On March 6th Kira, Sallie, Karen, and I observed BHS Camerata Orchestra. They were very well behaved. Most of the class time was spent doing warm ups, and yes he was walking us through them one by one, but I feel like on a normal day it would have taken around half an hour of time to warm up. leaving very little time to play music. He had a variety of useful warm ups. He would start with scales, and change up the rhythms, then would play a short melodie and have the orchestra copy him. He would have the orchestra pull out their etude books which were all the same sequence of etudes but written in the octave of the instrument. He would play the etude and have the ensemble play it back, then would change the rhythm of that etude and they had to repeat it in the same rhythm. Finally, he would have them pull out their fiddle tunes and he would select random soloists to play at the repeats. The first day they did not get to any concert music.
Actually MC doesn't do warm-ups with the Camerata. He just did that for the benefit of our class. Everyone in Camerata is also in another string class, so there is no need to repeat the exercises later. Having that said, it is common for high school groups to spend 30 minutes some days on fundamentals. This time is essential for the technical and tone development of the groups.
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