Crowned in Glory: The Beyond Band Approach

Abstract

In recent years, primary and secondary education has embraced trends which emphasize “core” subject areas. As of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), music has been labelled an essential area of education in the United States. However, given that this inclusion is relatively recent, there exists a dearth of tools to aid music educators in delivering meaningful and measurable content. As a composer, I have created the Beyond Band model to provide educators with the tools to facilitate interdisciplinary learning outside of rehearsal. This model is epitomized here by the piece Crowned in Glory and its affiliated instructional materials. In writing a work which is technically achievable for student ensembles and enables students to create meaningful connections between their musical experiences and extramusical subject areas, I hope to provide educators with a tangible solution to the issue of measurable and accessible cross-curricular instruction in a concert band context. The Beyond Band model addresses this need through asynchronous online instruction, which takes the form of brief video lessons. These lessons are accompanied by short comprehension quizzes which are automatically graded through the school’s LMS, as well as larger unit projects which allow students to engage with the material in a more comprehensive fashion. Crowned in Glory—a six-minute work for concert band accompanied by eight weeks of virtual instruction—serves as a prototype for this model. The work is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem “The Lonely Isle,” which he wrote as a farewell to Britain as he was being sent to fight in World War I. The online materials accompanying this work deal extensively with poetry, history of World War I, and music’s relationship with each.