Posted by Yeah.... on May 20, 2003 at 22:13:08:
In Reply to: are Band Directors Musicians? posted by Tuba Ply/BandDir on May 20, 2003 at 16:30:37:
I see it this way - If a student is serious, she or she should put in enough practice time to do both. Someone saying that student x spent so much time working on scales that they're etudes are suffering just sounds like a cop out to me, if you have an audition that matters, you'll have everything in it down. If a director teaches a student that scales aren't important, and a student has an important audition where he or she has to know these scales, thats simply bad advice. You learn everything you need to know for the audition. Period. And this is just considering an audition here, it could go farther to consider that knowing scales will keep a kid from getting embarassed for not knowing a scale during a jury when he/she finally gets to college. I have incredible respect for band directors - all of them - very few of us would be doing what we're doing without them. But we also wouldn't be if we didn't know that we needed to practice our stuff. Well, thats my 2 cents