HALEY WOODROW
COMPOSER, ARRANGER, EDUCATOR
HALEY WOODROW
COMPOSER, ARRANGER, EDUCATOR
Creating Composers Clinics
This 90 minute Creating Composers Clinic is designed to introduce the principles of composition to band students, as well as give them the opportunity to act as composers by customizing In Two Places for performance. Students will learn how to analyze and describe structural functions in music composition with vocabulary words such as exposition, form and closure. They will also learn to perceive pacing, structure and the storytelling aspect of music, as well as become more aware of how compositional choices affects listeners. Other outcomes include increased familiarity with ranges and orchestrational considerations, and a hands-on approach to assigning melody and balancing the ensemble for performance.
Education Articles
Listening to Artistic Music, Score Study and Composition Planning
This article has been updated with embedded videos that include three online lessons on Listening, Score Study and Composition Planning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It works well as a supplement for ensembles who either have performed or intended to perform my "In Two Places", but can also be used for other educational purposes as well. Contact me through my contact form if you'd like the accompanying exercises in PDf format you can assign to your students, and please consider doing a Skype or Zoom call with me and your students as a part of the educational effort!
Grade 1 Band
This article will discuss fourteen of the most played works in the Grade 1 Band category of the Texas Prescribed Music List (PML). I am currently hard at work this Spring creating three new band pieces, and have been intensively studying scores to find patterns as to what the most popular pieces have in common, as well as what makes each piece unique. This part 1 article will discuss the patterns I have discovered in comparing the pieces in terms of key, meter, tempo, difficulty level, theme, length, ranges, melody and harmony.
March of the Shadows
In response to COVID-19, I have created music for band students to play at home! I have taken the melody and "fun lines" from my "March of the Shadows", pasted them all into one part and then copied the music for all instruments. Also included are accompaniment tracks to play along to! Please feel free to embed in LMS systems such as Blackboard and Canvas. And if your students enjoy the music, please consider purchasing and programming from this website for the 2020-2021 school year! I do accept Purchase Orders.
Past Projects
My inaugural run of my eight-session “Creating Composers Clinic” served to introduce the principles of composition to a group of 8th grade students at Hillwood Middle School in Keller ISD. Throughout the eight weekly sessions, the students and I composed a collaborative composition for Saxophone Quartet, which was comprised, premiered and recorded by a group of their peers. We even teamed up with HMS Audio/Visual club to create a “music video” of the piece, which earned a finalist position in the 2017 Keller ISD Film Festival. In this video, each workshop participant’s picture is displayed, with the audio of their contribution playing underneath. The second half of the video features the entire composition, performed by the HMS Saxophone Quartet.