Being A Great Director: World Champion Wayne Downey Demonstrates

My name is Joel and I am a recovering band dork. Actually, to use the term “recovering” would imply that I am overcoming it or trying to be less band dorky, neither of which are the case. I still am, but now I get paid to do it, which is definitely a good thing. Along those lines, I came across a few videos on YouTube the other day that I just couldn’t pull myself away from. I wanted to go tweet them out to all of my followers on Twitter (follow @sywtt), but then I realized that most of my followers aren’t music-types so the takeaway they might get would be minimal.

So what are these videos? They are a clinic that Wayne Downey did for the Riverside City College in Riverside, California. “Who is Wayne Downey,” you ask? His biography explains:

Wayne Downey is the Music Director of the 13 time DCI Champion Concord Blue Devils Drum & Bugle Corps. Under his supervision as arranger and teacher, the brass section of the Blue Devils has been awarded the Jim Ott Memorial Trophy for “Excellence in Brass Performance” for an unprecedented 22 times, more than any other brass section in the history of DCI.

If that’s not enough, here he is in an interview from 1980:

Even posting them to my blog So You Want To Teach? didn’t feel like the right thing to do, so I decided that the best place to put them was here on MusicEdMajor.Net. The total time of the videos is nearly 30 minutes so before you start watching them, I want to list a few things that I took away from the video regarding his pacing and teaching style. Even more, I’d encourage discussion about some of these things or other things you see in the comments section below…

• Obviously, if you’re teaching a younger group, classroom management will be more of an issue.
• Notice how relaxed, yet engaged he is. People will generally respond with the same energy-level that you portray.
• Though these are basic concepts that most of us have heard at one point or another – and he has doubtless taught hundreds of times, he still goes at them with the same passion.
• On that same topic, the students have heard the same stuff for years also. But he focuses on four primary things over and over: breathing, tone quality, intonation, and releases.
• Notice at the beginning of the third video how he stops mid-thought and tells them he likes something that they did. If you missed it, rewind to about 0:10 and watch the baritones in the second row as they put their horns down.

All of these concepts are exactly why great music teachers and great coaches are just generally incredible teachers. Sorry about my mini classroom management clinic here, but it’s vital. We can really boil great teaching down then to three things:

1. Know the subject matter
2. Stick to what works, and present it passionately
3. Catch someone doing something remarkable – and remark about it

Enough of me, here we go:

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