the edge of being stereotypical homespun, myopic and faintly backward Midwesterners. I have heard more marvelous parables acted out by these characters than I can count. The musicians on the program are some of the finest in America. The writing is superb. But plenty of Midwesterners, Lutherans and others have mistaken Keillor’s works for mockery. For every 99 Keillor admirers, there’s one listener that doesn’t get the joke, or doesn’t get that sometimes all it is is a gentle joke.

This summer, I read a book by the marvelous writer Sarah Vowell, called “Radio On”. It’s a diary of a year of listening to the radio. Vowell doesn’t just listen to one station in one city; she listens wherever she goes, to many different stations with different formats, and makes some very astute comments about sounds coming out of her radio and about large issues as illuminated by those sounds. Some of her comments rake NPR over the coals, but manage to avoid whitewashing NPR and its listeners as snooty elitists, while still making some good points about ways in which NPR could probably lighten up a bit. In a couple of chapters, Vowell dumps on Garrison Keillor pretty firmly. I happen not to share her disdain. She may be a little too acerbic and sharp-tongued and smart-ass by nature (which generally works for her) to appreciate Keillor’s act; but I wouldn’t begrudge her the opportunity to be so. I happen to like “Prairie Home” for a lot of reasons besides his observations about humans via his mythical little town, and I wish someone could explain it to Ms. Vowell in a way that would break through her deflectors (hello!; Star Trek nerd reference!) and help her understand what he’s going for. But I get why she and other people might not “get it.”

 

In my first job out of college, I worked in the light-manufacturing department of a biotechnology company. I often would assemble thousands of little plastic pieces, or do equally repetitive things, in a given week. For about three weeks that winter, I was (figuratively, and sort of literally) pinned behind my drill press while another manufacturing department member tried doggedly to get me to join his church. By the time those three weeks had become three weeks, it was borderline harassment. I finally whispered to my department supervisor that if Jacques (not his real name) said one more word to me about how great my life would become if I joined the Houston Church of Christ (not its real name; a singular organization not affiliated with the more well-known Church of Christ denomination) and about why the church I did attend was just not sufficient to ensure my ascent into Heaven at the end of this earthly life … then I was going to march straight into the office of the president of this 40-member company and take up his valuable time asking him to supervise the removal this yahoo from my life.

Astonishing how easy it is to stumble into situations where, inadvertantly, you can poke a nest with a stick – and run afoul of a swarm of True Believers.

So I try to forgive people for not understanding the meaning of “Starred Thoughts™”, or for not agreeing that Jean-Luc Picard became a better starship captain right around the beginning of season three, or for rooting for the Canadiens over the Bruins, or vice-versa. And I hope we can convince more people, someday soon, that if they do accidentally poke the bear, they should at least be left alive – figuratively, literally, whichever. Because if some of the people who populate our nation’s capitol have inadvertantly taught us anything in the past few weeks, it’s this:

A little perspective can only be helpful.