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Another SCISA Music Festival is in the books, and it’s a bittersweet occasion for yours portly, as it’s the last one as a music teacher at my current school. I’ve been taking kids to Columbia, South Carolina for the SCISA Music Festival every year since 2012 (except for one year when I had to stay on campus for our reaccreditation visit, and during the COVID year, when we hired a judge to adjudicate our pianists on campus). My Instrumental Ensembles, whether in the “Small” or “Large” categories, and either High School or Middle School, have earned Gold medals every year since 2013 (the High School Small Instrumental Ensemble in 2012 earned a Silver for an instrumental rendition of “The Circle of Life”).
Because we are not a traditional concert band, there’s a good bit of “tech” that goes with the group. Essentially, my Music Ensembles are large rock bands, often with multiple guitars, basses, pianos/keys, and whatever other instruments happen to be enrolled in the class. One year, I took an ensemble that consisted of the following mélange of instrumentation: piano, electric piano, viola, alto sax, euphonium, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, electric bass guitar, and ukulele. It was one of the oddest mixtures, but it worked.
This year, my High School Ensemble featured the typical guitar (all electric), keys, basses (three of them!), and drums, but also alto sax, violin, clarinet, and guzheng. The last of those is a traditional Chinese stringed instrument. We incorporated all of that into a cool arrangement of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic “My Favorite Things.”
That selection itself came about as a result of organic creativity. I was stumped as to what piece to pick for the High School this year, until one of the students came for an after-school lesson and asked to sightread some jazz piano pieces. We found a Jamie Aebersold book with a number of pieces, including “My Favorite Things.” He had immense fun playing it.
Just a day before, my older brother had texted me a lengthy live recording of John Coltrane playing the piece. It seemed serendipitous that my student was also drawn to the piece, so I decided we’d try it as a group.
It began to morph from there. Our alto saxophonist is phenomenal, and I worked out an odd little “Middle Eastern” scale for him. Essentially, it’s an E Phrygian scale, but instead of a G natural as the third interval, it’s a G#; to wit: E F G# A B C D E. That raised third creates a really interesting interval.
My guzheng player and I also collaborated. He is a delightful international student from China, and he will often practice during my afternoon planning. The guzheng typically uses a kind of “open” pentatonic tuning, so he contrived a unique blended tuning in order to get the pitches he needed to play the melody. I told him that I wanted the piece to sound like “East meets West.”
It all fell into place from there. One thing I will miss about teaching music in a group is that very process of collaborative creation. The molding of our arrangement felt like a musical conversation that unfolded gradually, each element falling into place at its appointed time. The process was truly magical.
