Posted by Rick Denney on July 08, 2003 at 17:35:50:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Keeping a good beat posted by John Gregory on July 08, 2003 at 15:33:16:
I like communities that have a number of community bands. They tend to sort themselves out, so that those who want a social band can find one, and those who are more into the music can find a band more suited to their objectives.
But no community band will ever be pleasing to professional musicians who demand that level of skill and precision. The choice to be an amateur, or to play music as an amateur, demands a certain degree of tolerance, it seems to me.
Everywhere I've lived so far (granted, all are big cities), I've found an accessible band that had making music as its primary objective. That doesn't mean they are all wonderful, but it does mean that all of them have musicians that are better than I am as well as those who are not, all with the same hope of getting better. Like you and Mary Ann, I've left bands that I thought were musically dead and holding me back, but in every case it wasn't the skill but the objectives that caused the problems.
But I hope that you are kidding when you talk of getting angry. Getting mad at community-band musicians is like when I get mad at golf clubs. The only result is my own high blood pressure, and my own lack of enjoyment. The golf clubs don't care, except when I throw them.
When I played in San Antonio, I was last chair in a group of tuba players all of whom had professional training (except me, of course). Their leader was a symphony-grade musician, and I learned a huge amount from his example. He would give us the eye from time to time when we were doing something we knew was wrong, and we would feel the burn of shame when he did it. He never said a thing that I recall, but the excellence of his example was all that was necessary to make us want to play our best and to run off those not interested in that objective. (Back to topic: In that group, we would maintain the beat, um, shall we say, in spite of the conductor, and he would often praise us for staying right with him. Left to his own devices, he had the capacity to completely wind down to a total halt. We used the 'time required for the sound to get there' as an excuse for anticipating his direction, but frankly we played the tempo he started us at and then he and the rest of the band kept up.)
Rick "fascinated and sometimes baffled by community-band dynamics" Denney