Keeping time

30 to 240 BPM by slider or tap tempo, with a beat indicator and the meters a band student actually needs, 6/8 and 5/4 included.

Something to tune against

A sustained tone on any of the twelve pitches, in equal or just intonation. Just temperament is there because a section learns to lock in against a reference far faster than it does against a needle.

Checking pitch

A4 set to 440, 441, 442, or 432, with needle response you can slow down or speed up. Useful when a young player's tone is unsteady and a twitchy needle only makes it worse.

Taking a recording apart

Load an MP3, WAV, or M4A and work it between 25 and 200 percent speed without the pitch moving. Scrub the waveform to the phrase you want, set a loop, and stay there until it's yours.

The period, with a clock on it

Every item in the order gets a time beside it and a timer that actually runs. When you've given the march nine minutes, the board is the thing that holds you to nine minutes.

Up before they sit down

The do-now is on the screen when students walk in, so the first four minutes of the period aren't spent explaining what the first four minutes are.

The recording and the chart

The reference recording you want them to hear and the seating for the day, in the same place as everything else instead of three tabs away.

What's coming

The next concert, the next call time, the next thing that should be on their calendar, in front of them every day rather than announced once and forgotten.

Optimistic, sometimes to a fault

I believe students are capable of just about anything, and I know perfectly well that the optimism gets me into trouble now and then, which is a trade I have always been willing to make. One of my saxophonists struggled through his first two years before he found his footing with the horn in his hands, and by the time he graduated he was the strongest soloist in the program, though what impressed me about him was never the playing so much as his willingness to keep turning up to something he was not yet any good at. A private lesson is where that bet gets made every week, because we aim at something a little past where the student actually is and then agree in advance not to apologize for missing it the first several tries.

A door at any time

There should be a way into music for any student at any point, and in my program that means a set of classes that deliberately do not all run on the same expectations. The easiest door is the jazz lab, which begins with learning music entirely by ear, long before a page of notation or a word of theory ever shows up, and it asks a great deal of the students who walk through it without ever being out of reach for anyone who wants in. Private lessons work on the same principle, since I teach beginners and I teach students preparing for auditions, and I have never once considered the beginner to be the less serious job of the two.

Knock the walls down

My job is to knock down whatever wall is standing between a motivated, willing student and the music, and more often than not that wall turns out to be money, so we fundraise in order to send honor bands, festivals, and solo and ensemble out free of charge to the family.

Other times the wall is the room itself, which is why our jazz program for girls and gender minorities began as a day camp where middle schoolers learned from local female jazz professionals, and it has since grown into something that reaches across the whole jazz program, with a handful of those students now gigging around Portland as the combo JazzChangesPDX. The freshmen who turned up for it this fall were all the proof anyone needed that it was worth building in the first place.

Why the instrument does what it does

We spend real time on the physics of the thing, on tube length and what it has to do with the speed of sound, on the mouth as a ramp that sets how fast the air is traveling, and on what is actually happening when two sounds overlay one another, agree, or conflict, and how all of that becomes harmony. This is one of the places where a lesson can do what a rehearsal cannot, because sitting one to one I can usually find the exact thing a student has misunderstood about their own instrument, and sorting out that misunderstanding tends to solve a good deal more than the problem we sat down to work on.

The first look is inward

When the work is not getting done, everyone in the room already knows it, so the first question I ask is not whose fault it is but whether I gave them enough time and enough scaffolding to do it, and only once I am satisfied on that count do we go looking for whatever the real block is for that particular student. Accountability has to mean two things at the same time, that the work gets finished and that the room stays a place where a student can fail at something and still belong to the group. In a weekly lesson that matters more rather than less, because there is nowhere to hide in a room with two people in it, and a student has to be able to walk in having had a bad week and say so.

What they keep

Most students stop playing at some point, and there is nothing wrong with that. What I hope they still have ten years later is the grit, the ability to hit a deadline, the habit of thinking about their own part in the context of everything going on around it, a kind and team-first way of working with other people, and the memory of having been part of something that got really, really good.