As I near the close of my first session as a faculty member at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, I am taking some time to reflect on the unique experiences I’ve had with the students here. Last week’s blog was about the negativity that many students voiced leading up the their initial auditions on the first day of camp. But over the course of the ten-day session, my day-to-day interactions with the campers have been overwhelmingly positive and rewarding. They are smart, conscientious, respectful, and open to trying everything I throw at them (which has been almost my entire bag of pedagogical tricks). More than that, they are curious about their instruments and about music. I’ve found myself in conversations about very specific tuba-related topics that I am quite sure I wasn’t thinking about when I was the age of these students.
Still, they are high school students, and some are as young as thirteen. They have now been living, eating, and rehearsing in close quarters for over a week. Every minute of their day is scheduled and supervised, including the fun. So when they arrive at my sectional rehearsals in the midst of a hectic day, it can sometimes be a struggle to bring 10-20 high school low brass players onto the same mental page in order to have a productive rehearsal.
One of the luxuries of summer camp (as opposed to band in the school year) is that if the students are overstimulated, frazzled, or need to let out some energy, I can allow that to happen. Part of my job as faculty is to create a positive environment for the campers, and camaraderie is a huge part of the large ensemble experience. But the other part of my job is to achieve specific musical goals with the students, and in order to do that the students need to focus. Honestly, I relate to these students more than I thought I would.
Over the course of the week, I began to realize the parallels between my high school low brass students and my own practice-room brain. Like my students, my brain is sometimes scattered in several directions and needs to be purposefully pointed in the right direction (sometimes repeatedly). Like my students, my brain doesn’t usually respond well to being coerced into focusing. But like my students, my brain does respond to learned verbal and physical cues that become a kind of “reset button” in moments when I need to bring my focus back to the present moment.
The verbal and physical cues that I use with my students are similar to those that many teachers employ. I hold up my mouthpiece at the beginning of each class to signal that our mouthpiece warmup is about to begin. Like a conductor, I use my hands to show students when to quiet down and get ready to play. When the class gets rowdy, instead of attempting to force the students to refocus by raising my voice, I use physical cues and repeated verbal phrases, spoken at a normal to low volume, to bring the group back to order. I’ve found that quiet repetition is a much better tool in the classroom than aggressive yelling.
It now strikes me that these same tools are available to me as an individual, and are recommended by the practice of mindfulness. Many people use a mantra of some kind to ground themselves in the present. I have yet to come up with a really cool, zen-sounding mantra, but what I often repeat to myself when I’m distracted in the practice room is “Aaaaaaaand back to the present.” In many cases, that’s enough. In other situations, a deep cleansing breath while closing my eyes helps me to refocus. I recently came across a qi-gong movement that has become my go-to method for establishing mental focus in the practice room (and other situations). Check it out at the following link: https://youtu.be/Ac08kMK-dyI?t=549
What I am realizing this week is that while I’d love to believe that I’m immune to distraction as a mature, evolved adult, my brain can be just as scattered and out-of-control as a class of high school summer band campers. But luckily, my experience with the campers this year has helped me to see that I, like my conductor colleagues, possess the verbal and physical tools to bring myself back to the present moment, no matter how many times my mind wanders. If I can do it for them, I can do it for myself.
**I wrote this blog while sitting outside at Blue Lake’s Kresge Lodge, which is our only source of wifi at camp. While I was writing, an impromptu baby shower was taking place about twenty feet away, seriously testing my mental focus. I’m happy to say that after losing focus several times, I took a deep breath and relocated to a spot where I couldn’t hear or see the party. Sometimes a change of venue is its own reset button.