Those of you who’ve had a kid in a children’s orchestra can skip right over this.
Here’s a beginning band playing Hot Cross Buns. An Intermediate school generally means grades 4-6, and since kids are wearing Santa cap, I’m guessing this is the winter concert, meaning they’ve been doing this for one semester, probably playing together two days a week.
Of course they sound terrible, but they’re holding their instruments properly, they more or less start and finish together, and I didn’t hear too many false notes.
It depends on what you mean. This does not sound authentically like a young, inexperienced orchestra to my ears. One that was that bad at the harmony parts would be worse at the unison parts. And I suspect there is a track with experienced musicians playing with it.
That said, yes, if you gave them music this far outside their ability, you would probably get something that sounds quite bad. But that’s not all children’s orchestras, just the ones that are just starting out. Beginners just don’t know what to do.
Also, a lot of it can be due to instruction. One of the most important things to sound good is to tune. My band directors did a lot to push tuning, both by tuning us all the time and teaching us how to stay in tune. I feel like there are even high school bands where this is not taught.
I know ITA but whenever I hear how awesome the drawing of a sun and dog (read: yellow blob and brown blob) are that a 4 year old did, I think of this book. Children’s bands are no exception. I have no musical talent but at least when I play a violin it doesn’t sound like Bigfoot with his balls caught in a bear trap.
Most importantly, the ad in the OP is a lie. The kids in that ad aren’t even playing: they’re miming a performance, while it’s an adult orchestra deliberately playing badly on the soundtrack.
Sure, kids’ music can be rough to listen to sometimes, no doubt. But the music teachers I know are pretty pissed off about this ad.
Others have hit the main points. These kids aren’t playing their instruments, and unless it was an all-stars group, no group that young would be playing that piece on those instruments.
We were lucky that our grade school district had good music programs. If your district has a shitty program, then yeah, the bands/orchestras will suck.
Our kids started in IIRC 4th-5th grade on just a few instruments. You could choose violin, flute, clarinet, or trumpet.
By middle school (6-8) there were separate bands and orch. And there were 2 - if not 3 - levels of band. So the bottom band of 6th graders was pretty much playing Hot Cross Buns and Twinkle. But by 8th grade, the top band was really playing some serious and enjoyable music. (Actually, our Jr High won state a couple of times while our kids went through.)
Same as sports. There are a lot of young, beginner teams that really suck. But relatively quickly, with the proper coaching, they actually develop some skills and can be enjoyable to watch.
Somewhere I have a vinyl recording of my high school band & chorus (the latter of which I was in) from the early 70s, which I hadn’t realized my mother had saved. One of my brothers transferred it to a CD about ten years ago for me. I listened to it once. Just once.
At least kids’ beginning orchestra concerts tend to be short, for the simple reason that they don’t know many pieces yet and those they do know are usually quite brief. Now dance recitals, those can be torture to sit through. There might be fifteen or twenty classes performing, and if you have two kids in different classes, they’ll always be in widely separated numbers, forcing you to sit through the whole damn thing to see them both perform.
From my own recollection of being in the band 7th-9th grade:
The first six months, we sounded bloody awful, to be frank. Not surprising, we were just learning our instruments.
The second semester, I was in Intermediate Band and we had some good musicians, although we were still very much in the process of learning our craft on them. For the difficulty of music our director picked for us, we sounded good. It was together, it had feeling, it was in key and on tempo, and what we played was catchy and listenable. So that’s two years in from a starting point of no familiarity with playing these things. To be honest, I got promoted in part because I switched from cornet to french horn, and the latter was a more rare instrument, hence less competition. So I was probably one of the less adept players for the band I was in. It was a challenge and I enjoyed trying to rise to expectations and demands.
Two years later, we did this piece. This isn’t us, and I don’t think we did it quite this well, but not too far from it.
Teacher here. Unless you have a group of massively dedicated kids who are Juliard bound, I would say the vast majority of children’s orchestras sound really bad.
Even most marching bands that qualify for the Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade aren’t all that great, to be honest. I say this and my niece and nephew have marched in it multiple times.
That music was performed by pros and mimed by the kids. Kids don’t make mistakes like that. They make entirely different ones. Even if they did play it, it was still mimed because that’s how videos are made. This is a commercial, not a concert.
Children’s groups can sound bad, yes. They also can sound good- for a children’s group. In a school, it can vary year to year as kids cycle through. Some kids won’t motivate to practice, some will. Instructors can’t stand over them to make sure they practice at home. Some kids do their homework, some don’t. Sure, a good instructor can make a big difference, but you can’t expect the London Symphony Orchestra from a bunch of elementary school kids. Is high school sports played at the same level as pro sports? No, of course not.
You have to have performances and recitals at every level of skill. First off, performing music is the whole point of being in a group. Performances provide a vital function of being a goal to work towards. Why get better if you’re never going to play in front of anybody? “We have to work hard to get this piece down for the concert.” Would the high school football team practice and never have a game?
All of my kids went through the middle and high school band programs. As a parent, I had to go to those shows. I sat (on insanely uncomfortable seats) and listened and applauded for all the groups. Not because I was transported to unearthly delight by what I was hearing, but because I want to encourage the kids to practice and get better. I did better than MY parents, who admitted that they had to have a couple glasses of wine to prepare for my concerts when I was in school.
Anyway, most of that was off topic from the OP. I do want to say, however, that in one of the wide shots, I noticed there was a girl swinging her legs back and forth. Just the sort of things kids do in concerts. Cute.
I loved being a Dad, was thrilled about 99% of it, those of you who know me know this.
But the one thing I detested above all else was the damn school talent show programs. Listening to 7 groups of kids for 2 hours just so you can see your kid for 15 minutes as she mouths the words of a badly sung song was f-in torture to me.
I was overjoyed when she outgrew that stage. Still am.
No. They tend to practise before public performances. Not great, but far better than presented there.
You are not supposed to question why the car is in the middle of an orchestra. Or how it gets out back onto the road, as it is at the end. Commercial logic.
There is a commercial for toilet paper shown during Toronto Raptors time outs. I would bet most people do not notice the bears change from blue to brown. It is unclear how significant this is in light of the subject, or maybe the degree of urgency.
PLUS - they make you pay for those stupid costumes - which they claim will be worn as Halloween costumes (and which has NEVER happened!) Most of the younger kids are just stumbling around, with only 1-2 kids having ANY idea what they are doing. Yet the stupid parents lavish these no-talent/no effort kids with bouquets. GAWD, I had blocked those horrific hours out of my memory.
Of all the considerable dance my girls did, my favorite was Irish. For the most part, the girls performed at different places - assisted living, parades, etc. And for the most part, parents were allowed to watch. So you weren’t paying extra for a “recital”. Instead, you were seeing the kids really perform for audiences (other than their family).
Oh! My! Gawd! I wasn’t expecting that, mostly because that was one of the pieces we did (along with Haydn’s Surprise Symphony) when I was a new French horn player in seventh grade. Our band got a One Superior Plus at the local competition. It helped that the director told the percussionist to really pound the timpani; we used the ones from our high school for practice and the student player started just tapping them until the director showed her how to mash it. The director got promotion a year later to the high school director. So yes it really depends on the director.
