Norwell High School Music Department

For those of you who didn’t make it over to the SEMMEA website, I thought it might be nice to post some photos from the District festival. Sadly, there wasn’t a photo specifically of Kelly, so I’ve posted one of the better shots of the orchestra.

The shot of the orchestra, at the very least, should give you an idea of the scope of the festival–there are probably about 100-130 players in the orchestra and the band and roughly 200 vocalists in the choir.  The power of the sound in the hall was amazing!  I do recommend that you make your way over to the Southeastern District website to see the rest of the collection–you can do so by visiting the SEMMEA website link over on the sidebar and then clicking on the “Festival” link.

Enjoy!

If there’s anything one could possibly need a tool for, one can typically find it online. Today’s find is an algorithm that finds all the reasonable voicings for any particular chord and displays them visually on the guitar neck. I’m sure that our more inexperienced guitarists will find it useful and that even some of our more seasoned veterans might find a couple of useful voicings in there. In addition to putting in the link below, I’m going to make it a permanent addition to the sidebar over at the right. Enjoy!

Chord Voicing Generator

For those of you who missed the exciting news yesterday afternoon, we finally got the first of the computers for our growing music technology lab. Big thanks go out to Kelly Chase, Norwell’s Director of Teaching, Learning and Technology, Mr. Devine and Mr. Keegan, and Jon Cotti for showing such enthusiasm for this project and helping get it underway. We’ve finally got a reason to use those awesome desks that were sitting around in the jazz band room when I got here in September! A few things you should know about this as we go forward:

1) I’ve moved the guitars, basses and amps to E108 (the middle practice room) for the time being. I’m not sure if that will become their permanent home or if we can find a better situation for them, but I want the room with the computer to be more focused on use of the computer itself: for research, composition, practicing with recordings or, eventually, making our own recordings.

2) The new computer is off-limits until I’ve had a chance to make sure all of the software is up to snuff and everything is functioning correctly. Once that happens, I hope we’ll have a steady stream of people coming in to make use of it.

3) One of the first pieces of software that will end up on the new computer is Sibelius 4, the composition program paid for by a generous grant from the Norwell PTO. Once I’ve installed it, I’ll be doing some basic tutorials with students on how to use it. It’s a very powerful tool that works fairly intuitively, but if you’ve never used composition software before you may need a few tips on how to get started.

This past weekend, at Littleton High School, the Massachusetts Music Educators’ Association held auditions for its annual All-State honors ensembles. A small segment of students who have successfully auditioned for the MMEA District ensembles are offered recommendations to audition, and from those students an even smaller segment are selected to perform in either the Massachussets All-State Honor Jazz Ensemble, Chorus, Orchestra or Symphonic Band.

The caliber of musicianship of all of the students invited to audition is very high, whether they are accepted into the final groups or not. These are, after all, the finest student musicians from the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Norwell High School is lucky enough to have had two students accepted into All-State honor ensembles–Kelly Fanning (bassoon) and David Neves (trumpet).

Hearty congratulations to Dave and Kelly, and in turn to all of the students who have thus far auditioned for Districts or All-State. You all work very hard, and your love of and devotion to music shows every day. I consider myself very lucky to be able to work with you.

Bravo!

We’ve had a nice relaxed period in which we were able to do some sight-reading exercise, watch some film footage and generally recover from the hard push we made into the winter break. As of this Monday, however, we officially shift into high gear again.

1) The final two pieces for the Young People’s Concerts will be going out on Monday and Tuesday–Jack Stamp’s Gavorkna Fanfare and David Holsinger’s A Childhood Hymn. Gavorkna will require significantly more rehearsal time than Childhood, and they’re both very different pieces, but I think that along with Peter and the Wolf, Cloudburst and Clowns they fill out the Young People’s Concerts programs nicely. Final concert program order, then, is:

• Gavornka Fanfare
• A Childhood Hymn
• Peter and the Wolf
• Cloudburst
• Clowns

2) Small Ensemble Night preparation begins in earnest this week. I’ll be posting the roster on Monday, so take a look at it and either let me know if you want to be taken off or put on. I think I got most everybody who asked to be put on. The other thing I’ll need to know is whether or not you either have a piece already picked out or want me to pick for you. I have a huge library of small ensemble music in my office, so please swing by if you want to come by and browse through it. Otherwise I’ll pick the music and have it out on Tuesday or Wednesday.

3) Small Ensemble Night groups–you are to rehearse on your own, both by practicing at home and by convening as a group to rehearse. I will not be running your rehearsals–you will. That’s a big part of what makes our small ensemble program unique. I will, however, be requiring you to check in with me periodically so that I can measure your progress and give suggestions where needed. The finalized roster will have a number of columns for check-in points–each time I sit in, I’ll initial one of your columns. You’ll be required to have all of the columns initialled in order to perform. Good luck and see you Monday morning!

Note to all Jazz Workshop students: As I mentioned in class this past week, we will periodically be using our Monday class (Music Theory/Miscellany Monday) for the purposes of listening to landmark jazz recordings. If you have an album that you think we should take a listen to, you’ve got to submit it to me each week by Friday at the end of school so that I can preview it (if I haven’t heard it already) and load it onto the Music Department laptop. Since we’ve only recently started this effort, we’ve only thus far listened to The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery and a mix of newer music (Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau) and have plans to listen to both Kind of Blue and Birth of the Cool.

A big part of a comprehensive jazz education is immersing yourself in the works of those who have come before you–so I hope to see more new albums come across my desk. Thanks!

-Mr. O’Briant

Ahh, the miracles of technology. Using the Music Department laptop and the wireless broadband available here at Littleton High School, I’m blogging right from the middle of the Massachusetts MMEA All-State Auditions. We got here with ease and plenty of time to spare, registered, and Alex, Kelly and Dave are all warming up over in the gym for their 1:00 audition time.

The atmosphere at these auditions, be they districts, All-State or SEMSBA, is always exciting and a lot of fun. It’s a bit chaotic, with the hundreds of high school musicians, their directors and chaperones, and festival staff wandering about. The warmup room is a cacophony, but a good sort of cacophony, because the students warming up are most of the finest high school musicians in the entire Commonwealth. The directors’ hospitality room is always entertaining, with the cliques of directors hobnobbing and bragging about how big their music program is, what grade 6 literature they’re performing this year and at what festivals they rated Superior. In the end, though, they have come here to further what’s most important–a rich musical education for their very hard-working, talented students.

What I think is best about these sorts of festivals are the networking and exposure opportunities for the students. The conductors that are brought in to work with the students are fantastic musicians, capable of giving a different perspective on music performance than the students get with me every day. Some of the connections that students make with those conductors and directors are lasting ones. For instance, I have a close friend and colleague who performed in an honor ensemble when he was in high school with Tony Maiello, a fantastic conductor on the faculty of George Mason University–and now, ten years later, he is working closely every day with Tony as a graduate conducting student. The students also get to make connections and form friendships with other student musicians in the state–many of them go on to perform together outside of school or attend college together.

I hope, therefore, that we have more students try the district and SEMSBA audition process next year, and I’m sure that we’ll continue to have great success here. Cheers, and see you all back in Norwell!

-Mr. O’Briant

Tonight is Norwell High School’s Curriculum Night, a sort of open-house for our incoming eighth graders and their families. Since we as teachers only get about eight minutes to explain the entirety of our programs to you, I thought it might be useful to direct you here, to the NHS Music Department website. Welcome, and we hope to have you as part of our family when September rolls around!

I had a chance to see the Norwell Middle School concert earlier this month, and I was extremely pleased to hear the work of some very promising, hard-working young musicians. It’s important that we have a chance to connect at events like Curriculum Night, but our commitment to shepherding the students of the Class of 2011 and their families from NMS to the high school certainly doesn’t end after that rushed eight-minute meeting. In that spirit, I encourage you, students and parents alike:

• Feel free to contact Amy Cortright or me at any time if you have questions about the NHS music program! Our contact information is available on the “Faculty” tab at the top of this page. Our doors are always open.
• Additionally, if you’d like to get a student’s point of view, feel free to contact any of the band staff members, some of whose email addresses are available on the “Band Staff” tab at the top of this page.
• Keep visiting our website! It’s relatively new, but there’s already a wealth of useful information on it. We update it regularly with information about concerts, events, classroom discussion materials and more. Bookmark it or try out the RSS feed to stay updated!
• Please feel free to come to any of the performances we hold at the high school! Additionally, near concerts we usually have at least one night rehearsal which is open to visitors. Often, you can learn more about a program from how it rehearses than from how it performs.

Again, thank you for your time at Curriculum Night, and we hope to be hearing from you soon!

-Mr. O’Briant

Since I was able to record last night’s PBS showing of Julie Taymor’s adaptation of Mozart’s comic opera Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), we took the opportunity to watch some clips of it today with our remaining class time after the San Francisco Symphony “Keeping Score” documentary.  My intent in showing bits of the Magic Flute overlapped somewhat with the original reason I brought in “Keeping Score.”  In the case of “Keeping Score,” I wanted to give the students the chance to see the inner workings of a modern symphony orchestra and to see that these professional players, as accomplished as they are, are really no different than you or me.  They still have to practice a lot, they still get nervous when they perform, they take risks when pouring their emotions into their performance, and they have a lot of fun doing it.

Julie Taymor’s Magic Flute takes that notion down a slightly different path.  It’s the perfect example of how opera is often very different than what it is typically made out to be–stuffy, old-fashioned and unlikely to entertain a modern audience of young people.  Judging from the enthusiastic classroom post-viewing discussions, it looks like Taymor’s production hammers home the notion that comic opera should be fun, colorful and over the top, and that it absolutely can resonate today even with high schoolers with little or no prior exposure to the genre.  Other directors undoubtedly try to get that across in their own ways.  Taymor used enormous puppets, wildly imaginative scenery, colorful costumes and actors who make the characters of Papageno, the Queen of the Night, and Tamino (among others) seem familiar, yet fresh and entertaining to us 216 years after its first performance.  I didn’t know this until yesterday, but Taymor even hails from Newton–she’s a local!

Tilson Thomas was absolutely right when he said that classical music is as much about emotion as it is about intellect, if not more so.  And Taymor was absolutely right to take a 1791 opera and transform it into something that can still mesmerize people of all ages today.  Hopefully we can learn from this that music doesn’t have to get airtime on your local Top 40 station to be fun, interesting and worth loving and performing.

The documentary series “Keeping Score” by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, which we began watching today, has a web-based component that might be interesting to check out.  It has further information on the pieces performed in the “Revolutions in Music” series (Tchaikovsky 4, Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and American composer Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring) as well as a number of other things of note.  Enjoy!

Keeping Score Homepage

On Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony