My name is Matthew Saxman, band and choir teacher at Fulda High School. I’d like to take the chance to share a little bit about a special project completed recently by the FHS Senior High Band members. During this school year’s mid-winter unit in that class, I decided to have the students research a country and its national anthem, and prepare and perform the music for that anthem for an audience. Several different concepts influenced my decision to assign this project.
First, the mid-winter unit for this class is traditionally dedicated solely to one thing – preparing music for our spring band concert in March, and the Large Ensemble Contest on the following day. The music we perform for those events is almost exclusively art music, meaning music written specifically for that sort of group to perform. In the other units, we enjoy the diversity of rock and pop music in the fall, Christmas and holiday favorites in the early winter, and often the magic and drama of movie and show music in the late spring (though not always – the theme for this year’s Pops and Pie Concert in May is ‘Video Game Music’!) While performing art music is essential to the art form of the concert band, working on nothing else for those long, indoor, winter months can become tiresome – for the students, and for their director! After graduating from college and before moving to Fulda in 2013, I taught general music in Winona, MN for one year. While I do prefer teaching band and choir, I try to incorporate some more general topics in music into the curriculum here.
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