Ok, the title doesn’t say it all, as my posts usually open. So I was looking around on YouTube, and saw these:
This is a high school band in Japan, apparently not a cherry picked group of elites, but a high school band playing a transcription of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. Usually I hate transcriptions of this French stuff, for a ton of reasons. They often just don’t ‘work’. But these kids are astoundingly great. Beyond being technically proficient, they are musical, so to speak.
Then I saw this, which is perhaps even MORE amazing- this is an elementary school band playing a transcription of Leonard Bernstein’s Slava!. It’s a piece that is considered challenging for HS ensembles in America. They pull it off at a nice controlled clip (mostly) with panache. Wonderful solos.
Oh, I forgot to mention that both groups play without music. Those opening pages of Daphnis go on and on in those 12-tuplets, winding through all these incredibly tricky keys. Of course to even play that stuff one memorizes it in some degree for execution’s sake, but this full memorization business is just a horse of a different color. Also- very very nice solo work.
So onto the question, finally- How is a program of this caliber possible, practically speaking? They have 24 hours a day and 12 months a year in Japan too, right?
I don’t know about Japan, but for school children in China, playing an instrument was a very serious thing, You would likely start extremely young, and be taking weekend and evening classes…every evening…for years.
It looked to me like they had music, why do you think they didn’t?
A lot of Japanese kids (and, actually, a lot of American kids at one time, I don’t know about now) use something called the Suzuki method, where the first few years they play by ear only, and they start with teeny little instruments when they are mere babes. By the time they learn to read music, they’re technically proficient and know what things are supposed to sound like.
I’ve noticed that American kids don’t practice all that much on their own.
There are only 50 kids there. It may not be “cherry picked” from all over the region, but I doubt every kid who wants to toot a horn gets to play. We’re seeing only the best.
We don’t know how long they had to prepare. It’s not unusual for an American professional symphony orchestra to receive the sheet music for a challenging program on Friday, be expected to know that music for rehearsals Monday-Thursday, and perform it Friday and Saturday. I imagine this crew had a bit more time. If so, memorizing the piece isn’t that big a deal.
I am not and was not a spectacular musician, but I was good enough to play in a professional symphony for two years in high school. Most high school musicians here just really aren’t that dedicated. I’m not terribly surprised if this isn’t the case in other countries.
I won’t say that my high school band was anywhere near that good, and I personally certainly wasn’t, but the memorization part isn’t as difficult as you’d think. You don’t really think about memorizing things, it just kind of happens with enough repitition. I pretty easily got to the point where it was almost like my fingers had memorized the piece and I could do it without conscious thought. During marching season memorization was required (along with memorizing the marching patterns). The rest of the school year we had scores in front of us but I, at least, didn’t really need them after we’d practiced enough.
ETA: The kids in those videos are unbelievably good, by the way. We never played such difficult pieces. We played things like Sousa marches and TV themes like Hogan’s Heroes and Hawaii 5-0.
Yep. At the junior high school where I teach in Japan, the band practices 5-6 days a week. I am not sure how long the practices are, but I think they are at least 3 hours. I am not surprised the best elementary school band in Japan is that good.
I like this clip of an 11-year-old Japanese girl playing the guitar, bass and keyboard parts of Rush’s YYZ at the same time. I’m guessing she’s probably a trained organist.
That’s Yodogawa kougyou Koukou in Osaka. It’s a lower level kind of school (technical training not focusing on academics but more on technical/industrial training) which means it’s easy to get into but they actually study some pretty difficult stuff.
The level of teaching is often very good and, of course, they train and study pretty hard.
