Walter Bitner

The Boar’s Head in hand bear I,
Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary;
And I pray you, my masters, be merry,
Quot estis in convivio.

Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.

The Boar’s Head, as I understand,
Is the bravest dish in all this land,
When thus bedeck’d with a gay garland,
Let us servire cantico.

Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.

Our steward hath provided this,
In honor of the King of bliss,
Which on this day to be servéd is,
In Reginensi Atrio.

Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.

Ah, the pomp and the glory of the presentation of the Boar’s Head! The choir resounds throughout the hall with the fulness of the season! The stateliness and order of the procession! The manliness of the men! The loveliness of the women! The succulent aroma of this rarest dish, a meal for kings! All hail the Boar’s Head!

*       *       *

I first programmed The Boar’s Head Carol for a student performance at Blue Rock School – I believe it was in 1991. Blue Rock had a tradition of presenting a festive performance to celebrate the Winter Solstice each year, which I inherited when I became the music teacher there, quickly embraced, and thereafter retained as the approach I preferred when pulling together December musical performances in school environments after I left Blue Rock in 1995.

Also at that time, a colleague at Blue Rock introduced me to the work of John Langstaff, his life’s work Revels, and in particular the tremendous performances that were presented seasonally by New York Revels, which we made a point to attend each year. These performances, and the spirit and philosophy behind them, informed what I did each fall with my students in a tremendous way.

Tradition

At this time of year, what I wished to give my students was an experience – irregardless of their religious or cultural backgrounds – that would ignite their imaginations and provide them with a sense of community: not only community with classmates, friends, and family sharing in the celebration, but also community with those who have gone before, with our ancestors. Ideally, a musical performance and celebration of the season holds the possibility of connecting us to the past, and our heritage as human beings, in ways no other experience can offer.

The tradition of The Boar’s Head Carol comes down to us from antiquity: the popular version most often sung today dates from the early 16th century, and the tradition of serving the Boar’s Head at the celebration of the Winter Solstice (“Yule”) – and later, Christmas – has been practiced since ancient times. The English carol is associated with the tradition of the Boar’s Head Feast on Christmas Day at Queen’s College, Oxford, England. This ritual meal is held to have been celebrated annually for more than 600 years. An excellent and exhaustive history of the carol and its tradition can be found here, and the Wikipedia page for The Boar’s Head Carol maintains a list of institutions around the world where it is celebrated annually.

As if you need reasons:

This carol is the perfect song for students to sing in a school environment for this kind of celebration: it festively and authentically evokes the season yet does not have a religious text (well, ok, Reddens laudes Domino means Giving praises to the Lord, but it’s in Latin). Other reasons to include this carol in your holiday program include:

• it features the boys (men) of your choirs, yet includes everyone
• it’s a macaronic carol – the text is in both English and Latin
• it’s simple, yet produces a grand effect
• it brings pageantry and a respite from the static staging of most choral presentations
• it can involve the art students in actually producing a boar’s head to present

Years later, when most of the details of a winter performance a student participated in or a parent witnessed have vanished from their memories, they will remember this carol. It’s that special.

By September, students would begin asking me when we would begin to work on it.

How to perform it

The unison verses are sung by the men – or boys – and the four-part chorus is sung by the entire choir.  The men stand in place while they sing the verses, and process forward on the choruses. I would have the men begin at the back of the hall, spread across the back of the audience and singing over their heads towards the women of the choir at the front of the hall, for the first verse. Then they began to process down the center aisle in pairs, with the first two pairs carrying the Boar’s Head platter on a trestle held on their shoulders. The visual and audio effects of this carol are grand for the audience! If we had a table on stage as part of the performance and an actor(s) to present it to, the Boar’s Head would be reverently placed before him and/or her at the end of the carol with flourish.  If not, it would be placed on the table of some august personage in the audience (usually the principal).

Traditionally, the verses are sung by a soloist, but I always preferred to have all the boys in my choirs sing them together in unison. With elementary students, I would have the boys sing the verses, the girls join on the choruses with the choir singing the soprano and alto parts of the SATB texture, and student instrumentalists (strings and/or recorders) filling out the parts not sung as well as reinforcing the parts sung by the choir. High school students are easily capable of quickly mastering and memorizing the entire carol as it is traditionally performed – which we also supplemented with instrumentalists (string quartet with oboe works very well!). Here is the traditional carol:

The setting above as a PDF file: Boar’sHeadCarolQCO

However, the best version I have come across is by the English composer Elizabeth Posten, and includes two wonderful instrumental descant parts for the verses (I have had students perform these on recorders, violins, and/or oboe) and a climactic alternative final chorus which places the melody in the bass part. I found this arrangement years ago in The Christmas Revels Songbook compiled by Nancy and John Longstaff, which seems to be available here at the Country Dance & Song Society store. It also seems to be included in Carols for Choirs 1 from Oxford University Press.

I never had any trouble convincing high school art students and their teacher to create a beautiful paper-maché boar’s head dish replete with trimmings for us to use, year after year. In schools with a younger population, the students who made the boar’s head were also members of the choir!

I intentionally retained a few elements of my winter concert/performance the same from year to year: The Boar’s Head Carol, Personent Hodie (the processional carol with which we invariably began this performance that I have included in part 3 of my solfège series here), a Mummer’s Play, and the recitation of Susan Cooper’s moving and momentous poem The Shortest Day.

The repetition of these elements each year helped to create a sense of tradition for the program and the event, gave returning students something to look forward to and to pass on to the younger students, and also made the preparation of a robust repertoire for the program possible within the short period of time we had to prepare it, as most of the students already knew some of the music when we began the year.

I’ve never eaten boar’s head, have you? Students of every age took a sort of gruesome delight in contemplating the idea, and inevitably threw everything they had into the performance of this carol.

The Boar’s Head at The Feast of Stephen

In 2006, at Linden Corner School in Nashville, I wrote an elaborate script for the Winter Solstice performance. It was titled The Feast of Stephen, and it was set at the court of Good King Wenceslas, with students playing all the parts and performing all the music.  We had fun with this carol in that play.

Fool: The wassailers and the Court have arrived for the Feast of Stephen. Is the kitchen ready?

Page: The boar’s head in still in the oven, I believe.

Fool: Free range?

Page: Of course.

Fool: No antibiotics?

Page: Indeed.

Fool: Very good.  Is the wassail ready?

Page:  The cook has just put the cider on the stove.

Fool: Organic?

Page:  Verily.

Fool: Very well then.  And where is the Good King?

Page:  Ah, the Good King.  He, ah, went to look out.

Fool: He went to look out?

Page:  He went to look out.

Fool: On the Feast of Stephen?

Page:  Indeed.

Fool: But there’s nothing but snow, round about,

Fool & Page: Deep and crisp and even.

…and later, at dinner time…

Page: Your Majesty, The mummers have not yet arrived, but the boar’s head is ready to be served!

Good King Wenceslas: Blast!  It will be a sorry feast if we have no mummers to play for our dessert.  We hope they have not been eaten en route.  This accursed dragon hath laid waste my kingdom, eaten my knights, and now even threatens to spoil our winter solstice celebration!  We had hoped to feast on dragon tail this year and dispense with the gnarly old boar’s head for a change…still, a tradition is a tradition!  What would the Feast of Stephen be without it?

Page: Ummm….vegetarian?

Good King Wenceslas: Indeed.  Perhaps you have something there.  Next year, let’s have tofurkey instead.  But there’s no use letting all of our cook’s labor go for naught.  Bring on the boar’s head!

Page: Bring on the boar’s head!

This audio recording of Steeleye Span performing The Boar’s Head Carol from 1977 is not traditional by any means, but it features the incomparable Maddy Prior, and the drama of the band’s entrance after the long a cappella arrangement of the carol is magnificent.

©2015 Walter Bitner

Walter Bitner is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, conductor, and teacher, and serves as Director of Education & Community Engagement for the Richmond Symphony and the Richmond Symphony School of Music in Richmond, Virginia. His column Off The Podium is featured in Choral Director magazine, and he writes about music and education on his website Off The Podium at walterbitner.com.

In dulci jubilo is a famous medieval Christmas carol. It is a macaronic carol (i.e. the text is in a mixture of languages): the original text alternates between German and Latin. The words are attributed to the German mystic (and student of Meister Eckhart) Heinrich Seuse (1295 – 1366), and describes his vision of singing angels dancing with him.

It is one of our oldest, loveliest, and most important carols. The lilting, singsongy, exuberant melody and the relative ease with which they were able to learn it made it popular with my students of all ages – from elementary through high school. Although not a piece I included as an annual repeating feature of Winter Solstice performances, I would program In dulci jubilo every few years, and most of my students sang or played it in a Winter Solstice production at some point.

The earliest surviving example of the melody is from a manuscript dated c. 1400 in the Leipzig University Library. It was published in Geistliche lieder auffs new gebessert zu Wittemberg (1533), one of the earliest Lutheran hymnals, and survives in settings by a number of composers including Michael Praetorius, Dietrich Buxtehude, Georg Philipp Telemann, and J.S. Bach. It was also published in Piæ Cantiones, a collection of medieval Latin songs published in Finland in 1582. Piæ Cantiones, through a circuitous path, introduced several carols to the Christmas traditions of English-speaking countries in the mid-19th century.

There are many versions of the carol which maintain the macaronic alternating lines in Latin but translate the original German into English – a comparison and discussion of some of these can be found here. I chose to use the two versions printed in The Oxford Book of Carols with my students, which is yet another translation of the German into English by S.P. (the OBC editors are rather mysterious about who this stands for) – I preferred this translation as it is lighter in tone and less religious than the aforementioned.

This is a recording I made with 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students at Linden Corner School in Nashville in 2005.  Linden Corner was (and is) a small school with one class per grade level, and the (unauditioned) choir heard here consisted of every student in those grades, who had been working with me for about a year when I made this recording. The choir is accompanied by a string quartet comprised of 6th grade students.

The choir sings the soprano part of the carol in unison, and the quartet performs the SATB harmonization of the carol in two versions: the first two verses as harmonized by Bartholomew Gesius (1601), followed by the quartet alone performing J.S. Bach’s harmonization, and finally, the choir joins the quartet for the fourth verse – again, in Sebastian’s arrangement. I did not have the choir sing the third verse as the English words are the most religious (about sin) and least uplifting of the four – instead, the quartet plays Sebastian’s setting as a special instrumental verse. It is well worth hearing twice. Here is a PDF of the adaptation I made for us to work from, combining both settings into one score:

In Dulci Jubilo Strings

It seemed more natural to have the students sing the first two verses at rather a faster clip than many of the more reverent and “churchy” performances you will hear in other recordings, and then adopt a more stately tempo for Sebastian’s setting, as it was more difficult for the student instrumentalists to play than Gesius’s harmonization, and allowed them to dwell on the dissonances a little bit longer.

Listening to this recording more than a decade later, there is something touching and moving to me in the sound of these earnest, rather unpolished young voices singing this ancient carol.

This arrangement – combining settings by both Gesius and Sebastian from the OBC – is the rather traditional way my students have performed In dulci jubilo. I have also done the same arrangement with elementary school students using a student (SATB) recorder quartet instead of strings:

In Dulci Jubilo Recorders

This works surprisingly well, despite the fact that the instruments are all at four foot pitch – the effect is very similar to that of a portativ organ.

In a high school Winter Solstice performance, my younger mixed choir also performed this arrangement with a student string quartet, the only difference was that instead of the choir singing only the soprano part in unison, students sang all four parts, and we used the piece as an opportunity to practice (learn) singing from SATB score.

Many composers – especially German composers – over the centuries have been captivated by In dulci jubilo, and there are numerous settings of the piece in a variety of approaches for the adventurous to explore.

Michael Praetorius (1571 – 1621) – whose prolific and versatile career as a composer, organist, and academic straddled the transition in musical styles from the renaissance to the baroque – included an elaborate and beautiful setting for double choir in his collection Polyhymnia Caduceatrix & Panegyrica (1619):

Dietrich Buxtehude (1637 – 1707), whom Sebastian famously walked 250 miles to hear play the organ, wrote a chorale prelude for organ on In dulci jubilo, as well as this rather stately (and ponderous) setting for choir, organ, and violins:

Carrying on the tradition, Sebastian’s good friend and contemporary Georg Philipp Telemann wrote a more extended cantata on In dulci jubilo for a quartet of soloists, choir, strings, and continuo in fine, full-blown high baroque style:

Our friend Sebastian wrote several settings of In dulci jubilo, including works for organ as well as the harmonization for the last verse provided above. The chorale prelude, BWV 729, may be the most celebrated and most often performed:

©2016 Walter Bitner

Walter Bitner is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, conductor, and teacher, and serves as Director of Education & Community Engagement for the Richmond Symphony and the Richmond Symphony School of Music in Richmond, Virginia. His column Off The Podium is featured in Choral Director magazine, and he writes about music and education on his website Off The Podium at walterbitner.com.

Although he is little recognized today, the English composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852 – 1924) was one of the most prominent musicians in the English-speaking world at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and he had considerable influence on the work of many composers and musicians whose work is better known.

His biography reads like that of any great composer: already in his teens Stanford was writing music feverishly, and his catalog included church music, secular songs, choral works, and orchestral works before he was awarded an organ scholarship at Queens’ College, Cambridge at the age of 17. By the time he was 30 he had been appointed professor of composition and conductor of the orchestra at London’s Royal College of Music, where a Who’s Who of English musicians passed through his tutelage: Stanford’s pupils included Frank Bridge, George Butterworth, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Herbert Howells, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and many others.

Sir Charles held many organist, orchestral and choral conducting posts, wrote prolifically in every genre, and was highly regarded as a composer by his contemporaries: his Third “Irish” Symphony was featured at the opening concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1888, and Mahler chose it for performances with the New York Philharmonic in 1911. Along with his friend and colleague C. Hubert H. Parry, Stanford championed the music of Brahms and brought it to the English-speaking world: Stanford arranged for the English premieres of Brahms’ First Symphony, Neue Liebeslieder waltzes, Alto Rhapsody, and other works, and was commissioned to compose for Joachim, Brahms’ champion on the continent.

But all that was a long time ago, and Stanford’s reputation has been eclipsed by others now. It was through his exquisite miniature The Blue Bird for chamber choir and soprano soloist that I first was introduced to his music.

Blue in Blue

The Blue Bird is a setting of a poem by the English novelist and poet Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861 – 1907). Coleridge originally published the poem anonymously in French as L’Oiseau Bleu in 1897; when she died suddenly from appendicitis at 45, she left behind unpublished manuscripts and many poems, which were brought out posthumously under her own name in 1908. Coleridge had been a significant presence in the cultural world of Stanford’s London – her father founded the London Bach Choir and she had many prominent literary friends. Sir Charles was apparently deeply affected by her death, and set eight of her poems in choral settings. The Blue Bird was composed in 1910.

The lake lay blue below the hill.

O’er it, as I looked, there flew

Across the waters, cold and still,

A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,

The sky beneath me blue in blue.

A moment, ere the bird had passed,

It caught his image as he flew.

Coleridge’s poem captures a single moment in two quatrains, in the manner of a Japanese haiku. There is nothing extraneous; the poem’s great beauty lies in its direct expression of natural beauty and its power to evoke a strong impression in the imagination of the reader (and for the song of course, the singers and listeners). The poet carefully identifies the subject of the poem as “I” so that as each of us reads or hears it, we see this image in our mind’s eye as if we ourselves are the witness of the event.

In Stanford’s setting, the choir’s opening chords provide a cool description of the poem’s setting: The lake lay blue below the hill, and over this, the soprano soloist flies in pianissimo with the single word blue. For a scarce four minutes, this bird flies by: the soprano’s melody swoops gracefully, rising and falling above the choir, sometimes blending with what her peers are singing, sometimes distinctly climbing high above. Blue in blue. There is no final cadence: this bird simply flies off into the distance on the fifth of a minor seventh chord, leaving the scene without resolving.

It is pure impressionism.

The Blue Bird for high school choir

I don’t remember when I first heard The Blue Bird, but its masterful expression of serenity and its potential as a vehicle for a choir with a good soprano soloist to have a deep musical experience and make a powerful impression on audience and singers alike caught my imagination. When I found myself directing just such a choir at Nashville School of the Arts about a decade ago, I hunted down a copy of the score.

I was very surprised to find that Stanford had written it in G flat Major. Six flats!

Now I don’t know about your high school choir, but most of my students learned to read music in my choir rehearsals beginning in ninth grade. Even in my most advanced ensembles, most singers only had two or three years of singing from written notation under their belts. All of my students marked their music in solfège, and we sang on syllables until notes and rhythms were mastered, at least. Six flats were a lot to navigate for my young singers and would have created obstacles easily avoided by singing in a simpler key.

So I did the obvious thing and transposed it up a half step: we learned it in G Major, then put it back down to G flat once pitches were secure and the choir didn’t need the piano to find their notes any more. 

Here it is! I hope you get a chance to do this one with your group: you’ll be glad you did.

©2020 Walter Bitner

Walter Bitner is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, conductor, and teacher, and serves as Director of Education & Community Engagement for the Richmond Symphony and the Richmond Symphony School of Music in Richmond, Virginia. His column Off The Podium is featured in Choral Director magazine, and he writes about music and education on his website Off The Podium at walterbitner.com.

Why you shouldn’t always tell your students the truth

For more than half of my teaching career, I taught music & performing arts at elementary or K-8 schools – six of these schools in all, with a wide range of approaches to education between them. One common aspect among all my experiences at these schools, however, is that I spent the majority of my time at each school – thousands upon thousands of hours of my life – as the only adult in the room, in front of a group of children. We spent most of our time together singing or playing music, dancing, rehearsing plays, or working on developing our skills to do these things, but over the years we had a lot of interesting and sometimes amazing conversations – both on and off topic.

Early in my career I began to practice intentionally not answering all of their questions, hoping to spur their imaginations and spirit of inquiry, and that they would develop the habit of trying to find things out for themselves. My experience was that often students would come up with very interesting and insightful ideas about the world if I could refrain from shutting down the possibilities that opened with a question by slapping a pat answer on it.

Sometimes, especially with younger elementary school children (K – 3 or so), I took this practice a step further, and intentionally told them things that weren’t true. The story of “The Rhinoceros” that I told to first grade students at Carrollwood Day School when I taught there from 1999 – 2003 is the tallest example of these tales that I told over the years, and became something of a tradition and a legend there among the students, some of whom would even corroborate my story and help maintain the myth among the younger students once they discovered I had been leading them on.

The intercom system at the old CDS campus

In those days CDS was a K-8 school that occupied the premises of a summer camp on a lake in Odessa, Florida during the school year. The campus was covered with huge old live oak trees, and the buildings in which classes were held sprawled across several acres. At the front of the property on Gunn Highway was a large building with some offices, a kitchen, and an auditorium/multi-purpose space used variously as school cafeteria, rehearsal space for dancing and theatre, school assemblies, and more. Between Gunn Highway and the lake were six smaller buildings on the elementary school side of campus, all built on the same design with three rooms, each used as a classroom. In the years I taught at CDS, there were two or three classes each for grades 1 – 5 (Kindergarteners attended school at the early childhood campus), and all of their classes were held in these buildings. Ball fields for physical education and a larger classroom building that included a science lab were on the the middle school side of the campus, where students in grades 6 – 8 attended classes.

“Specials” were housed in the building farthest from the road on the elementary side of campus – the three rooms in our building held the music and art rooms and the school library. Elementary classroom teachers would walk their classes across campus to and from “specials”.

Each classroom at CDS was outfitted with an intercom: a speaker that was mounted on the wall and controlled from the main office: announcements could be made to every classroom or two-way communication could be made with each class individually utilizing this intercom system.

The elementary and middle schools ran on different schedules. When elementary classes were scheduled to attend a special or other event outside their own classroom, it was simply the classroom teacher’s responsibility to bring their class at the right time. In the middle school, however, there was a “bell system” that rang over the intercom system in their classroom to signal the beginning and end of each class period.

Since both elementary and middle school classes participated in specials, the middle school bells rang over our intercoms in the specials building – but did not ring in the elementary school classrooms.

The Rhinoceros

I don’t know what inspired me, but one morning in August 2000 – at the beginning of my second year teaching at CDS – I was sitting with a group of first graders in the middle of class when the middle school bell rang over the intercom. The children were startled – a couple of them actually looked like they were about to jump out of their seats – and asked what was that noise?

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s just the rhinoceros. He must be hungry again!” I said.

The rhinoceros! That created a bit of a stir. Most of these children had spent years at the CDS early childhood campus, and were now finally “graders” in their first week at the big school, as the students at the ECC called those students who had grade levels assigned to their classes.

“Yes, of course, haven’t you heard about the rhino yet? He lives in a pen over by the middle school, near the lake. When he’s hungry, he pushes a button in his pen to ring the bell we just heard, and one of the middle schoolers will go out to his pen and feed him.”

Some laughed and some looked at me incredulously, but I could almost see their imaginations at work by the expressions on their faces as they took in my story and the preposterous idea of a rhinoceros living right here, at school!

Some of them believed me, and I think some of them just enjoyed the idea even though they knew I was putting them on – whenever the bell rang during class, they would often shout out “The Rhino!!!!!” and grin. Some of them told me weeks or months later that they had finally made it over to the middle school side of campus and looked all over the place: they couldn’t find the rhinoceros anywhere!

Each year brought a new crop of first graders and I continued to tell the story of the hungry rhinoceros with each class when they first heard the middle school bell ring over the intercom in my classroom.

Why I did it

This is one of many instances in which I perpetuated falsehoods with my students – such as the story of where falafel comes from (falafel trees, of course), or the time I explained the gash on my forehead (all too real) with the story about the bear I fought on my way to school…

One reason I did this was that it was simply fun – fun to let my imagination run away a bit and take the children with me. I think that though children are less experienced and therefore more gullible than adults, often they know when they are being had and just enjoy going along for the ride.

More importantly, I think that it is important that children learn that adults don’t always tell the truth – even those they look up to. I was careful always to be truthful about things that are important and about the subject of our work together, and only told them fanciful tales about inconsequential things. But my general idea is that I wanted my students to have the experience of doubting the word of an adult – even one they knew and trusted. This doubt once sown would help them begin to listen critically to what they were told – by anyone – and weigh it against what they know to be true, their own ideas and experiences.

All of this, and some laughs along the way.

©2016 Walter Bitner

Walter Bitner is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, conductor, and teacher, and serves as Director of Education & Community Engagement for the Richmond Symphony in Richmond, Virginia. His column Off The Podium is featured in Choral Director magazine, and he writes about music and education on his website Off The Podium at walterbitner.com.

This article is a companion to my article  Wholehearted Attention.

It’s generally accepted that one of the goals of education – beyond the attainment of specific content objectives – is to instill in the child a love for learning.  It has been my experience however, that a love for learning is part of a child’s natural state and does not need to be instilled.  Children who exhibit behavior to the contrary have most often faced social and/or emotional difficulties that impede their inherent wish to learn and grow; some of a teacher’s work involves trying to determine what these obstacles are and finding ways around them.  Beyond providing the child an acquaintance with and proficiency in the broad array of subjects necessary for success in life, the overarching goal of education might be better described as enabling the child to become her own teacher.

The music teacher has a unique opportunity and responsibility for helping students to reach this goal.  Often it is the music teacher who has the most sustained relationship with students in the school environment, working with the same children throughout their experience at a school, while in other classes, their teachers change from year to year.  Because of this prolonged relationship with her students, as well as the emotional and social aspects of music making, the music teacher has the chance to make an impact on a child’s life in a deep and lasting way that is distinct from the other relationships a child develops with adults in school.

Like other teachers, the music teacher’s work largely consists of placing demands on students and helping them rise to meet these demands.  Music is a performing art, and these demands are presented in the context of the rehearsal process.  As students work with their music teacher over a prolonged period of time, they become accustomed to this process as they apply it to a constantly expanding repertoire, which is carefully chosen by the teacher to present appropriate new challenges, and to develop their musical and technical skill sets, their knowledge and understanding of the art form, and perhaps most importantly, their own awareness of themselves as artists, as human beings, and as learners.

A music teacher is initially aided in this process by the impression that children often hold that music-making is “fun” and somehow more attractive to them than some of the other subjects taught in school.  To be sure, a music program that is taught well will provide many joyful experiences for those who participate.  But inevitably, in a program that aspires to the pursuit of excellence on the part of teacher and students, the moments come in which the rehearsal process – or the required practice to be done outside of rehearsal by all participants –  is no longer fun: it’s work.  If the material under study is well-chosen, it will present appropriate challenges at every step along the way for students – and these challenges will become more difficult and require more time and effort to master as the students mature and become more accomplished.

Young children learn initially through imitation, and to an extent, even as they mature and become able to learn in other ways, imitation remains a primary mode for acquiring new skills even for adults.  (Just peruse the countless “how to” videos on Youtube if you need evidence to support this assertion.)  The demand on the music teacher to provide a model of how to be a musician is relentless: in any given class students present a range of cognitive development that only begins with the ability to learn through imitation, and although older students will need instruction that challenges them to think and learn in new ways, the instinct for imitation on the part of students does not relax.  When in front of the class, the music teacher becomes the ideal musician, exhibiting wholehearted attention to the rehearsal process, to the students, and to the music itself.  The teacher cannot demand the same intensity of work from the students without demonstrating it herself in a manner that is perceived by the students as beyond their current abilities.  In this way, the teacher’s example becomes a concrete model of the kind of behavior the students are trying to accomplish – what they are imitating – that they carry with them not only as something to hold their own efforts up against when they are practicing on their own, but ultimately, as the kind of person they wish to become.

What allows the teacher to continuously increase the demand she places on the students, thereby increasing their abilities to sustain the work in the classroom for longer periods of time, with more intensity, and meeting ever-greater musical and technical challenges, is trust.

The trust that a child holds in her teacher is the foundation of all the work in the classroom.  This is true in any classroom setting of course, but it is particularly vital and powerful in the case of the music teacher due to the sustained relationship a child develops with the music teacher over a longer period of time than with most other teachers she will encounter in school.  The teacher earns this trust over time, through daily demonstration of her competence as a musician, dedication to her craft, skill as a teacher, and through her demonstrated care for her students as people as well as in her regard for them as aspiring musicians.  Through repeated iterations of the rehearsal process resulting in successful performance, the student’s trust in the teacher becomes more profound and this allows the teacher to place ever greater demands on the student, thereby helping them rise to new heights of accomplishment.

In a long-term relationship built on trust, the student who learns how to sing in a choir or play an instrument in a musical ensemble makes slow and steady progress towards a distant goal, mastering a complex web of skills to arrive at a specific result.  Through repeated experiences of this process, the student gains not only the skills necessary to accomplish the goal of excellence in performance, but a self-knowledge and understanding of their own learning process.  Through imitation on her own of the process she is led through daily in music class, the child becomes able to enact this process on her own, gradually weaning herself from the need for the teacher to lead the process as she matures.  An adult who has been through this demanding experience as a child gains a secure understanding of her own abilities not only as a musician but as a learner, and is able to apply this experience and process confidently to any field of endeavor to which she gives her wholehearted attention.

©2017 Walter Bitner

Walter Bitner is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, conductor, and teacher, and serves as Director of Education & Community Engagement for the Richmond Symphony in Richmond, Virginia. His column Off The Podium is featured in Choral Director magazine, and he writes about music and education on his website Off The Podium at walterbitner.com.