Donald MSM

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The trip to the Manhattan School of Music taught a lot about the importance of dynamics and the feeling of the jazz style. Their band was much different from ours in that they were more in tune with one another and spent less time learning notes and more time on playing the music in tune and feeling the Mingus style of jazz.

            The band is also different from us in that there is less joking around partly because many of the people in the band barely know one another. The interaction with between the director and the students is less joking as well. The class also took some time explaining the music and where it originated from and how it came to be. I also saw that they don’t listen to the music before they play it unlike our class.

            I think the most important thing in the band that we could take from is how they strive not to stand out but to be in tune and have a medium sound so that we could hear the rest of the band. It is this that kills us as a band at Berklee and something we as a band should work on more.