Dig In
More lessons from concert band conductors
I am fondly remembering high school honors bands as Q1 rolls to a more temperate close. “Honors bands” are audition for all-star ensembles that fill the interstitial calendar spaces between Jersey winters and blistering summers in non-air conditioned school buildings and were some of my earliest experiences being coached, prodded and performance managed.
The cycle ran something like this: you spent weeks preparing the annual audition piece for your instrument (I can still hum various Concertos for Clarinet in Eb). There was a long day of auditions with dozens of similarly minded musicians, where you played a few dozen measures of the audition piece, some scales, and had to sight read some intricate piece, all while seeing the backs of three judges heads. Your scores were tallied, and the best section of musicians made the band. A few weeks later, a school bus dropped you off at the host school’s auditorium for weekly evening practices, followed by two days of intense rehearsals with a guest conductor who stayed for the final performance.
There was no measure of group interplay or dynamics; it was straight up statistical measure to produce a hierarchy of clarinetists. Partway through Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s “Coach Wooden and Me,” a reflection on fifty years of friendship with one of the all-time great college hoops coaches, I’m realizing the real effort was in the preparation of the pieces. I was more nervous for the auditions than I should have been as I didn’t know how well (or not) I was prepared. This is true for all effective interviews — and failing to gauge teamwork can cast you into the valley of passive-aggressive behavior post selection.
One of my favorite guest conductors would exhort the reeds to “Dig in! Dig in!” when we were playing some transcribed string parts full of complex scales and harmonies. I thought the phrase was out of place at the time, as we were trying to power through and decode options for fingering, breathing and pace as a group. But “dig in” became part of the band vernacular, even used by my own high school conductor for a bit, as it felt empowering. It was certainly better than “Play faster!” - encouraging speed creates a defensive reaction; encouraging a player to stand on turf of multiple staves and those much-practiced scales is much more empowering. It worked.
In addition to Kareem’s thoughts about Coach Wooden, preparing a paper abstract last week also floated the “dig in” maxim. Backstory: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” turns fifty (!!) this summer, and Monmouth University is hosting a conference in its honor. It remains one of my all-time favorite albums, and “Meeting Across The River” is one of my favorite and most-examined songs. After hearing it live on the beach this past fall and then seeing the call for papers, I decided to venture outside of my technical writing space and submit a musicology paper.
I had one day to assemble notes I’ve been keeping for the better part of six months, and clicked “send” just a few hours pre-deadline. “Dig in” got me to stop thinking about the paper as an objective or a task and instead as something to build from known, solid principles. Outlining what I know - chord structure, instrumentation, vagueness of that song’s lyrics, and the album sequencing that puts “Meeting” in a position of rising lyrical and musical action - was the ground from which I dug in.
Sometimes you need to transpose the problem view and simply dig in.
Coda:
Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” remains one of the best books about writing and tackling complexity. Here is a wonderful 30-year retrospective from the author.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Substack is beautiful in its breadth, depth and frank honesty. If you read nothing else of his, consider how he captures his relationship with the late Bill Walton.
I composed most of this while listening to some early Renaissance (band, not era) songs (Prologue, Can You Understand and Things I Don’t Understand) that feature forward bass work of the late Jon Camp. Dissecting them in bass lessons over the last decade I’ve seen how he used scales to create movement and pacing, and how my preparation (or lack of it) would make learning those parts more comfortable.