The return to school means a return to extracurriculars. Music teacher John Lofto is excited for another year directing Cowichan Secondary School’s bands.
While they play some classics to work on fundamentals, he says that his students – in band and with The Cow Bells club – have a little bit more fun playing when it’s songs they already know.
“When I was in band I went, ‘Great! We’re playing the fun pop songs that I can sing along to, or we’re playing something from a movie like Star Wars or Harry Potter,’ so we do a lot of that,” he says.
Audiences enjoy the familiar tunes as well. Lofto says that he took his band students on a tour of elementary schools across the valley last spring and the familiar hits drew quite the response from onlookers.
“We did like Frozen, Moana, Star Wars, and Take on Me. It was purely songs that all of the kids knew and they got uproarious,” he says. “We had a group of 300 or 400 kids in the gym all singing the lines to the Frozen songs that we were playing. You can see my band kids smiling and laughing. It’s a lot of trying to push that kind of joy.”
As for the number of band members, the supply chain of musicians from middle schools is recovering after taking a hit during the pandemic.
“When COVID hit, the bands fell apart,” says Lofto. “There wasn’t a way to do it properly […] Just a ton of reasons why it didn’t work. So the year after COVID, the band enrolment at the middle school dropped to like nothing.”
He’s been focused on rebuilding the band program since taking the position four years ago. His first year started with 15 students and five of those were flutists.
“From there I desperately recruited a lot for any kid that I heard played music. I’m up to a healthy 40 or so and adding more. It’s been a lot of making sure that kids are having fun in band,” he says.
The transition to the new Quw’wut’sun Secondary School next year will have some improvements for the music program.
“My big request was that I wanted practice rooms,” says Lofto. “And we’ll finally have some flexible staging in the school. It’s not a full theatre, but you can actually do in-school medium-size concerts.
I know and am grateful that the new school is at least going to have at least a spot that I can put on performances or even just have music going so that kids at lunch can hear music.”
Their pop-ensemble, The Cow Bells, learned and recorded seven pop songs last year, practicing on lunches and in flex periods. They included classic hits like “Dreams” and “You Make Lovin’ Fun” by Fleetwood Mac along with newer songs like “No Roots” by Alice Merton and “Mind Over Matter” by Young the Giant.
A lot of the song choices are based on personnel available. Like when they tried Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come On Eileen” because they had someone to play the violin, or Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See” because they had a flutist.
He says it’s about 50-50 for songs picked by him and songs picked by students.
“They’re really good about going with me when it’s a song they really don’t know,” says Lofto. “These kids appreciate what this older music can bring because a lot of them just don’t know it.”
Lofto says his favourites from last year’s recording season being “Come On Eileen” and “Mind Over Matter.”
“The Come On Eileen was pretty legit, there was a lot of tough tempo changes in there and those kids got it down,” he says.
The recording process is done each song in one whole take, with maybe one or two runs per song. Lofto edits the audio in the free editing software Audacity and builds a video in Final Cut Pro. He is still learning the audio engineering process.
A Cow Bells songs will be played each hour on 89.7 Sun FM during Weekends with Nicholas this Saturday, September 9th. You can find their released video catalog on the Cowichan Secondary Performing Arts YouTube page.
