Fleurish Winds

Front Ensemble Philosophy / Technique

Audition Materials

Instructors:

Nick Junker

Shawn Muench

Welcome!

This is a big packet, but don’t let it stress you out. In fact, it’s better if you just show up musically prepared

and ready to play! Everything philosophical in this packet will be naturally conveyed in the teaching. It’s

something to read and grow with the entire season. Here’s a short introduction to your instructors and

what we’re looking for in auditionees:

Nick Junker:

Originally from Hastings, MN, Nick Junker earned his undergraduate degree in Instrumental Music

Education from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. At the University, he performed with the

University’s Wind Symphony, Chippewa Valley Symphony Orchestra, was the caption head for the Blugold

Marching Band Drumline, and served as Director of the Blugold Athletic Band. Since the start of his

undergraduate career, he has also worked as a staff member and consultant for many high school

marching bands in the upper Midwest. Nick is now in his first year as the Director of Instrumental Music

at Ellsworth High School in Ellsworth, WI. Outside of his career, Nick takes every opportunity he can to

travel around the world. He looks forward to being a part of the Fleurish Winds staff and making great

music with talented students.

Shawn Muench:

Shawn completed his Bachelor of Music Education at UW- Eau Claire in 2017 and numerous seasons in

the marching arts with Minnesota Brass, Phantom Regiment, and the Blugold Marching Band. His wide

ranging musical abilities in chamber percussion and piano/organ are paired with commanding intellectual

studies and personal development knowledge. Grounded in experience teaching many students of diverse

ages, Shawn is capable of teaching the whole person for and through the musical experience. His

philosophy of education emphasizes fact-based learning, discrete skills, and respect for cognitive

architecture, but remains wholly aware of experience and perception as the real channel of expert

knowledge, even while limited by language constraints and social convention. Shawn hopes that in every

interaction he would be impactful, authentic, and humbled by a constant need for further development.

In his free time Shawn studies philosophy, writes journals, and keeps an eclectic Buddhist practice while

residing as Director of Music for St. Anthony, St. Ann, and Sacred Heart Catholic Parishes in Cumberland,

WI.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR: Character > Present Ability:

-People who try new things based on our comments and aren’t afraid of errors--- ERRORS ARE GREAT.

Don’t even bother with being nervous (if you are, just think about what you’re doing, not the

situation). We can see past each and every foible in a player and tell exactly what your skills are

regardless of errors.

We’re judging you on your potential.

-People with great attitudes. You take ownership. You know that you can grow. You’re friendly. You work

quickly and do things before someone asks you to. You work for the team.

-People who show up as prepared as they could be! We want you here no matter what- but prepare and

it really helps the group out! (And you’ll feel way more comfortable).

-We’re prepared to accept ANY SKILL LEVEL so long as you’re willing to learn. We can teach you basic

percussion skills and music theory from the ground up.

One more note: Organizations that affirm individuality and individual differences produce stronger

outcomes. YOU MATTER. Musicians who make a point of affirming their genuine values before entering

challenging situations perform better! (Check out Presence by Amy Cuddy on this).

In other words: We want to see the authentic you! We’re inviting every auditionee to write an honest,

candid bio about themselves like the instructor examples above to read aloud for one another.

Community is a big part of what we do. Community means being real with each other. It’s awkward to

get to know new people, and it’s totally fine.

Your instructors are looking forward to meeting you!

THE PACKET:

Here is the philosophy in brief with references to explanations in the Appendix marked by

superscripts.x

Feel free to skip ahead to the technique/music!

The Philosophy- The Dispositions for Success

What is an expert? According to cognitive scientists and my own experience, expertise is a mastery of

many facts and skills that are stored in long term memory and therefore quickly and easily recalled. Those

facts and skills are myelinated neural networks that form habits:

When you practice, you are simply programming your body to get

faster at particular behaviors by insulating neurons. Do a

behavior, get myelin, behavior goes faster. If you want to get

better, you have to get repetition on things you don’t do

smoothly yet. Experts are people with lots of facts stored in long

term memory. When something is new, it takes up a lot of working

memory. After deliberate practice it gets stored away as

efficient myelinated neural networks (long term memory) and

you no longer need to think hard about it while doing it. This frees

you up to think about other things to continue improving or perform multifaceted skills easily (experts just

have lots of habits/facts on lock and so perform better).

We practice two things: discrete physical skills AND how we think. You get better at thinking like a

musician does and doing it constantly.

This requires a particular disposition: falling in love with boredom1. The only way to expertise is boring

repetition! It’s the royal road. There is no other way. You must LOVE working on discrete physical skills

and developing your dispositions2. Your dispositions involve your work ethic, grit, application of Flow3

(applying Flow helps make things un-boring) etc.

Dispositions also have a secondary character of being how you actively think while musicking. Experts

think about particular criteria CONSTANTLY and DO THEM. You get better at doing good music stuff

CONSTANTLY (stuff like timing, good tone, playing with your neighbor etc). It’s a mental skill to apply your

attention to basics like that.

Believe it or not, experts are just really good at the basics. They do them all the time. They enjoy paying

attention to basic criteria (again, see the Flow handout)3 and feeling how it feels to execute things

So that brings us to another idea: Knowledge has a character of being divorced from language. Concepts

are containers for ideas and easy to pass around, but you must convert them into particular feelings and

perceptions. How does it feel to do a relaxed piston stroke? How does it sound to play clean? We keep

exploring these spaces until you have a repertoire of how it feels to be doing things well. Experience is the

real channel of knowledge- it’s a concept paired with an experience. You’ll know why we do things this

way, but also feel how it feels to do that.

Experts can DO stuff (including think a certain way) They know how it feels to

think and do things.

And finally, just a few important ideas, expanded in the Appendix:

-You need to adopt a growth mindset.4

--You need to focus on the process.5

-Be concrete with your learning.6

-How Good Percussionists Practice.7

-Organized Sound8

And that is plenty. On to the technique/music:

The Lowdown- A Quick Guide to Technique

Two Mallets:

We use a rear fulcrum grip:

Look at your hands while they hang at your sides. There is a natural curvature. Bend your elbows to a

playing position and maintain that. The hands sit in an American grip ie. not flat (German) and not with

the thumbs up (French). The mallet shaft is gripped by the pinky, ring, and middle finger. The thumb

rests along the side. The pointer hangs naturally in front of the thumb. The mallets should form a V

shape with the back shafts pointing back to each side of your body (not towards you).

Four Mallets:

We use the Musser-Stevens approach on all instruments, as outlined in Method of Movement.

Some basic skills to work on:

General:

-Standing tall while playing.

-Bringing the hands up together as an ensemble.

-Prepping (ie. motions that help the ensemble start together).

-Start thinking about how you move when you play. (Pulsing etc). (We’ll focus on playing/lock down all

technique first and THEN begin working on the performance look).

-ALL dynamics are played with a punchy stroke, just at differing heights:

FF= 12” Strong Piston Stroke

F= 9” Strong Piston Stroke

Mf= 6” Strong Piston Stroke

Mp= 3” Strong Piston Stroke

P= 3” or less Strong Piston Stroke

-Using your body: Don’t baby step up the keyboard. Take a big step/lunge up when needed. The body

remains parallel to the keyboard. Avoid reaching with your arms without having your body travel first.

Your body should travel places first and the arms go right with it remaining in position. Some exercises

work well when you center your body on the overall area and then lunge left to get started. Then you

simply lunge to the right on the higher part of the exercise. Remember to lean forward when accessing

the black key manual.

-Think of most of your playing involving FLOATING- ie. the mallets’ default position is up. The Piston

Stroke covers this idea:

Two Mallets:

The Piston Stroke:

-Bend the wrist to bring the mallet head up to the top of the stroke. Wrist quickly sends mallet

down to strike and picks up the mallet to the starting point where it rests again. No tension.

-At Various Dynamics.

Shifting:

-As the mallet travels UP after striking, the hand simply moves on the X Axis over to the new key. This produces a check mark shape in the mallet head path:

-The wrist does ALL the lifting, the arm moves over to the new key.

-Shift relaxed.

Four Mallets:

The mallets are labeled from left to right: 1 2 3 4.

The Piston Stroke:

-Various Dynamics (Heights)

-With individual mallets (single independent stroke)

Single Alternating Stroke:

-Alternating between 1-2 or 3-4

The Exercises for the Audition:

*** Learn what you can!! We will work these from the ground up so no worries if you’re not absolutely prepared!!

Lock Jaw: Two Mallets and Inside Mallets

Octaves: Two Mallets and Inside Mallets

-Practice various octaves patterns in various keys. Will be taught aurally at audition.

Flowchart: In C Major Only (works on four mallet intervals)

Green Scales: Two Mallets and Inside Mallets

-In all keys. Try left hand lead!

-Play ALL CENTERS- don’t stack up the mallets.

Blocks: With Four Mallets- Varying Permutations and Dynamics

-Quad stops (all four playing 8th notes)

-Single alternating (8ths and 16ths)

Broccoli: With Four Mallets- Varying Dynamics

Appendix:

1: fall in love with boredom

To succeed you must be okay with working on boring things in a repetitive fashion. There is nothing

luxurious about the process of being successful with music. You need to do the following to get

anywhere meaningful with music:

-practice every day

-learn something new every time (ie. get 1% better each time!)

Furthermore, PROVE you are doing these things. You might THINK you are practicing regularly, but

you don’t KNOW until you make a calendar like so:

The above is called the Seinfeld method, even though Seinfeld openly stated that he doesn’t use that

method. You get a calendar and your only job is not to break the chain of days with a practice session.

Be wise about this: habits are not easy to adjust. Don’t force yourself into an hour a day routine

immediately. What if you only expected five minutes a day for a week? And then ten minutes a week?

So many people fail at establishing habits because they make changes that are too large, too fast.

Another tip for regularity: Write down what time of day and for how long you will practice on

particular days.

Remember when you practice—you have to WORK on something new or that actually needs learning.

We will hit on what to practice later—but for now just realize: if you get 1% better every day, you are

golden. DO NOT merely repeat things you know. It WILL be harder, it WILL feel like work. You have

to accept that.

2. Dispositions

Dispositions are implicit beliefs. They manifest as your tendency to think and act in certain ways

because of how you view the world. Outcomes of experiences (external and internal experiences) add

up to your repertoire of dispositions that influence your behaviors.

Your behaviors are your best attempt to meet your needs at particular moments. We don’t always

meet our needs in the best ways possible, hence the value of learning: a change in your dispositions

because of realizing something works better to meet your needs. Experiences and especially thinking

about your experiences are the way to change your dispositions and thus change the outcomes of

future behaviors. These outcomes are external (doing well at something) and internal (feeling good

about something). The outcomes change because you behave better and/or you feel better about the

outcomes since your disposition changed. So dispositions involve actions AND how you feel about

the outcomes.

The value of a teacher is that they can point you to dispositions and behaviors that work

without all the trial and error. Teachers are shortcut makers. They make you do things you

normally wouldn’t on your own (like be bored and be repetitive).

3. Flow:

4. Adopt a growth mindset:

http://www.tabatatimes.com/mindset-

fixed-and-growth-mindsets/

Does your self worth hinge on being smart at the beginning of things and reaching goals easily? That’s

a recipe for misery. Your only barometer for success should be working at the process like a pro. Be

outcome independent.

People with a fixed mindset use outcomes as constantly shifting evidence for what they are. Instead

of outcomes, live out a set of beliefs about PROCESS and base your self worth on how well you work

like a pro. Do what pros do, get what pros get.

5. Focus on Process:

Where does everything that makes you improve actually happen? In the future? In comparisons

between yourself and others? It happens in the PROCESS of getting better (THE PRESENT).

Here is a reality for musicians: You will NEVER feel like you’re truly an expert. As you get better, the

more you realize how little you know. The only thing we are doing is getting better at getting better.

It’s a learning journey.

Remember that comparisons only have a place for seeing what is effective to do—do what a

particular pro does, and get their results. It’s that simple. It’s not even about right or wrong. It’s just

do this, get that. You decide what you want to be. Comparing yourself to others should be a

MICROSCOPIC part of what you do. You should NEVER feel bad about not being as good as somebody

else.

Your taste will advance faster than your abilities at music. So be sure to put in the time to keep your

skills at pace with your taste.

6. Be Concrete About Your Learning:

In order to ACTUALLY get somewhere you have to know what you know and PROVE you know/can

do something. If you can’t do something, work until you can. Then reflect on the fact that you know

it. Say: “I did this just now. I learned this thing.”

What is the use of doing something and then FORGETTING it after? When you practice/learn, SAY

what you’re going to learn and TEST yourself afterward. Free recall is an excellent strategy for

learning. Read something and then afterward ask yourself to explain what you learned. How often do

you read something and then have NOTHING to recall afterward? If you don’t know that you know it

then what is the point?

Throughout your day, pay attention to how you used your time. Did you accomplish any particular

goals? Was your time mushy, unintentional? Pick a thing to work on and be intentional about it. Do it

until it’s actually good and know that it is something you know.

One last note about concreteness: The world of knowledge and connecting facts and ideas is very

different from the world of application. How does it feel to know and do something? You need to map

your knowledge to experiences and KNOW what the connection is: It feels like this to play this

technique.

Learning can be viewed as a greater awareness of nuance in ideas. It’s imagining an idea as a

sculpture. Each idea has edges, shape, and a way of interacting with other ideas. Each idea has a

feeling. What does practice mean to you? What does phrasing mean to you? What memories, beliefs,

and physical behaviors represent that? Can you make words on a page become more real, personal,

and actually effective?

6.5 More on Being Concrete/Avoiding Illusions of Competency:

There is a lot of wisdom in:

• Simplifying what you’re doing. What’s the goal? “I want to be able to play this piece.” Great. It’s

that simple. Do the very simple steps honestly/actually/without mental fog and you’ll get there.

Cheat/take shortcuts and you’ll play poorly.

• Looking at the music and understanding “how it goes.”

o There is a HUGE number of things you can analyze here depending on your knowledge:

▪ Key/Scales used

▪ Form

▪ Phrases/motives used

▪ Chords used

▪ Melodic structure-steps, leaps, non harmonic tones

▪ Long term voice leading

▪ Dynamic structures

▪ Voices in the score- melody, inner notes, bass line

▪ Aesthetic of the piece (what does that chord REALLY sound like? What is the true

emotion/flutter in your body when you hear it? What do you think

about/visualize when you hear the music?)

▪ Technical challenges/strokes used

▪ How the music develops/goes somewhere

• Chunking small parts.

• Testing yourself and making sure you actually know the music you’re trying to learn. Don’t create

an “illusion of competency.” If you can’t play it five times in a row then you don’t have it.

• Using imaging to imagine what is coming up and connecting chunks. Until you have true mental

ease happening and you can clearly think of what’s coming up, do it, and continue on—you

haven’t learned it.

• Realizing that how you think it will feel at first might be very different from reality. Try to hone in

on the real feeling that makes this new skill/movement actually go. Often we have an old habit

and we need to learn a new one even though it feels weird. Be okay with the weird feeling. That’s

the feeling of learning something new and getting better.

Lastly: Don’t start at the beginning. Everybody does that way too much. Remember that there’s a primacy and recency effect in the brain—you’ve gotta do important work at the beginning of your practice session to take advantage of that. Lastly Lastly: Some days you will feel like nothing got done. Magically over the course of several days it just sinks in. Do the work and realize the results may take their time to emerge.

7. How Good Percussionists Practice:

Practicing is very straightforward in theory, but we need to be clear with ourselves about making

sure we are doing what we believe we are doing. (See 6.5 for tips).

We can make this pretty simple. What do you need to play keyboards well? You need to hit the right

bars in the best place at the correct time. If you do this, you are doing well. If you do these basics

BETTER, then you are doing really well.

If you do these with an above and beyond attention to tone and touch, then you surpass 90%

of percussionists automatically.

Remember, we hit stuff. How much control do we have over our sound? NOTHING compared to a

wind instrument- so we’ve got to get the BEST sound out of everything and do it consistently.

Consistently is huge. It lends a clarity to your music and it’s purely consistency that makes people

sound amazing.

8. Organized Sound:

Our main focus is sounding the same. If you play rhythms at the same time but have a different quality

of sound or a different dynamic, it will still sound dirty. So we will focus on blending sound with our

neighbors to organize the sound. We want everything to speak clearly. If I feel uncomfortable or

unsure about what rhythm you just played, the sound is unorganized. We should HAND THE SHOW

ON A PLATTER to the audience. “Here. It sounds like this.” Absolute organization to the sound is huge.

This means interpreting the rhythms the same, and just connecting with your neighbors and DOING

IT TOGETHER. Do everything together. Link up your ears.

Finally, music has to breathe. You have to convey the overall VIBE of the music- phrase the phrase.

There has to be something present and organic about how you play. Are you actually listening?? How

does it go?

Music Theory Review:

This will include everything you need to know to do a good job in a front ensemble. You’ll

understand how scales work, why key signatures exist and how to know them, and how to

analyze your music and understand what is going on. This stuff is ESSENTIAL for anyone

who is serious about getting better. Ensembles with people who know this stuff LEARN

FASTER together. When you know these things you will memorize music better, faster, and

play with more confidence because your brain understands what is happening.

Topics covered here:

-Note Names on Staff- Compared to the Keyboard

***E-F is a half step! So is B-C!

-Do Re Mi Scale (Major scale) Construction

-Half steps and whole steps

-Key Signatures and Circle of Fifths

-Intervals

-How to Comprehend Minor Scales

***(need to “get” major scales, key signatures, and intervals before this)

-Relative Minor Method

-Parallel Minor Method

(All to be added in future)