Summer Camp – Building the Ideal Curriculum

              Every summer I lead week-long music camp for Orchestra students.  I always really look forward to this week.  I head up a team of fantastic Orchestra teachers from around my school system, and we get a really dedicated group of kids who are a joy to teach.

              Every year, though, we have to decide what our curriculum will include.  In our daily school-year classes, we are very limited in what we can accomplish.  When we consider the skills expected of a professional musician, we only touch a small slice of them.  We focus on playing an instrument in an ensemble.

              The list of other stuff includes things like music theory, ear training, music history, improvisation, composition, arranging, orchestration, conducting, small ensemble playing, solo playing, fiddle & bluegrass styles, rock styles, jazz styles, vocal training, rhythm training, and I could go on.  While we may get to touch on a few of these in the course of a school year, at the collegiate level and beyond, these things all merit their own classes or series of classes.

              A week of music all day!  Seems like the opportunities would be endless, but we had to make some tough choices this year.  Here’s what we were up against: kids come expecting an orchestra experience.  We have to produce a concert by the end of the week.  Right there, we have two full orchestra rehearsals and sectional time where we can work with kids on the technical requirements of their specific instruments.  3 hours taken.  This is summer camp after all, and playing an instrument all day is beyond the mental and physical capabilities of even top professionals.  So, two PE-type game periods each day.  1 hour taken.  Art project time.  We bring in a certified art teacher to supervise kids creating masterworks painted onto broken instruments and instrument cases.  1 hour taken.  We all have to eat.  ½ hour taken. 

We want to expose kids to top professionals in the field, so we bring in guest artists for several days.  They will touch on and demonstrate some of those things, but they don’t have the time to teach kids how to do them.  45 minutes taken.  Uh-oh.  There’s only 45 minutes left of our 7 hour camp day!  How do we decide what to do!?

This year, we looked at the skills that the teachers brought.  One plays fiddle in a bluegrass band.  Another plays drums in a rock band.  All of us can teach the academic parts of music, and all of us play occasionally in professional orchestras.  After some discussions we decided that fiddling class and percussion ensemble would be both fun and good vehicles for valuable skills the kids could bring back to their orchestra experience, but it was a tough call.  In any subject, there’s always a lot that gets left behind, and deciding where to dive a little deeper and where to leave something out is never easy.