Listening Excerpts to Develop Band Musicianship is a resource that can sit near your workstation for ease and speed. I feel listening has been a great benefit to my students. I have spent a lot of time attempting to be more efficient, and I want to share the fruits of my labor with others. Incorporate listening excerpts into your teaching, and you and your students will benefit greatly.

—Jim Childers

Providing great listening models for band students can be an incredibly efficient and effective way to convey musical concepts—provided directors have a library of well-organized recordings that catalog everything from expressive styles (“Heroic”) to technical issues (“Double-Tonguing”).

With this essential book, Jim Childers does the hard work of classifying the top wind band recordings to provide efficient excerpts for just the right concept.

Imagine teaching students to do a lifting release. If they heard members of “The President’s Own” in one of their amazing recordings, students can be enlightened and inspired. With added coaching from the director, students will have a shortened trip to improved performance.

In this resource, Childers collects hundreds of quality listening excerpts into tables and categorizes them both by instrumentation and by characteristics such as expressive elements, articulations, tempo, and more. This book helps directors be efficient in using small, but effective, listening to develop students’ musicianship—and is particularly helpful in a distance learning environment.

When considering how much time directors spend in rehearsals trying to describe and redefine the musical effects they desire, words and their connotative meanings often fall short and fail to produce what a director hopes to hear. But providing students the opportunity to listen to great bands playing those desired elements from within great pieces of music can, and will, improve musicianship and inspire students!

Jim Childers is Director of Bands at Marion (IL) Jr. High School, where he directs all band activities in grades six through eight. He has directed bands since 1991, at Marion Jr. High School since 2002 as well as Highland High School and Mt. Vernon Township High School. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, studying trombone with Dr. Robert Weiss. He has guest conducted many camps, including ISYM at the University of Illinois, and has been invited to present at several conferences, including The Midwest Clinic.