School of HONK is a teaching band I co-founded with friends and bandmates over four years ago. Growing out of the HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands, and learning from our experience organizing other, smaller brass bands and music ensembles, we are now a diverse learning community and brass band with members from all different backgrounds, spanning age and musical experience. Around a hundred members come out to play and parade together each week, and there are hundreds more who are a part of our community, coming a little less regularly or on a drop-in basis as they are able.

We welcome members who’ve never played an instrument before, offering loaner instruments and songs arranged with simple parts most people can play on their very first day. We also welcome more experienced players. We count numerous professional musicians amongst our membership along with players from many other local bands, offering these members more intricate arrangements they can learn and opportunities for solo improvisation and playing by ear.

The inclusive, non-competetive social environment of School of HONK is what keeps all these people coming back, but the excellence of the musical and spectacle-based practice is a necessary prerequisite, even if our definition of excellence is different from that of an orchestra or jazz band.

While School of HONK is its own project, begun not to advance my interests in Noise and the Novice but for its own ends, it is something that embodies many of my values around living traditions; social, collaborative learning and teaching; the power of the novice; and the blurry line between noise and music that drive my program of study. So, I am working to make an intentional practice of mining my experiences participating in, programming for, and facilitating at School of HONK in order to ask and answer questions about this program of study.

Below are some of the projects I’ve undertaken within School of HONK and

Improv interviews

This is an interview project in which I am interviewing musicians, and possibly practitioners from other fields which prominently utilize improv, to learn how they think about improvisation, how they think about their own improv practice, how they got started and work to improve, how they assess improvisation when they hear it, and more. I’m unsure what its form will take, and really just need to get started.

The Jam Bible

Music jams are often leaderless. This means they reflect the larger world and are male-dominated spaces, centering the loudest, most tecnically competent players. And none of this begins to capture the endless, drolling repetition of boring songs with infinite, amusical noodling over top. OK, so I have an opinion about this and #notalljams, but this project is one in which I am working to document some of the successes I find in creating inclusive, novice-accessible spaces to jam and improvise. It may include activities, prompts, song skeletons, or other innovations I discover, but it’s all about creating the free, expressive space jams can provide when they are thoughtfully structured and facilitated.

School of HONK hand signals

This one is a little goofy, but it’s goal is real. One of the things that is most frequently skipped over in the teaching time we create at School of HONK is the importance of looking and listening. We learn how to hold and play notes on our instruments, which is important, but our individual contributions of individual notes is only a small part of what makes our music happen. The dynamics of a large ensemble, the sonic and visual communication that needs to happen to keep everyone on the same page are many, and I thought some animated GIF-style documentation of the hand signals we use to lead songs and transitions would be a funny way to document those signals.

Song form documentation for new leaders

Not only are School of HONK members new to playing music, many of our mentors are new to leading music as well. This document is the beginning of a documentation project to set new leaders up with the skills they need to study, prepare, and review how we play songs at School of HONK. My hope is that, while observation and osmosis will always be a part of the learning process, that explicit documentation like this will give new leaders the tools they need to try things out sooner rather than later.

Song arrangements for new players

While all the songs in the School of HONK book are arranged with beginners in mind, some arrangements are better than others. These are some of the songs I’ve arranged, mainly for School of HONK but also for other ensembles and projects, along my path learning to arrange tunes for brass bands with the needs of novices on different instruments in mind.