The Pursuit of Excellence: A Band Director’s Guide to Success
34 years as the Director of Bands at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, Sally Wagner brings all of the tricks of the trade together in one perfect little package. She discusess everything from intonation to preparing for assessment to starting chamber ensembles within your large ensemble.
The book is organized in a very simplistic way, breaking it down to four major sections: The Pursuit of Excellence, Strategies That Make a Difference, Fine Tuning Your Program, and Quotes that Inspire. The book does finished with two shorter sections, an Afterword, and About the Author. This allows for easy and quick assess for just about any questions or things you need to reference. I wish that as a brand-new-fresh-out-of-college teacher that I had this book. Heck, this is a fantastic addition to any Instrumental Music Methods pre-service collegiate course, or for mentor teachers to use with their new/young teachers.
I LOVE that she discusses using chorales in band (intonation, my dear friends!), how to choose appropriate festival music for your group (even though YOU’ve always wanted to do Lincolnshire Posy, is it really for your group?), and why it is so important to stop and do a bit of self-reflection. We as educators need to reflect and the book offers wonderful ways for us to be real with ourselves. One of the chapters discusses recruitment and how important it is to start from the bottom up while listing different strategies. This is something that I myself have been references to help build up numbers in my own program. The check-lists are easily accessible and my personal favorite is the two months leading up to assessment check-list. Greatest…check-list..ever…
How many of us find ourselves stuck with broken instrument after instrument? Her chapter How to Save up to $2,000 (or more!) in Repairs Per Year offers great insight for in-house instrument repairs. These are all things that with the right tools, a band director can do right in the classroom. Ms. Wagner and her husband Mr. David Fedderly (retired principal tubist, BSO and faculty at Peabody) have teamed up and wrote a book on brass instruments that include maintenance and repair, but that is for another blog post (great book!!!).
The icing on the cake in this book is the section just dedicated to Quotes That Inspire. Whenever I’m having a rough day, or I just need a bit of a pick me, I browse the quotes that Ms. Wagner has chosen to lift and inspire. It’s nice to have them all wrapped up in a few dedicated pages.
Right as I was starting my first year of teaching high school in 2016, Ms. Wagner came to St. Mary’s County on our county-wide music PD day to give a session with our band directors and talk about her new book. This was the first time I had met the infamous, now-retired high school band director from Eleanor Roosevelt High School and being a (brand new) female high school band director (after teaching five years of middle school), I was going to cling onto every word she said. And I did. And I continue to. I go to all of her sessions at the Maryland Music Educator Association Conferences and pick her brain whenever I have the opportunity.
Ms. Wagner and I have share something in common: we are both the first female high school band directors in our schools AND in our counties (MD school districts are broken down by counties). She started at her school in 1981 and retired in 2015. Me? I started in 2016. 35 years apart and we share that same opportunity and experience. You would think that this far into the 21st century these insistences would be few and far in-between, but not in rural Southern Maryland; and here I am, 2 1/2 years later, still trying to figure it all out.
Even though the book is full of the most useful and wonderful information for band directors of all ages, I would like to quote her Afterword:
No one told her she couldn’t. No one told her that aspiring to be a high school band director in the earlier 1970’s was going to be impossible because men had those jobs and women taught elementary school. So she went on believing that she would one day be a high school band director. She was cautioned, when it became obvious that she was determined to pursue her dream. She was told there was only one woman teaching secondary band, at a junior high school somewhere east. No one knew the woman’s name, only that she existed.
These words hit home for me. Being a female low brass player myself, I was always the girl in the man’s world: at marching band, at drum corps, even at college when I would spend my time hanging with the Phi Mu Alpha boys. I had aspired to be a high school band director since I was 15 years old and when I was 29, I had finally made it. We see more and more female directors popping up and that makes me proud as a woman and as fellow female director. I do know that end of the day, I’m working on being the best band director I can be for myself, and most, importantly my students. Ms. Wagner’s book not only sparks this light into my life, but comes with an invaluable amount of wealth of knowledge from her many years in the field.
Thank you, Sally, for paving the way.
Purchase The Pursuit of Excellence: A Band Director’s Guide to Success HERE