Hi all. I hope you are healthy and safe these days.

Last week marked the end of my first semester at Arizona State University, and the experience of beginning a new position mid-pandemic was humbling and challenging. At ASU, I was indelibly impressed by school’s leadership, my amazing colleagues, and above all our students, whose maturity and creativity inspired me every day.

The impact of COVID-19 on universities, schools of music, and conservatories was at once universal and local. This crisis is unique in the way it impacts everyone—we all have spent the majority of two semesters working to make sense of our place in a world suddenly bereft of cultural collisions. At the same time, our worlds have become increasingly local: our responses to the pandemic depend on our buildings, our cities, our HVAC systems, outdoor temperatures, and the unique situations of our students and their needs.

Because I talk incessantly with my students about the importance of reflection to learning (see here), I thought I would share some of my thoughts at the end of a singular semester in a new place.

More Resources

Themes/Framing

In my communication with the percussion faculty (Simone Mancuso, Shaun Tilburg, and Dom Moio) and our students over the summer, I settled on three larger frames for our work together in the percussion studio this semester: 21st century skills, community, and social change. Vaccine aside, I was inspired to think about how to maximize our time rather than running out the clock and just talking about how great Amadinda is each studio class. (Still, they are pretty great!) In fact, I was optimistic that by focusing on big skills, we could stay on mission through the most challenging times of the semester.

Back to basics and new skills

First, I wanted to focus on technical and soft skills alongside essential practices for performing musicians:

Recording: I’ve written on recording before (see here), but I wanted us as a studio to focus on ways in which recording can help us as musicians: as a practice tool, as a collaborative tool, and as a tool of professional development.
Professional Development: Since we would be spending more time on the internet and less time drumming, I wanted us to focus on some of the skills of professional development that are at times missing from percussion curricula. Fortunately, ASU’s large ensembles were extremely active around guests, and we were able to fill in some of the more area-specific gaps, highlighting career discovery, developing portfolios, professionalizing practice routines, and networking with guests
Collaboration: At the same time, I wanted to make sure we looked for new ways of collaborating remotely, knowing that those skills would certainly be valuable to the students in the future.
Preparation: Since we would be spending less time together in person, this fall allowed our studio to spend time on how to prepare for musical situations. I tried to prioritize talking about skills that could maximize lesson time: part marking, listening, practice organization, and software/hardware that reduce friction.

Basic musicianship from our experiences last spring in Kansas, I had a sinking suspicion that Zoom might not be the best platform for minute technical adjustments to fulcrums or beating spots. As such, I wanted to return to basic principles, and make sure we focused in every lesson on the techniques of musicianship as expressed through percussion playing. These include;

Having strong mental representations
Reading actively, critically, at sight
Learning multi-modally
Practicing Virtuosically
Playing expressively
Creating actively

Here, I was really inspired by our our school-wide focus on recording, the large ensembles’ commitment to digital collaboration, and the brass area’s outrageous fecundity in the face of adversity.

WAIT A MINUTE!

I’ve always maintained that music degrees are humanities degrees, and that musicians develop highly leveragable skills that can be applied to almost anything. These include (among others):

collaboration/problem solving
task individualization
discipline

Seems like the above “new” skills are not so new. In fact, I felt the pandemic allowed me to speak more directly about how to use general skills in the service of myriad professional goals.

2. Community

Inspired by the ASU charter, I wanted to make sure we focused on community this semester. ASU claims it should assume “…fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.” I took this to mean that while we want to change the world with what we do, the local environment is the exemplar of our global reach, and nothing seemed more salient than trying to take care of the students in the studio while staying safe. Sometimes all we could manage was a quick conversation about baseball or the heat (pro-tip: when in doubt in Arizona, talk about (1) how hot it is (2) how cold it is (3) will it rain? or (4) gosh, it rained!)

3. Change

Finally, I wanted to open the door to discuss our role in social change. The explosive events of last summer and the growing realization within the classical music field that our work is deeply restrictive and at worst perpetuates many troubling ideas about race opened the door to some meaningful conversations. Much of the energy from this summer was directed at how universities could rethink their curricula, and how to make themselves more open places. While I don’t think we accomplished our goals, I was inspired by my students’ candor and generosity of spirit, and excited about the work we began together.

In particular, I LOVED our listening sessions, where studio members each brought a work that they felt in some way was underrepresented. Our resulting playlist is KILLER!

(On Melita Belgrave’s suggestion, I recommend Deepa Iyer’s article My Role in a Social Change Ecosystem, which asks (among other great questions):

What role(s) do I feel comfortable and natural playing?

What role(s) make me come alive?
What role(s) am I often asked to step into by others? )

(SOME) CHALLENGES

Percussion studios, it turns out, are very germ-forward. We spent a lot of time over the summer thinking about how to keep students safe while they were on campus, even if the faculty were teaching remotely. As COVID research developed, we worked with the facilities team and the Dean to create a set of cleaning protocols, as well as a more organized and restrictive practice room sign out system. We also worked with students who couldn’t come to campus on either lending out school instruments or working with what they had with regards to space and instruments. We were fortunate for guidelines from the Percussive Arts Society, as well, which helped us determine what kind of resources are needed to stay safe indoors. This is of course not enough, and I know many students felt constrained by their access to instruments and their own personal and family health situations.

Communication

Communication was key this semester, and a major challenge that we never really fully conquered. Without the small talk, or running into students and colleagues in the hallways, we missed something. Trust? Banter? Shop talk? For my students, it was challenging to tell what information was coming from whom, and what was essential to their work. My solution: create ANOTHER platform!

As I had done in the past, I relied on Slack for studio communication, bundling what would have been a wide swath of google docs, emails, texts, and phone calls into one moderately organized junk drawer and trying to set up the workspace to (hopefully) allow us to speak both up and across the studio. Since Slack is a bit more conversational than email, I found it allowed students to ask more directed questions more easily. At the same time, we were able to bypass the morass that is a .edu email account.

Takeaways

So, how did it go?

My big takeaway:

The skills of musicianship may all be learned in a remote environment. In particular, remote work is a fantastic way to develop professionalized skill sets. BUT, the sense of community, of shared purpose that motivate percussionists to be the best version of themselves is challenging to replicate online.

Simply put: It’s possible to maintain a community remotely, but very difficult to build one over Zoom and Slack.

Let’s look more closely:

Final projects

I made the decision to open up our traditional end of semester juries this semester. While students who wanted to record a jury performance certainly could, we made the capstone project a more flexible assignment, allowing students to create original work, engage with the community, and explore themes of interest to them. I also wanted students to leave their lessons with something; a video they could add to their portfolio, a new collaboration, etc. As it turns out, spending an entire semester recording oneself makes a big difference when one seeks to record a final project, and I was impressed with the leaps forward our students made this semester. We faculty heard a variety of terrific performances, and saw much creative editing (maybe too much?). Here are some highlights:

Ryan Fowler recorded all four parts to James Tenney’s Crystal Canon for Edgard Varèse.

Jo Ramirez composed for the first time, and then recorded all the parts for a piece for a piece about eviction and its perpetuation of the cycle of poverty.

Chris Goulet wrote and recorded a piece for vibraphone and live electronics:

DMA candidate Tyler Wales continued on his quest to record all of Joe Tompkins’ French American Rudimental Solos:

And Austin Vigesaa and Robert Grahmann recorded a VERY socially distanced version of Ivan Treviño’s Catching Shadows, with some great subliminal imagery:

The jury is a terrific medium for performance majors to gradually work through nervousness and performance anxiety, but might not be ideal for everyone, especially those in degrees focused on non-performance careers (Jo and Ryan, for example, are in ASU’s Music Therapy program). Sacrosanct as they are, I want to keep this flexibility moving forward.

Percussion Ensemble(s)

My colleague Simone Mancuso and I made the decision to begin the semester remotely in Contemporary Percussion Ensemble, resuming in person whenever we and the students felt safe, or when the science developed to a point where we felt comfortable. Since ASU’s large ensembles were also doing something similar, we didn’t want to create risky physical situations for our students through curricular overlap.

This format was a great way to focus on the skills of chamber music: score study, rehearsal preparation, hearing multiple voices at a time. As such, I felt we were productive and on mission this semester:

Simone led his groups in remote recording projects over the semester, including a remote Musique de Table (!!)
Chris Goulet, one of our percussion Teaching Assistants, worked within Bandlab, to track Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride, in addition to editing and producing our entire virtual concert:

Egha Kusuma, who has let ASU’s Pan Devils steel band for the past few years, turned his typical fall concert into an online event, tapping ensemble members to introduce the instruments in the ensemble and ably recording many of the parts himself. If that wasn’t enough, he wrote a piece which the band premiered remotely:

So many Eghas in there!

For the first weeks of the semester, I presented on score study, part preparation, cueing, and gave some guided listening tours through seminal percussion chamber music. My groups recorded their parts individually, and by listening to our terrible comps, we made interpretive decisions while hearing how individual parts fit into a group texture. In the case of Caroline Shaw’s Taxidermy, I wanted the recordings to be a way for us to study the score and prepare for an eventual in-person encounter.

By the time we met in person, I had the sense that most students knew the works much better than they would have had we jumped into quartets immediately. The takeaway, of course, is that students should be doing this kind of preparation with every piece they learn, and I’ll definitely keep some of these seminars moving forward.

Research/Context

In some ways, this type of semester was ideal for a teacher with my temperament. My teaching emphasizes historical knowledge as a framework for critical thinking. I believe knowledge of the past is essential to creating innovative new work. This year, the ease with which we could share information digitally, and the sudden availability of a LOT of incredible digital performances meant that I was able to highlight repertoire, discuss great performances, and generally nerd out with less friction.

Recordings

Like many of my colleagues at other universities, I had students submit recordings ahead of time. I thought this would allow us to tackle two issues at once: the need for maximal efficiency and clarity within remote lessons, and my desire for students to get more comfortable using recording as a practice and performance tool.

As I’ve written before, recording provides instantaneous, unbiased feedback about your playing. One of the central tenants of Deliberate Practice is that learning requires feedback. When we record ourselves, feedback is immediate, and unbound to our biases about our playing. This allows for more accurate adjustments to mental representation.

At the same time, practice is central to learning any new skill. If recording will be essential to my students’ professional careers (I can guarantee it will!), why not have them practice recording each week? I’ll keep this policy moving forward, since it allowed for us to get right to business in lessons and allowed for guided critical listening where necessary.

Critical Listening

Primary to the development of our mental representation is our critical listening skills. In Peak, Anders Ericsson defines a mental representation as “a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.” Mental representations help one diagnose mistakes and suggest change, and finely tuned mental representational skills can actually rewire the neural circuitry of our brains towards increased memory, pattern recognition, and critical thinking. While recording oneself and listening back can help develop mental representation, the most effective way is through modeling, either from your teacher or from recordings.

This semester, guided critical listening returned in force to my teaching. Listening to music with my mentors was crucial to my development as a musician. Studio classes or lessons with Robert van Sice often included listening to a musical excerpt, with Bob commenting on the phrasing, voicing, energy, or precision of a performer or ensemble. These guided listening sessions helped me anchor my ears more effectively, allowed my mental representation to grow by leaps and bounds, and eventually made me a better teacher. With the time crunch of contemporary universities, however, guided listening has disappeared from my teaching. This semester, though, I often spent lesson time listening to students’ submitted recordings with them, pointing out things I noticed in their musicianship and technique. While any gains in music are long-term (and I’m wary of immediate progress as it tends to point towards a too-kind learning environment) I hope to keep these sessions going forward.

Studio Class

Since our studio class would be remote this semester, I decided to divide the time into three units: presentations from myself and the other faculty, guest presentations, and student work. Some highlights:

Incredible session on our role in social change, which saw many studio members opening up about how we can help engender a more equitable arts community
We held several sessions where studio members presented underrepresented music. These turned out to be my highlights of the semester, as our studio members found amazing work that deserves a wider audience.
I presented (well, ranted) about practice techniques, part marking, and other preparation tools
Shaun Tilburg talked about how to dive deep into your practice and how focusing on small things can reap big rewards
Amy Garapic presented on musical activism through percussion
Abby Fisher talked about career paths in music and how to start preparing for your professional career while in school
Doug Perry talked about how streaming has become a vital professional outlet and laboratory for musical development
Simone Mancuso led us through some seminal percussion repertoire

Remote Lessons

I personally found teaching remote lessons interesting and inspiring. It forced me to be a clearer teacher, a more resourceful thinker, and a less dogmatic musician. How?

Online lessons with mediocre internet speed (Phoenix is……slow……) tend to adopt a Victorian pacing. Speak, wait, speak, wait, play, wait, comment, wait. So polite! In an effort to save time, I managed to partially tone down my verbosity this semester. I got better at giving verbal explanations rather than physical demonstrations (particularly for minute muscular concepts) while keeping up with assignments using a shared doc for each student, to reduce lesson time spent on finding what we did last time. (“Oh, you were supposed to learn #5? I see…”)

Since Zoom has a tendency to offer either an audio experience or a video experience (is that a feature!?) I reckoned with my tendency to teach by sight or by dogma.

Finally, because the computer was the central device in remote lessons, we were able to explore broader projects around percussion playing. We had students working on recording projects, composing new pieces, analyzing recordings, all of which to me enhanced their ability and acuity as percussionists. I tried to approach each lesson as a time for shared experimentation, which freed us from the slog a bit.

That said, remote lessons—and by extension, remote learning—are a better fit for some students than others. In conversation with colleagues across the country, we agreed that some students thrived in a more independent mode, while others benefit from the physical environment and community of a university campus. My belief is that the issue is not necessarily the technology of remote lessons, but rather the sense of engagement with a larger purpose and broader community.

Making Space

Every time I asked our students to innovate, question their beliefs, or create something new, they responded with aplomb and grace. It made me question whether in many cases, the rigidity of a school’s dogma or curriculum holds back our students from the kind of flexible thinking we want them to have.

Final Thoughts

Despite these successes, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we could have done much more. I know the student experience was challenging. Spending many hours in front of a computer screen eliminate the physical cues that allow for saliency in university programs. It’s hard to feel the energy of a large classroom, or that surge of excitement during a passing period before a studio class or lesson. Clicking in and out of meetings felt miraculous in February, but dulling in October, and the lack of physical boundary between work and play wore my students down. Small talk was eliminated, meaning that almost every interaction I had as a faculty member with my students became transactional. No more packing up mallets after a lesson and asking about family or food.

Because I felt everyone was overwhelmed and screen time was so high that any opportunity to shut down was huge, I initially resisted scheduling even more time with students to hear how they were doing. In the future, I’ll look for more ways to make this more possible, as our sense of esprit de corps diminished this semester. (see above, re: students’ needs vis a vis community).

Engaging with local schools has traditionally been a significant part of our work in university music programs. Because we couldn’t visit schools this fall, I felt a sense of isolation from the energy and optimism high- and middle-schoolers project. True, they had their own issues, and I was new to the area, but connecting more with the community in Tempe/Phoenix remains at the top of my list for the future.

Our studio conversations around social justice were some of the most inspiring moments I’ve had as a teacher and professor. Inspired by our amazing HIDA leadership, my students’ desire to investigate their biases and rethink their place in the musical world was fantastic to see. As we deviled deeper into the semester, though, I found us pivoting more towards the nuts and bolts of percussion playing, eschewing more aggressive changes to our percussion culture in favor of infrequent nudges. While I’m sure the systemic ideas we’ve put into place—a commitment to equity in programming, for example—will help, my disappointment reminds me of my role as both a gatekeeper for and a supporter of my students. I’m hoping to find more traction here.

More Resources

My work this semester was heavily influenced by my research into Deliberate Practice, Design Thinking, and cognitive biases.

I’d also recommend Jason Haaheim’s excellent blog, which is a nice clearing house for thoughtful and actionable ideas about practicing and craftsmanship.

I’d love to hear from others, since my perspective is of course limited. What worked, what didn’t? What were some epiphanies around teaching percussion and—by extension—cultural literacy this semester? What can we do to think more broadly about what it means to be a musician in 2021?

Contact me directly!

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Fall 2020 Reflection

Themes/Framing

Back to basics and new skills