When I played in school band beginning in the 1950s, band music was stored in the classroom in oversize, floppy black folders. Individual sheets of music for each song or arrangement. It was a mess. Pages got lost or crunched up. Almost every time the conductor called for a piece to play at rehearsal it would touch off several minutes of "It's not in my folder" and searching for the correct replacement.
50 years later, after using the same black folders for 10 years in the Garden City district, I decided there is a better way - binders and plastic sheet protectors!
At the beginning of each concert season I would stuff the binders with the appropriate music, just as I had with the black folders from the past. Only now, everything
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was in the same order: scale sheets first, all warm-up exercises next, concert music in show order, finally music for sight reading and playing for fun. (for example, every folder had the Jeopardy Theme Song - Kids like playing it. It is fun).
Yes, they had color coded labels. The front cover even had the names of all students using that binder in the different classes. They would occasionally leave notes for kids in another class. This happened mostly in the flute and clarinet section.
Of course, it being a school district, it took THREE YEARS to amass the 40 binders and 5 boxes of sheet protectors necessary. Ms. Potorski was instrumental in helping me realize this purchase. |
