Love all of this! I'm teaching a Theory/Aural Skills sequence this coming year and a big goal is to relate them as clearly as possible to the students' instrument(s) (i.e. not just singing). One of the ideas I had was assigning practice homework that could double as their warm up (3 types of exercises, 5 min each, 5 sessions/week), so this is affirming to see and really great food for thought in developing those assignments.
One thing I'm wrestling with here is how to create exercises that support, in contrast to your warmup, an instrument-general technique, that can be applicable across strings, winds, voice, and percussion. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the shared ground of scales, rhythms, etc., but I'm curious what aspects of technical thinking you've borrowed from other musicians that you'd be willing to share!
Great to hear from you on this. My newsletter coming tomorrow deals with this obliquely ( https://compitello.ck.page/percussion ) with the notion of how to structure a practice session. More importantly, I tried to speak to creating warmup exercises from the music at hand, and the idea that a fragment is much better than an exercise book…
In terms of exercises, I recommend Christopher Berg's book "Practicing Music by Design" which does a good job of speaking across instruments on practicing. Beyond that, I would think of what you want your students to be able to do! Categorize these skills (Will Mason's Substack had a great post about this within the context of theory…) and then ask the students to generate exercises around these ideas. They don't need to be long, but they do need to relate to the music they're learning. The creation might spark ideas they could use. For example, if you want them to get better at a rhythmic concept, what about asking them to create some exercises that support this: rhythms that are challenging? I would recommend REALLY SHORT exercises, and asking the students to play around with them, which increases their notion of control while short-circuiting performance anxiety. I wrote out some ways to be creative here:
Love all of this! I'm teaching a Theory/Aural Skills sequence this coming year and a big goal is to relate them as clearly as possible to the students' instrument(s) (i.e. not just singing). One of the ideas I had was assigning practice homework that could double as their warm up (3 types of exercises, 5 min each, 5 sessions/week), so this is affirming to see and really great food for thought in developing those assignments.
One thing I'm wrestling with here is how to create exercises that support, in contrast to your warmup, an instrument-general technique, that can be applicable across strings, winds, voice, and percussion. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the shared ground of scales, rhythms, etc., but I'm curious what aspects of technical thinking you've borrowed from other musicians that you'd be willing to share!
Louis!
Great to hear from you on this. My newsletter coming tomorrow deals with this obliquely ( https://compitello.ck.page/percussion ) with the notion of how to structure a practice session. More importantly, I tried to speak to creating warmup exercises from the music at hand, and the idea that a fragment is much better than an exercise book…
In terms of exercises, I recommend Christopher Berg's book "Practicing Music by Design" which does a good job of speaking across instruments on practicing. Beyond that, I would think of what you want your students to be able to do! Categorize these skills (Will Mason's Substack had a great post about this within the context of theory…) and then ask the students to generate exercises around these ideas. They don't need to be long, but they do need to relate to the music they're learning. The creation might spark ideas they could use. For example, if you want them to get better at a rhythmic concept, what about asking them to create some exercises that support this: rhythms that are challenging? I would recommend REALLY SHORT exercises, and asking the students to play around with them, which increases their notion of control while short-circuiting performance anxiety. I wrote out some ways to be creative here:
https://www.thepercussionconservatory.com/post/7-creative-ways-to-ditch-dull-practice-sessions
Hope this helps!