Anyone picking up the June 2008 issue of music magazine The Instrumentalist will receive a nice surprise: Thomas Dale band co-director Steve Barton has an article appearing in the magazine.

“It’s a technical article for band directors intended to improve clarinet tone and intonation,” Barton says. “The idea is that the mouthpiece generates the vibrations that cause the instrument to sound as it does and to play the other notes. If the sound generated by the mouthpiece is incorrect, the instrument doesn’t work or sound as well. This is not new information; I just synthesized the concept into an exercise that can be used in class.”

Barton had been using the exercise in his own band classes, a practice that didn’t go unnoticed by Quincy Hilliard, a well-known educator, composer, and conductor. When visiting and performing workshops at Chesterfield County Public Schools last year, Hilliard noted Barton’s technique and suggested he submit an article to The Instrumentalist. The resulting article, accepted by the nationally known publication in late April, will be Barton’s first.

However, it’s not his first published work. “I’ve been included in the book series Teaching Music Through Performance in Band, Volume 5,” he says. “I was asked to write an analysis of one of my band compositions. I also have six published compositions for band.”

Still, though he’s been published before, Barton finds his article’s acceptance in The Instrumentalist “a bit humbling,” especially considering that the journal, with over 20,000 circulation both domestically and abroad, is one of the most respected in the industry. He admits, “I was pleasantly surprised when I received the email that they had accepted the article.”

For Barton, the biggest victory is not about his own accomplishments, but that the article might be of assistance to others. “If the ideas in the article can be of help to another band director to improve their students’ performance, then I’m very happy to be of help,” he says.
Barton has been a co-director (with David Holley) of the Thomas Dale High School Band for three years, and has an extensive musical resume: before coming to Thomas Dale, he taught at Manchester and L.C. Bird high schools and Salem Middle School, as well as schools in South Dakota and North Carolina.

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