MMEA Conference: Lessons Learned from Established Programs (Lexington and Longmeadow)

This was a very worthwhile clinic featuring two of the top educators in the state, Jeffrey Leonard who is Director of Fine and Performing Arts for the Lexington Public Schools and Michael Mucci who holds the same position for the Longmeadow Public Schools. Both fantastic programs, Jeff and Michael shared their stories of how they built, maintained, and enhanced their programs.

Both clinicians talked about the importance of building a music culture within their district. We have built this somewhat at Pentucket, especially in the high school building where we have A Capella meeting before school and 6 jazz, percussion, and string ensembles meeting after school. This is in addition to our in-school concert band, chorus, and two music electives. However, we need to do more at the middle school level. My new goal for the middle school next year is to have small chamber groups meet after school either taught by me or from someone else via Community Education.

Private lessons are integral to both programs in Lexington and Longmeadow. Jeff Leonard pointed out that the best thing to do is create a lesson program that is collaboration between the music department and community education. This way cori checks and payments are handled through community education while the selection of faculty and what they teach is handled via the music department. I reached out to Jeff three years ago to learn more about his program along with Peter Tileston from King Philip Academy. We have copied this model and now have "The Pentucket Music Academy." We are hoping that more students will join this growing program. Both Lexington and Longmeadow require all of their students to take private lessons if they are accepted into their highest honor wind ensembles. They also offered the idea of having your top high school students give private lessons to the elementary school students for $10 an hour which I will talk to Sharon Pacenka, head of Pentucket Community Education, this week.

Next we talked about the importance of having students listen to quality music. Growing up, a high school baseball player most likely went to a Red Sox game or at least watched them on tv. How can we expect to tell our kids "keep practicing to sound better" if they do not know what better is? We must provide excellent modeling of sound for them. Michael uses a subscription of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Online Digital Concert Hall at a cost of around $200 a year. How do we handle listening at Pentucket? David Schumacher, Director of Jazz, and myself have uploaded music onto the ITunes of one of our practice room Apple computers. However, this room is used non-stop and can only fit about three people at a time. I now get the point more than ever that our students need to be listening to quality music. As a result, I have contacted our high school librarian to see if we can create a listening library for our students using the 20-plus computers in the library. The idea would be for me to assign a few listening assignments for the students to complete in the library with the hope that overtime they would want to do this on their own and come to the library during study halls or after school to listen to music. I currently assign online listening assignment via School Loop however I do not think that goes deep enough into gaining appreciation of quality literature. Jeff also brought up the importance of having your groups listen to different ensembles (i.e. have the band listen to the choral pieces). Michael stated he spends about 10%-20% of his rehearsal time each day with listening and relating it to the day's lesson.

Michael brought up a great point about sharing students. Sometimes band directors do not like to share their students with chorus and vice versa. However, it is great for band members to get into chorus where they will get more ear training and for chorus members to be in band where they can get better at rhythm and balancing. We as human beings tend not to just stick with one art, but practice at least two. Sharing students only helps your music department, not detracts it. We are proud at the middle school especially, to share students between band, chorus, and strings.