Music Teacher Feature: Ed Schaefle

Back for its second year, Classical MPR's Teacher Feature highlights the lives and work of music teachers throughout Minnesota.

Ed Schaefle
Orchestra Teacher
Blaine High School
Blaine, Minn.

Who or what inspired you to become a music teacher?

I didn't start out to be a music teacher — I began college as a Math and Chemistry major, and thought I would continue to play violin for my own enjoyment. By the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I realized that music was more important to me, and I changed my major.

I learned the next summer how much I loved teaching when Augie professor Ed Wilcox and Sioux Falls orchestra teacher Paul Fialkowski gave me the opportunity to assist in the school district's Summer Strings program. I really enjoyed the relationships that developed with students as I helped them work through the challenges of learning their music, and I was completely hooked the first time I gave a downbeat and sound came from the orchestra.

I still get the same satisfaction working on the podium, and my relationships with students and their families are even more important to me now than they were then.

And where specifically did you go to college?

I have a B.A. in Music from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., and a M.M. with an emphasis in Music Education from the University of Texas at Austin.

What grade level(s) do you teach? What types of music classes do you teach?

At Blaine High School, I teach students in grades 9 to 12 and I conduct four orchestras: String Orchestra (9); Sinfonia, a non-auditioned string orchestra (10-12); Concert Orchestra, an auditioned symphony orchestra (10-12); and an extra-curricular Chamber Orchestra.

In what ways do you try to encourage your students to appreciate and participate in music?

In rehearsals I do my best to include skill development and opportunities to participate in performing, listening to and creating music. Most of what we do in school is rehearsing and performing music for orchestra, and students can often continue to play in a college or community orchestra after graduation. Some play individually or in small groups for worship at their church. There is a growing awareness of alternative styles for strings, and former students of mine are applying the skills they learned in orchestra to play in indie, folk, country and jazz groups, which I think is great.

Not everyone can keep up their ability to perform, but I tell students that everyone can be a lifelong listener, going to concerts of all kinds, downloading favorite pieces of music, and yes, tuning in to MPR. A class project called "senior music listening" encourages students to think broadly about music for strings. Orchestra seniors present a piece that is important or interesting to them from the loosely defined "orchestra world," which can include concert music, film scores and video game scores, and one or more pieces from their own musical world, which can be anything school appropriate. Students hear a really wide variety of music for strings that they can add to what they already know.

Creating music receives less attention than it should, but I do teach basic music writing skills to all students, and I offer opportunities to students who want to compose. I will always print parts, conduct a reading session in class and give feedback to a student who completes a piece, and BHS orchestra concerts have included several student compositions in recent years.

Where do you see music education fitting into the broader educational spectrum? How does it help or enhance other curricular areas?

I believe music is essential and unique in a complete education for any student. All students should have the opportunity to achieve excellence in reading and writing, math and science, history and world languages, physical education and vocational training — and the fine arts, including music.

Current testing focuses on a limited kind of standardized testing of a limited kind of learning, and those limited results can then drive decisions about curriculum, instruction, funding and staffing. What my students and I do well together requires teamwork, creativity and sustained effort that simply cannot be measured using the bubbled answer sheets of a standardized test. There is research that supports the use of music in enhancing learning in other curricular areas and in overall brain development, but music exists fundamentally for its own sake. The experience of creating sound that brings a composer's imagination to life and communicates meaning to an audience is unlike any other and deserves an equal place in a student's education.

What's one of the most memorable moments you've had while teaching music?

On stage, the Blaine Concert Orchestra's performance at the Minnesota Music Educators Association's 2005 Mid-Winter Clinic is one I will always remember. The students were an exceptional group of musicians, and they played a challenging program very well. It was also special for me because it was the first time my parents had heard one of my orchestras since I was a student teacher.

As a listener, concerts that stand out for me and all of the students in grades 3 to 12 who heard them were presented at Blaine by the locked-out musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2013. The musicians are extraordinary performers who managed to stay connected to each other, their audience and the music they play during a most difficult time, and afterwards there were students searching for words to describe how and why the sound of the orchestra was so special.

A memorable student composition we premiered at Blaine in 2012 is "Coexist" by Austin Frohmader. As a high school senior, Austin already showed imagination, creativity and development of his craft as a composer. He was also able to write from a very personal point of view while inviting performers and audience to experience the music and meaning of "coexistence," which is a message that was important to him.

Do you participate in music outside the classroom?

Violin is my primary instrument, and I have played in college or community orchestras for most of my life.

I am especially proud of the Anoka area's Northern Symphony Orchestra, which was formed 12 years ago. Anoka High School orchestra teacher Mike Halstenson and I asked a group of music colleagues and students from the northern suburbs to play a concert of music for strings in June 2002. The response was very good, so we added winds, brass and percussion the following school year.

Mike is the conductor, I lead the strings as concertmaster, and the orchestra plays three to four concerts a year of standard symphonic repertoire. The orchestra has expanded from its original roster of music teachers and students to include fine musicians from all walks of life, but there is still a strong connection to music education: concert admission is free for ages 18 and under, and we have collaborated with young musicians several times. A concert last fall that was shared with more than 100 middle school musicians playing student arrangements of NSO repertoire drew a capacity audience of almost 800. I have also enjoyed playing in the violin section with my wife, Karen, daughters Colleen and Tara and two of my sisters, Mary and Margie.

If you were to help program a day of music at Classical MPR, what would be a piece of music you'd play in the morning? Along similar lines, what piece of music would you play in the evening? What is it about these pieces that make them a couple of your favorites?

This reminds me of the fun I had choosing classical music for small college radio stations in Aberdeen and Sioux Falls, South Dakota!

In the morning I would play the "Swan Lake Suite" by Tchaikovsky. It is one of the first pieces for orchestra that I remember hearing when I was very young, and I was completely taken with the soaring melodies and the sounds of all of the instruments. Then when I was in high school, it was on the program for the first symphony orchestra concert I ever played, as a member of the Aberdeen College-Civic Symphony, and being in the middle of all those sounds was even better than hearing them.

In the evening, I would play "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis" by Vaughan Williams. The theme by Tallis is beautiful itself, but Vaughan Williams's creativity makes it peaceful and thoughtful and grand and rich, and even transcendent in the end. In graduate school I conducted the piece with a very talented University of Texas String Project orchestra, and that experience helped me realize the quality of performance that student orchestras are capable of.

These represent the music I love most to hear and play and conduct, but if I was programming a full day for MPR, I would go forward to the present day and back before Bach, and I would include chamber music, vocal music, new music and live performances, too, all of which I appreciate hearing on Classical MPR.

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