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7 Easy Ways to Engage Your Concert Audience

Let’s be honest, some of our concerts are not very exciting. The music might be performed with precision, the students might look great in their uniforms, but if our audiences can’t wait to hit the parking lot, then we’ve missed an opportunity to help them learn about music and get excited about music education.

KHS America Announces Annual Scholarship Winner

Each year, KHS America awards a college scholarship to a member of the United States Army All American Marching Band (USAAAMB).

Learning Scenarios from 75 Years of Rodgers and Hammerstein Musicals

Mr. Lawson Goes to Washington

This issue we present the 17th annual School Band and Orchestra Essay Contest winners and their essays.

We Never Talk Anymore

Once upon a time, a music teacher had a really bad day.

On the way to musicianship in public school programs: Exploring the turf

This essay discusses introduction of Terry Riley's "In C" to urban middle school students as a vehicle for collaborative music-making.

We Never Talk Anymore

Nurturing Passion in Young Musicians

In the September 2016 issue of School Band and Orchestra there appeared an article I wrote entitled “Practice Without Playing.” I actually wrote the article, or at least a first draft of it, a long time ago — half a century ago to be precise — when I was just 15 years old and a student in the tenth grade. At the time I had played the clarinet for just thirteen months but by my sophomore year I just couldn’t get enough of this mellifluous licorice stick and my passion for music was becoming insatiable.

Creating An Effective Lesson Plan

Lesson planning can be one of the more tedious responsibilities that we have as conductors and teachers. Among teaching marching band, the creation of handbooks and syllabi, paper work, staff meetings, and simply surviving each school day, lesson planning is often abandoned and we resort to “on the fly” teaching instead.

Perspective: What A Long, Strange Year It’s Been…

It’s hard to believe that I am already sending my thirteenth issue of SBO to the printer since taking over as editor a year ago. My first issue was December 2014, and here we are at December 2015. Like that first issue under my tutelage, this is also the annual “50 Directors Who Make A Difference” issue. Once again, we gathered a year’s worth of nominations for this honor from the submissions we received through sbomagazine.com, reading each of them for their words of praise heaped upon their particular nominee. As was the case my first year putting this feature together, getting the information from various band directors was a challenge about 50% of the time. Gathering this info from fifty people in every state is quite a process. To the very last minute, there were phone calls made, voicemails left, more emails sent, text messages, more phone calls, calls to administrators and sympathetic school office staff, there were Facebook messages; I was even tempted to try carrier pigeons. If you’re a band director and you get an email from me out of the blue in November 2016, all I can say is, “please open it and reply promptly.”

Perspective: Perpetuating the Species, Survival of the Fittest, or Self-Preservation …

As I was putting this annual issue together, historically called the “Band Director’s Survival Guide,” it was obvious that this wasn’t the month for me to write a feature piece profiling somebody notable or at least noteworthy, from the world we serve at SBO. Interestingly, in starting out this issue, it all began by assembling the ten winning, wonderful essays, from those submitted by the thousands, for our annual scholarship program, where SBO and its supporting sponsors award $1,000 to students who write an essay on a particular subject.

Headlines: Music For All Grants Revelli Scholarship

Music for All has chosen Mikaela Ray of Franklin H.S. in Franklin, Tenn. as the 2015 William D. Revelli Scholarship recipient.