Year 13: Week 23 - Back To Beginning Band

Last week, my 6th-grade and 7th-grade band had their first performance. This was a big deal. Any first band performance is an event. Students start learning instruments at the beginning of the school year, making sounds that only a band teacher can tolerate. Then after only a couple of short months, they are making music. It’s a miraculous process that happens year after year worldwide, or at least it did. 

But these perfromances felt different.

The pandemic put a hold on band programs. When schools shut down in March 2020, bands went remote like all other school programs. Remote learning had different effects on different academic subjects, but it was devastating to concert bands. The primary way to learn how to play in a band is to play in a band in person; nothing online could replace this.

When the fall of 2020 came, many schools were remote. Some of these schools didn’t offer band, and ones that did had teachers struggling to begin instruments remotely. This was very difficult, and while some teachers found success, the progress in remote learning on the band was a shadow of what in-person instruction would be like.

Then there were the schools like my school that were in-person but did not allow band as part of COVID-19 mitigations. This meant that the 6th graders that year didn’t have a band. Then in the fall of 2021, 7th graders were allowed to start a band, but 6th graders weren’t. And finally, this year, we had a band for all middle school students, meaning we had a beginning 6th-grade and a beginning 7th-grade band.

Starting two beginning bands this year has been exciting, but it’s also been challenging. Not surprisingly, less 7th graders wanted to try something new and different and be in a band more than 6th graders. The fact that the band was perceived as dangerous during the early parts of the pandemic cast a shadow in some people’s minds about band instruments which hurt enthusiasm.

We have had a lot of success, and it’s really important that they can perform for the community, however people in the community really needs to watch two beginning band performances. So I planned two daytime afternoon presentations, one for the 6th-grade band and one for the 7th-grade band. I invited our elementary school classes for each presentation, had a couple of classes come, and then band student families were invited.

Each band played a couple of pieces together, and I also was able to feature students playing solos and doing small ensemble work. This was an excellent way to differentiate and give students the opportunity to perform differently.

Like so many things coming out of the pandemic, these presentations felt like doing something for the first time, even though I had done these performances before the pandemic. There was a feeling of uncertainty. Maybe something changed because of the pandemic; perhaps something broke that we couldn’t fix. However, things went great and proved that music persists, and there are some things the pandemic could not take away from us.