You’ve got a letter from school which says you are invited to a parent meeting for prospective band students. Along with this is an instrument recommendation or your child. What does it all mean?
Below I will explain how a band director typically determines the instrument selection for your child.
If the whole beginning band process is being followed, this is the basic layout.
1. Students are given a test, usually the Selmer Music Guidance Survey, though other similar tests may be used. The
purpose of the test is to determine their skills in tonal memory,
ability to discriminate among tones, ability to recognize repeated
musical patterns, rhythmic counting abilities, and ability to
discriminate among rhythmic combinations.
2. The
abilities in separate sections of these tests greatly help to determine
success with particular instruments. For example, a trombone slide
doesn’t operate like pressing certain keys on a flute to produce certain
notes. The player has to find a spot on the long slide of
the trombone which corresponds to the note he wants to play. This
requires a better sense of tonal pitch and therefore, a student who
performed very well on the tonal discrimination section will do better
on the trombone than a student who performed poorly on this section. Likewise,
a prospective percussion student would need to score well in the
rhythmic discrimination sections of the test, though ideally, all band
students would perform reasonably well in the rhythmic discrimination
sections.
3. This is followed by an individual meeting with the student. In this brief meeting, the interviewer will determine a student’s level of interest , and review the test with them. If
the student is interested, the interviewer will then do a visual look
at fingers, size of the child, lip and teeth formation, underbite,
overbite, check for braces or the possibility that braces will be
needed.
4. The interviewer will then let the student try an instrument or two, usually asking the student if they have a preference. Usually,
a demonstration of the instruments is done at the test or at the
interview so the student has some familiarity with the choices.
5. In
the determination process, the interviewer will use a mouthpiece or
head joint of various instruments to see if the child can form the
correct mouth position. At the end of this meeting, the
interviewer will make a recommendation, possibly two recommendations,
provided the child has shown an interest in learning an instrument.
Not all schools follow this procedure so you need to check that out to be sure your child has a quality recommendation. Children
can fail to learn an instrument, through no fault of their own, when
they would have succeeded beautifully on a different instrument.
See my next article: How to purchase or rent an instrument for your child.
This article originally appeared at www.Factoidz.com, written by Lorena Williams
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