There is a special Heaven for music teachers

[dropzone]

Last evening was spent, as several are each year, at a school chorus and orchestra concert. I came away from it, as I always do, with a renewed admiration for the patience and understanding of music teachers.

I was lucky that I missed the first twenty minutes because they put on the least experienced students first. However, when I arrived the Freshman Chorus was just starting. I can’t imagine who was on first and how bad they were. God bless these kids, but they were atrocious. I remember asking myself if they had ever sung before, but realized that the boys, at age fourteen, probably hadn’t. Not with THOSE voices, at least. Holy Peter Brady, they probably hadn’t had those voices that morning!

They were followed by the Guitar Orchestra :eek. Imagine a beginning guitar class playing en masse; strumming ploddingly and singing off key, because that was exactly what it was. To be fair, I have to blame the arrangement of “Blue Christmas” for some of the problems. But some of the students were playing it in ¾ and others in 4/4. Then they’d trade, like it was a John Cage composition. One of the soloists wasn’t bad but the other was bad for two. But we couldn’t laugh, being superficially supportive parents, surrounded by the parents from The Music Man (“That’s my little baby playing!” “Doesn’t he sing like an angel!”) and with a fifth-grade clarinetist between us. Her first concert is in a few weeks. I can’t wait. (Actually, for somebody who started three weeks ago she’s not bad.)

As the evening progressed things improved, although the orchestra has been better. Per both Wife and violinist Oldest, “The cellos and violas were flat.”

I’ve been following Oldest’s musical career since she was ten, and how her teachers were able to see the good in that cacophony of squacks and squeaks when she started is beyond my limited abilities. I’m good at localizing sounds, so I could tell how she made it through her early concerts: if the bow was actually in contact with the strings she was muting the strings with her fingers. It takes a special talent to fake like you are playing, but later several other students learned how to do it and the orchestra started sounding like a quartet.

So hats off to all of the music teachers! How they do it, day in and day out, without putting a gun to their, or their students’, heads, is a miracle.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

[stands up and gives Dropzone a round of applause and a big “hear, hear!”]

Now here’s my story:
La Principessa, age 10, scored a major triumph last week at the all-school Christmas concert, playing the clarinet in public for the first time. She was so thrilled–where we were sitting we couldn’t see her head as it was behind the music stands up on stage, but we could see her little happy feet, dancing around, she was so excited, unable to keep still in her chair. The Beginning Band (all 5th graders) had 11 flutes, 10 clarinets, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone, a glockenspiel, a snare drum, and a bass drum. It was simultaneously marvelous and appalling. Musically, of course, what can you say? A group of 10-year-olds who have been playing for about 8 weeks, thrashing their way through “Jolly Old St. Nicholas” and “Good King Wenceslas” and “Jingle Bells” (twice). But on another level, it was Most Excellent. For each kid, there was at least one parent out there with a big silly grin on his or her face. This was the culmination of weeks of screaming and hollering when the dang thing wouldn’t play right. We were just happy they were playing at all, let alone playing well.

The rest of the concert was all downhill, of course. A distinct anti-climax.

The Sixth Grade Band had 7 flutes, 4 clarinets, 1 alto sax, 1 snare drum, 1 bass drum, and one trumpet playing in tune, bless her heart. Every note nailed. She was a no-nonsense-looking girl with a big ponytail, and I wish her well. Girls Rock!

In the car afterwards, La Principessa observed smugly, if correctly, “Hah, the Sixth-Graders had to stop and start over.” Well, yes, they did. They got hopelessly lost in the middle of “Silver Bells” and Mr. O. (who is a saint, by the way–why bother to make a movie about a Mr. Holland when you’ve got a Mr. O. in your own backyard?) very calmly stopped them and restarted them at “41”. We told her, “Don’t be so smug–it might be you next year.” “Oh, no,” she asserted, “I will always be perfect.”

The Middle School Orchestra (8 violins, 2 violas, a cello, and a bass) moaned their way through 3 selections from Handel’s Fireworks Music, which was recognizeable as such only because the Principal Violin, a classmate of Bonzo’s named M. (who used to have Coke-bottle glasses but has since gotten contacts and now Bonzo, oddly enough, doesn’t want to talk about her at all) was the only one playing in tune, and so I hummed along with her under my breath and tried to ignore the rest of the noises coming from the stage. (Did I mention that Mr. O. is a saint?)

The Concert Band (7th and 8th graders) actually didn’t sound too bad. They had 1 oboe, 4 flutes, 4 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 1 alto sax, 6 trumpets, 2 trombones, 1 baritone, 1 bass guitar, and 1 snare drum. They played something called the “Silver Jubilee Overture”, which I thought sounded familiar from somewhere.

Also, I decided that if I ever decide to take up the clarinet, it’s going to be the bass clarinet for me. The one in the Concert Band was played by a little skinny 7th grade girl, the kind of kid that’s all stick-like arms and legs and then the big clunky feet underneath. Her clarinet was nearly as big as she was, and it made a surprising amount of noise, too, for being the only one, a very distinct tone color that was easy to pick out amongst all the musical mayhem. Cool.

The Jazz Band also wasn’t too bad, although they did get lost in the middle of “I Remember Clifford”. But they fumbled around for a while, and finally made it back to Home Base with no casualties. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the trumpet soloist suffered a rubber band blowout on his retainer halfway through, and was evidently of two minds as to what to do about it, whether to leave the thing in or take it out, and so the overall quality of the musical performance suffered. I understand Wynton Marsalis doesn’t have this problem.

[aha]

Thanks drop

aha
Director of Bands

[That_Girl]

Amen