Welcome to our podcast, Band BFFs.
The podcast where we make your music selection less complicated.
In the next few episodes, we're going to have another special for you.
This one is going to be on winter concert music programs that could be chosen for your
awesome bands.
We are going to have different episodes ranging from easier music all the way to more difficult.
And today's episode will start us off with the easier pieces.
And they are entitled Holiday Rock by Chris Bernotas, Diary of a Grumpy Elf by Timothy
Loewist and African Bell Carol arranged by Robert W. Smith.
Cheers to starting the conversation.
All right, Holiday Rock.
This is such a great piece.
I love how it's written out.
It is about two minutes in length if you play it at a pretty brisk tempo.
It has very, very simply written parts.
This could be something you could even do with a beginner band or a really young group.
There are no eighth notes in it.
It has a six note range for all instrument parts.
Very, very playable.
No dotted half notes at all.
It even has a flex band capability.
That's right.
It's not a true flex band piece, but it's arranged in a way that you can absolutely
play with the instrumentation.
So it can fit any group.
It's also really cool because in the percussion parts, there's a drum set part, which you
can probably play on a drum set or separate it out.
But of course that makes it more fun for the kids because it just sounds really fun for
the concerts.
This is a medley.
So it's a combination of several different popular tunes.
I like that even though there's not a single eighth note in this piece at all, but one
of the things I like about it, even though it's very simply written, it's melodies that
the students and the audience will recognize and they are not so watered down that you
can't tell what it is.
So I think it's very smartly written.
So at the beginning, it starts off with angels we have heard on high.
There's an introduction and then it's angels we have heard on high.
There also isn't a key signature at the beginning and instead all the accidentals are written
into the parts.
So that's something also for younger bands.
The trumpets typically have the melody followed by low brass or woodwinds and trumpets, but
it's nice because the low voices also get the melody and it's not only in the upper
parts.
They do have more of a simple like one, three, one at times, but they do get their moments
of glory, which I think is important for our budding low brass children.
I also really like that this is written, it's very kind of chunked into these sections where
there's not any one instrument besides percussion that is playing for like 30 measures at a
time.
They always get a little bit of a break.
So if you are dealing with a beginner group and endurance is an issue, it's built in to
help you with that.
Yes.
The French horn part does go up to an upper C in this first medley, but if you wanted
to flex band it and move it to the fourth part, which is with the low people, you could
do that or you could of course just have them take the C down an octave or whatever if you're,
if you do end up playing this with a beginner group and they're not quite there yet range
wise in your band.
Then at 17 we have God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen as the melodic feature.
And as Laura mentioned, there's not even a dotted half note.
It's a half note tied to a quarter note.
So they probably have learned about ties by this point and this is written so that if
you haven't talked about dotted quarter notes, then you don't necessarily have to.
So just very typical and upfront on that one in the low brass get a lot of the melody,
but again, it is passed back and forth between lows and highs.
Then there's Deck the Halls and again, it's a tied half note to a quarter note, lots of
upper woodwind melody followed by the low brass melody.
It's very back and forth and playable and very 2D most of the time.
It continues on until you get to the dreidel song, which of course is something that everybody
will recognize.
And there's no style markings either.
Everything is just very connected how you would want to teach students to play.
And the thing that I like about that is I always think it is we do a disservice to students
when there are style markings on the page and they aren't ready to play them and we
teach them to ignore them because we're just training them to ignore those in the future.
But this you don't have to tell them they're not ignoring anything.
There are no style markings.
And then we have Jingle Bells after that and of course that's very playable and it's back
and forth four measures of upper woodwind and trumpet melody, four measures of low melody.
And I do like every time the low voices have a chance to shine almost every time they have
the melody they're by themselves.
Right.
Everybody else isn't playing whole notes on top of them and covering them up.
It's written in a way where they can shine.
They truly do get their moment to shine.
And that's it.
It's a great little piece, very easy to put together and would be wonderful for training
up a younger group.
Our second piece is Diary of a Grumpy Elf by Timothy Loewest and this piece is super
cute.
It is so much fun to play with your students.
It is about three and a half minutes in length.
Now don't let that scare you.
That includes an optional narrator part.
The narrator part is really what I think makes this cute because it is diary entries from
a grumpy elf in Santa's workshop.
So you know it helps to tie everything together.
But that the narration never takes place on top of the music.
The music has these little interludes and then the diary, the narration is read in between
all of those.
So it's three and a half minutes when you add the narration.
It's in the key of concert B flat.
Some of these are in minor mode just because the elf is grumpy.
We do have more.
It goes into three, four at the end.
Yes.
One little section of three, four at the end.
And lots of transitions in this.
But again they're broken up by the narration which I think makes these transitions a little
bit more.
This is great for a younger band because you can talk about things like Rotardandos and
Formada and how you look up and start together after a pause.
Because of course the band has to come back in after each narration.
So it's a great teaching piece overall.
Not a lot of percussion either.
So it's pretty easy.
You know it's got sleigh bells and crash cymbals, cowbell, things like that.
But you could easily play this piece with three or four students or even less if you
had to.
If you have lots of percussionists you can double up on marimba, vibraphone, lots of
keyboard doubling you could do.
So it starts off with just a little interlude and then the grumpy elf talks about being
upset about something.
And then it's jolly old St. Nicholas in a minor key.
The rhythms are very easy.
Quarter notes, some eighth notes, easy percussion.
Then the band gets to say ho, ho, ho, humbug or whatever.
So they think that's really fun.
It's got just a couple accents in that section.
Then the next narration.
After that it's a march like.
So you get to teach different styles of music even within this piece.
Then there's some staccatos.
Staccatos and this.
This is like the march of the wooden soldiers here back and forth between.
There's a little instead of it all being 2D there's like a little conversation where
we get a little counter melody in the upper woodwind.
So it is a little bit more complex than what we saw in the previous piece.
Yep.
There's another ritardando followed by a fermata.
Then this is cute.
I think it's so cute.
It's like little rocket bombs going off.
So all the kids get to whistle at random and then the bass drum just gets to hit randomly
in different spots of the bass drum to make it sound like fireworks going off.
It's very, very cute.
Then another narration.
And then we have he's very disgruntled and upset at this point.
And so we have deck the halls melody but it also has song of the vulgar boatman underneath
it.
So it's got like this very like sad feel to it.
And it's got for the first time dotted quarter eighth note rhythms.
So it's progressively getting more difficult in rhythm but it's not horrible and it's
adding little styles at a time but not multiple.
So in this one it only has staccatos or no style markings indicated other than slurs.
And it's almost like each of these little segmented pieces is like learning a line out
of a method book.
You can treat them as their own individual ideas because you're starting and stopping
each of them on their own between the narration.
So I mean it really is only like learning a long line out of a method book.
Then we have another narration followed by jingle bells and it's more bright and exciting.
A low brass gets the melody again and then we have a fun little glissando for the trombones.
Another narration and it's we wish you a Merry Christmas.
This is the first time it goes into three four.
No key change but just a time signature change and stays in three four all the way to the
end.
So this piece is fun because it gets a chance to teach the students lots of different ways
of going about reading music and starting and stopping.
And it's kind of like the old sight reading pieces right.
Like you're getting different time signatures different modes of music different styles.
So I think it's great for introducing transitions in music because none of the transitions are
complicated because you get to start and stop at every one of them.
So you're not having to worry about holding a fermata and coming in on a phrase afterwards.
So it's a great introduction to transitions in music.
And our last piece is African bell Carol.
This is obviously very famous and I there are so many versions of this out there.
But this is like a Latin bell.
There's so many.
It's all the same.
Really all that changes is the percussion.
Right.
Instrumentation.
I love this piece.
In fact we play it every single year on our elementary tour and when we go play at you
know different places during the holiday season because you can put as many kids on percussion
as you want.
It's got that cool flavor to it.
It's pretty easy and it's well written where when you have the melody you get to be pretty
important and very very repetitive.
That's the other thing.
So again so it's like you teach these chunks of music and then it comes back and repeats
itself several times.
So it's super fast in three four and the key of concert B flat.
The faster you can play it the better.
That really obviously only as fast as your kids can play it successfully and you need
every bit of percussion equipment that is there in order to make this really effective
and really cool.
And again another reason why it's so fun is there are like lots of different shaker and
djembe and all kinds of cool musical instruments the kids don't always get exposed to.
So the more you can add in different things and different pitches in the percussion that's
even cooler.
I will double up on the congas part every time I play it too because it's like louder
and just really fun.
And even one year it was really cool.
I gave the one little part to some of the fifth graders in advance and they learned
it and then they joined us and they played it with us when we came to the elementary
tour.
So that's a fun little just like idea you could do because it's not difficult rhythmically
to where a fifth grader couldn't learn it.
And if your percussion section is strong every time I play this piece if it's a really solid
percussion section I stage the people on that percussion at the front.
And you can even kind of do them antiphonally on both sides of the stage because there's
a soloistic part in the piece where they're kind of going back and forth you can do a
little trading fours with them on opposite sides of the stage but your percussionist
gets stuck in the back of the band all the time and never gets seen.
So anytime you can do something that can feature them.
I think it's a cool opportunity.
The whole piece starts off with percussion for eight measures and this piece is great
because it's in eight measure chunks.
So you have like a new voice come in every eight measures it's easy for kids to know
where the voices come into.
Flutes come in at nine followed by a little counter melody and clarinet four measures
later then at 17 we get the oboe harmony in there we add in a few more woodwinds on the
counter melody at 25 we add in the saxophone on the melody and then we get more more voices
in but still no brass yet.
Yeah your brass have been resting this whole time.
The trickiest part of this whole piece I believe are the four measures the second half of 25
so starting at 29 the one and two and three and one and two three because of the speed
because of the speed.
That's it.
So once your kids get that under your finger under their fingers the rest of this goes
together.
Yep.
Super simply at 33 the brass come in for the first time and we get this cool little like
horn and euphonium and tenor sax counter melody with the regular melody still on the top we
get to do some crescendo decrescendos too which is fun because it's not anything terribly
difficult but the whole band does it kind of sounds like a swelling.
At 41 we now get the alto and horn gets the counter melody part.
I know I love it too.
Let your horns play the range is not difficult.
It goes up to a D I think and that's the highest note.
So if you've got strong horns man let them play.
Let them play on this.
Then at 49 kind of the same thing except now we get these cool like little interjections
from the low brass on beat two with accents kind of like little bell tones.
Trumpet range goes up to an E the first trumpet part so you want to you want to make sure
that you've got you've got the players for that or at least a player that can sound good.
At 57 we get a cool part again in the horn euphonium sax alto part.
It just sounds really awesome and the kids love it and again like Laura said let those
horns go for it.
They go up to an F there.
And I mean this is something I've had my horns in this section I have rewritten this down
an octave for them.
You know they're doubling another conical brass instrument in the euphonium so if the
euphoniums can play that and play out and be really strong you're still you're still
going to get the projection you need.
Then at 65 everybody's got accents and it's like the biggest moment so far in the piece
we all in together.
Then it's a percussion groove like Laura said it's like back and forth between congas
and I think toms and they go back and forth on this cool part here.
And listen and you can like this can be as long as you want it or exactly the length
of time that's written kind of he leaves that flexibility there so let your kids have some
fun with this if they're if they can play it really well.
They do not have to play the solos that are written.
They can kind of improv and do their own thing which I think is another great thing to expose
them to as long as we all get right back together at measure 87.
That was my deal with everybody.
Well you mean the two measures into it.
As long as all the percussion land together you kind of have a cue or whatever to give
them that this is how you know we're landing at 87 and then the rest is smooth sailing.
And then there's just eight measures to the end so it's very powerful exciting when we've
played this at concerts like the audience loves this piece because it's just got a lot
of excitement.
It is a big crowd pleaser and again so even though it is one of the easier pieces range
is something to consider for some of your brass players but you just need a you need
just need a couple of hot shots that can that can play with that range or take it down an
octave because it's doubled in upper woodwinds too.
Well we hope you found a piece from our easy holiday tunes that for your winter concert
that could help your band.
Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of BAM BFFs.