Flexible Band Music Offers Wider Variety of Instruments

During the pandemic, music educators struggled to find ways to keep their students playing, keep their programs together, and teach music under their state’s ever-changing health guidelines. Few music programs came through those two years unscathed, with many losing more than 50 percent of their participating students.

Music educators altered their offerings as needed and began to include a wide variety of new ensembles such a world drumming, percussion ensemble, guitar class and jazz combos. These new ensembles provided an opportunity for students who had not considered participating in the school’s traditional ensembles a chance to join with their instrument of choice. A new type of instrumental group called the Modern Band replaced a school’s traditional ‘band’ or became another offering of the program.

Composers, arrangers and publishers were quick to respond to the changing needs of high school music programs during the pandemic and have continued to provide a plethora of music geared for the ‘post Covid’ reality. One of those efforts is flexible band music, a genre that existed prior to 2020, but has found new purpose as instrumental directors move forward and look to rebuild their participation numbers.

Flexible band music gives music directors the chance to include a wider variety of traditional and non-traditional band instruments in their ensembles without the challenges of rewriting or transposing the standard orchestration parts. It also gives directors the tools needed to perform traditional band standards and more popular pieces with unbalanced ensembles. Trying to perform a Sousa March or Holst Suite using the original orchestration when your band does not have any clarinets or trumpets would be frustrating if not impossible. A flexible band arrangement of those works would make that work for both the educational and performance component of high school music programs.

Flexible band music can either be arrangements of previously published works (like Sousa and Holst) or completely new pieces. Those new pieces could have been written either for full instrumentation and arranged for the flexible band or written in the flexible band format initially. Either way, the flexible arrangement contains all of the music elements required of a composition: melody, counter-melody, harmony, bass line and rhythmic support.

While music educators would be able to tell between a flexible band arrangement and the original (of Sousa’s Thunderer March for example), the parents and supporters attending the performance would not notice much of a difference, if any. Because the musical elements of the original are present in the flexible band arrangement, the primary difference would be the timbre of those musical lines. For example, one might notice if the melody, played by the trumpets originally, is performed by the violins in the flexible band’s performance.

To make this music accessible to just about any group with any instrumentation, flexible music breaks the composition down into four, five or six specific lines, typically called Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, etc. Part 1 tends to be the highest part and Part 5 or 6 the lowest. The arrangement then includes multiple instruments on each part, as appropriate to the range, technical difficulty and type of timbre needed. Part 1 typically is written for higher instruments such as flute, oboe, clarinet, alto sax and violin while Part 5 is for bassoon, trombone, euphonium, tuba and string bass.

The standard band instruments are represented on two or three of these parts so that all five lines could be covered by as few as three instrument families. Besides the band parts, each of the parts is written for one or more non-traditional instruments such as violin, cello, piano, guitar and electric bass. Percussion parts can be done by one player on a drum set or by an entire section of performers.

The inclusion of non-traditional instruments stems from the efforts made by music teachers across the country to stem the challenges of the pandemic. When spacing was required and wind instruments and vocals were forbidden (even with a mask), instruments that could be strummed, struck, bowed or plucked became some of the only ways to perform. That opened the band room door for student musicians who had not crossed that threshold before to join and, in many cases, lead their classmates playing instruments formerly not considered for inclusion in the school band.

With the pandemic and its restrictions behind us, many of those hybrid groups have not only survived, but thrived with the return of wind instruments to their numbers – the Modern Band. Flexible music not only provides for those groups, but for programs still working to get back on their feet and return to full instrumentation.

Flexible band music has been around for decades, but prior to 2020 was primarily considered only for small groups with limited experience. The pandemic provided the impetus for arrangers and composers to develop that format for fuller ensembles that demand a more challenging repertoire. And with it came the growth of the Modern Band and its ability to successfully include school musicians on non-traditional instruments. That inclusion, fueled by the flexible band music movement, not only adds new musicians to a school music program, but provides the opportunity for them to improve their reading and performing skills.