Alex Shapiro

By the time a person is four years old—long before their first fun wind band class—they can count to ten. So I've never understood why beginning music students are only given pieces in rigid, sometimes plodding, 4/4, 3/4 or 2/4 meters. Music, like life, is neither rigid nor plodding (well, at least not interesting music!). Thus, COUNT TO TEN is my contribution to the repertoire for beginning musicians who have a lifetime of wonderful, compelling pieces ahead of them that will be filled with chromaticism, syncopations, and mixed meters.

With its built-in drone and percussion parts, the piece is designed to sound good acoustically, but it will sound many times better when the students are paired with any of the cinematic-style accompaniment tracks—especially the "Full" version that combines all three elements of the percussion (strong downbeats and steady quarter beats), the Bb drone (for tuning and atmosphere), and the groove ostinati weaving through the music and adding a modern syncopation.

The premise is simple: count up, then down again from a grand peak of 9/4. This is not a time signature I would normally choose even for professionals, because it's easier to read subdivisions. But there's an important and purely psychological reason I opted for it here: if beginning musicians can achieve playing in 9/4, it may forever dispel any fear they'll have of large meters, and playing in 5, and maybe even in 7, will seem like a relative breeze. In other words, in addition to being a primer for contemporary repertoire, COUNT TO TEN is a middle school psyche-out: if you can count to ten, you certainly can count to nine!

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