A Work of Art
Not a journal
Fourth Entry
Our middle school had a band. Middle-school bands tend to be noisy, out of tune, rambunctious, loud and eager. The kids in middle school are starting to feel their oats. That’s what Mom calls it. She says kids in elementary school are usually very controllable; a loud voice is all that’s needed to quell them. But when they reach middle school, control becomes an issue, frequently an impossible issue, because the kids are feeling their oats. By that she means they are quite often out of control, unruly, especially when you put things that make noise in their hands or up to their lips. Then they are in their own world and difficult to reach. They feel the noise they’re making is exquisite.
Musical instruments make noise, especially in the hands and lips of middle schoolers. It takes a special kind of teacher to get a gaggle of kids that age to pay attention, to listen when she speaks and not be honking or pounding on their individual axes—‘axes’ meaning our instruments in our vernacular—while she is talking. I say ‘she’ because that’s what we had, a woman director, a young woman who was also a first year teacher. She was halfway decent. But halfway really isn’t good enough for a middle-school band director. The two major things needed in that position are the ability to control the students and, incidentally and less important, to get them to play together musically. She was excellent musically, but completely ineffective at controlling the students. As a result, she never did quite get us to become a band anyone would want to come listen to. Parents had to attend concerts; I think it’s written in the parental contracts they sign with God or someone. But no one else would want to.
That of course was a disappointment to those of us who were actually interested in playing well and making music. That was especially true for me because I played an instrument that could be heard only when the trumpets and trombones and drums and cymbals and such—the loud instruments—were not trumpeting and tromboning, pounding and clashing with a vigor that would have scared the stuffing out of a goose after being cooked, which is what it often felt like to be sitting in front of those instruments. Those players never seemed to do what they needed to do—quiet down, that is—and flutes and oboes and clarinets—I being a flautist—could have cried in desperation. So could the director. I think she resigned after that one year, giving up teaching and becoming an accountant. I overheard a teacher joking with another about how quiet that profession is.
This year I’m in the junior band. There are two bands at Livingston High School, the concert band and the junior band. The junior band is open to all comers. No, I don’t mean only boys. (That was me stretching for a pun. I’ll probably delete it if this ever gets seen by the public.)
Anyone who plays an instrument can join the junior band. For the concert band, you have to audition. Also, at least you must be a sophomore. So, I’m in the junior band.
The director is a man, and you don’t fuck around with him. I know that because that’s what he said on our first day of rehearsals. “Don’t fuck around with me or in this room. Do it and you’ll be out on your ear. Literally. You’ll get tossed out, and if you land on your ear, so much the better.”
His name was Mr. Landry; he’d been the band director at the school for years. He was something of a legend. He’d qualified for and taken a band to the state competition every year for the past 20 years, and his bands had come in first, been named the top high-school band in the state, three times. He cast a big shadow at the school; everyone was in awe of him; maybe that’s how he got away with saying ‘fuck’ to a bunch of young teens, both boys and girls.
One of the worst offenders in our middle-school band last year was Rudy O’Bannon. He was a percussionist. Those guys are supposed to play a whole number of instruments, many of them oddball ones, like the whip cracking sound in Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride, or the temple blocks used to make the clip-clop sounds of burro hooves in Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. But Rudy only played one instrument, the bass drum, and he played it with abandon and gusto. He didn’t read music so just played it where he felt it was needed and appropriate. In Rudy’s mind, the bass drum was needed almost everywhere, and the bass drum player was the band’s most important member, an all-star celebrity.
He was a clown with no brakes on his behaviors. One of his favorite tricks, maybe even the one that sent that poor lady into bookkeeping, was to accent every statement she made with a strong boom. Like: “This is a quiet section gradually building in a long crescendo to a double-forte ending. You have to start very softly or you’ll be too loud too soon and the ending will lose the drama of the buildup. So, begin very softly.”
BOOM!
She asked him to stop doing that many times, and each time, he promised he would. Then came the boom.
She didn’t know how to stop it. Mr. Landry did.
He told us that when the music was marked piano, he expected us to play piano, and he didn’t want to waste time reminding us each time we forgot. Rehearsal time was precious and reminders for kindergarteners, not high-school kids. We weren’t to forget what he told us. “Read the music and the markings!” he said, and he meant it. Frequent reminders of any one thing also meant the forgetter risked being thrown out on his ear. Or her. The markings on the sheets were important, and we didn’t have to only learn what they meant and obey them, he said.
BOOM!
That stopped him in his tracks. He looked up at the percussion section. They were all sort of hiding behind their stands, except for Rudy who was laughing.
Mr. Landry called to him, “Get down here!” and waved for him to come down front. When Rudy did, Mr. Landry asked, “Are you Rudy?” When Rudy acknowledged that he was, Mr. Landry grabbed him by the arm, took him to the door, and flung him out. Backwards. Rudy couldn’t keep his feet under him; he fell and actually slid about ten feet down the hall on his posterior. “And don’t come back!” Mr. Landry shouted after him.
We didn’t have any more misplaced booms after that.
But before I jot down experiences in band, it makes sense to provide some background. I play the flute. And I’ve been taking lessons for years, since I was 9. That was when Toby was playing Little League and Pop Warner—the football equivalent to youth Little League baseball—and city-league basketball. Dad asked me what I’d like to be involved in outside the house as I was just beginning a habit of sitting in my room all day reading or on the computer; this wasn’t the lifestyle approved by the American Medical Association for boys my age. He made a habit of using a lot more words in a sentence than were really needed.
I knew I didn’t want to play football. I envisioned some 150-pound behemoth charging at me with a football cradled in his arms and a wicked smile on his face. He wasn’t going to juke around me. He was going to run right over me. The coach would be yelling, “Tackle him, Artie. Put your shoulder into him. Crunch him good. Put him on his back. Show him who you are!” Well, at nine, I already knew damn well who I was, and it wasn’t to be a play toy for a kid who weighed twice as much as I did and liked to put littler kids in the hospital. In traction.
So, I picked as opposite an activity to those of Toby as I could. I decided I wanted to take music lessons. Specifically, on the flute.
Now, some boys pick the instruments they consider more manly, like the tuba. The trombone is especially popular, too. Perhaps boys can picture that hard slide running in and out, in and out, and relate that to something else of a similar nature; it is a very macho instrument. The percussion instruments have their proponents, too. I chose the flute.
I can’t really explain why. I know some boys choose that for the solid reason that in school, most flautists are girls, so being a boy in the flute section is much like a boy going out for the school’s cheerleading squad—it gives them multiple opportunities to get to know that group and perhaps get some action. That’s logic I can’t fault, even if it had nothing to do with me or my own choice.
I did like the fact the flute was small and light. Could I imagine hauling a tuba around? Some weigh as much as 60 pounds. No, I couldn’t imagine that. A flute, disassembled in its case, fits easily in a backpack. And I didn’t have to work out with weights and get all sweaty before practicing it every day.
So I told my dad that, the playing the flute part, and he signed me up for lessons with Mrs. Tordham. I took lessons from her for years. Still do.
We always start the lesson by warming up with scales. I’ve never quite understood why warming up was something I had to do. Brass players told me they warmed up so their lips were relaxed and flexible. I guessed athletes warmed up so their muscles, tendons and ligaments were ready for the stresses they were about to undergo. But for me? I was playing the flute. My lips didn’t do much other than pucker; they certainly didn’t vibrate like those of trumpeters. My fingers had to be loose, but I could just wiggle them before playing; no need to do play to warm them up, and certainly not scales. I hated scales. Borrrrring!
This is how a lesson goes. I start playing scales along with Mrs. Tordham. She always plays them with me. And I guess I’d been busy with other things one week because I get a few notes wrong. Well, it isn’t easy. She’ll call out a scale and we play it, but if she calls out, say, the F-sharp major scale, I have to know there are six sharps in that scale and to start on the lowest F-sharp on the flute, which is seven notes above the lowest note I can play. Then I have to remember to play a sharp on every note other than B. So, there’s much to think about, and on that occasion, I’m still thinking about something else. I always think about something else while playing scales. I mean, I do have a life outside practicing the flute.
“Scales are important for a number of reasons,” she says, noting my eye roll as she frowns at me for missing those notes. I put my flute down on my lap, knowing a lecture is blooming. She’s in talking mode. I know her as well as she knows me. She doesn’t like it if I screw up a scale. “Can you think what some of them are?”
She is clever this way. She makes me not only talk to her, but makes me think, and when I do that, and figure something out, then I end up seeing the value in what she’s on about. After that, it’s hard not to see her point, or even to dislike the way she got her point across. Hard to forget what I’ve learned, too, and that’s what she’s all about.
“Uh,” I say, showing my brilliance. Well, I need time to think! Then I do think and end up saying, “I guess a lot of passages we have to play in band have the same sequence of notes in them that we have in the scales I’m learning.”
She beams at me. “Very good, Artie. Anything else?”
I hate looking stupid, so I’m able to come up with something else. “Because playing scales teaches us to play in keys we wouldn’t play in very often otherwise? So when we do see them in our music we won’t be quite so befuddled and screw up?”
“Yes! And there are more reasons, too.” She evidently thinks I’ve reached the limits of my intellect because she doesn’t force me to come up with any more on my own; she just lists a few herself. “You’ll learn the scales by playing them every time you warm up and so your fingers will just play them by rote when they need to. And then, by not having to actually think which key to press next for every scale note, your mind is available to think of other things. Like tone quality, intonation, starting and stopping your vibrato musically, breath support, embouchure. All those things that are a pain in the posterior to practice on their own. But you can work on them when you’re playing scales, and they’re all so very basic to making music. It’s hard to work on those things when you’re learning a piece of music, but when playing scales, you have the time to think about them.”
I have to admit to myself, I’ve never considered that.
Then she throws in a real stinker. “Up to now, we’ve only done major scales, haven’t we?”
“Yeah,” I say, worried where this will lead.
“So how many scales is that?”
She is testing me again. But I am up to this challenge. I don’t remember specifying in this whatever it is I’m writing that I was smart, just that I got straight-A’s. Well, you don’t do that with a sub-100 IQ. I could figure this out, and I did. “One scale with no sharps, seven with sharps, seven with flats. So, fifteen.”
She smiles at me. It doesn’t make my heart flutter. I’m 14, she’s ancient. But better a smile than a frown, and getting a smile from her does make me happy.
I’m fond of her, even if she’s old enough to be my grandmother. She spends a lot of time talking to me, talking about being a professional musician. She asks me about myself, about whether I’d like to take my music further than just high school, about what I like and don’t about school. I tell her more about me than I do with anyone other than my dad.
I haven’t told her I’m gay. But I could. I’m simply not ready. I’m sure she’d be okay with it. She is friendly and kind and supportive, and I know she’s fond of me. I’ve become very close to her. Sometimes I don’t practice much, and she always knows it, but she doesn’t get on my case about it. She lets me know she’s aware but accepts that I have a life other than the flute. There are times, too, when we talk through a lesson and barely play at all. Those are when for one reason or another I don’t really feel like playing, that I’m upset about something and she can see it. Then we just talk. That’s when she encourages me to talk about my life; she is interested in me; she says I have great promise on the flute and will go as far with it as I’m willing to put in the work.
She talks about herself, too, but only the musical parts. What school she went to, what groups she’d played in there and after she graduated. What she’d done professionally; she’s retired from performing now. She is interested in our school band. She knows my band director. She is very nice, and I like her a lot. She’s the only adult other than my parents who’s really interested in me as a person, a young person facing what young people face. Like what I write about here.
How she was talking to me about scales just then could have been much worse. She could have been chewing me out because I’d just messed up the F-sharp scale during the lesson. Sometimes when I screwed something up, she’d pick up her flute and ask me to do it again and play along with me. Then when my notes didn’t match hers, she’d just hold her note until I played the right note, the one that matched hers. No chewing out. No embarrassment on my part. Then we’d do it again, and this time I’d play the right note, and so my scale would be perfect. Well, usually. I’d had to practice all the scales she assigned, and eventually I learned them. Didn’t mean I enjoyed playing them, though.
But there was no negative feedback from her when I screwed one up. Not even a frown. I was kind of sensitive to criticism, and she caught on to that very quickly. In my first lesson with her, when I’d done something she’d just told me not to, she’d said something critical and I’d looked down at my lap and hardly spoken to her after that. She’d seen how her words affected me and caught on right away. From that point on, I rarely got any negativity from her. As a result, I looked forward to my weekly lessons with her. There were no criticisms, not even when I deserved them, like when I hadn’t practiced much that week.
Hey, at 14, life’s tough. Maybe at any age, but certainly at 14. High-school freshman and all that entails, you know? She wanted me to be practicing an hour a day, and sometimes I just didn’t have that much time, or the inclination, to do that.
Sometimes I’ll have a bad week. She seems to read me well, and those are often the times we don’t play much. She helps me through some of the problems I am having with great advice and by providing me with a perspective I haven’t figured out on my own. This frequently doesn’t have anything to do with music. These can be life problems, boy problems even, and she helps me see ways through them. In my view, she’d have made a great therapist. I even told her that once, and she’d laughed and said maybe so, and that while therapists made a whole lot more money than she did, she wasn’t sure they were happier than she was because she spent her days teaching and loved doing that, just like she’d loved rehearsing and performing before she retired. Did psychologists and psychiatrists love their work? She said she had no idea, but doubted they loved it as much as she loved hers. And then she said she loved teaching me.
She was so supportive and had such a caring nature, I’d thought hard about coming out to her. I was getting to the point of needing to tell someone other than my dad. She was neutral, not an authority figure in my life and, being a musician, I was sure she knew a lot of gay people. She wasn’t gay. She was married and had grown kids. But she had lots of students, kids my age and younger and older, she’d been to a conservatory for her training, and I was sure there had been lots of gay students there, music being one of the creative endeavors that I’d heard attracts young gay adults . I thought that someday, she might well be the first person outside my family I could come out to. I’d been thinking about that more and more lately. I knew she wouldn’t turn against me for that.
“So, 15 major scales. We just played the F-sharp major scale. Six sharps. You’re a really smart kid, Artie. So, do you know which flat key is parallel to F-sharp? That is, which sounds exactly the same, but has flats in it rather than sharps?”
Hmm. I’d never thought about that, but it shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out. She smiled at me as I thought about it. If it sounded exactly the same, then it had to start with the same note, didn’t it? And which note sounded the same as F♯?
“Easy!” I said, taking no time at all to figure it out. “G-flat!”
“Told you you are smart! How many flats in that key?”
“Six.” I knew that because I’d learned that scale already.
She nodded. “Six flats is parallel to six sharps; the correct term for that is ‘enharmonic’. It’s a little different with seven sharps. That’s the key of C-sharp as you know. Its parallel key is D-flat, but D-flat doesn’t have seven flats, does it. How many?”
I grinned. “Five.”
She nodded. “No grass growing under your feet, Artie. But think about it for a moment. If those two sharp keys have parallel flat keys, then really, you’re not learning 15 scales, are you? Only 13.”
“I never thought of that,” I said, surprised by what she’d pointed out. “I never realized when I was playing the C-sharp scale, it was the same as playing the D-flat scale.”
She was enjoying this, I could tell. I’d relaxed, too.
Then she continued. “But this is leading somewhere, as you probably guessed when you groaned.”
“I didn’t groan!” I protested.
She just grinned at me and didn’t argue, just pressed forward. “There are minor scales as well as major ones. We need to learn those. There are three of them: the natural, the harmonic and the melodic minor. I think you’ll enjoy them. Relief from the utter boredom of the major scales.” She grinned again. I’d never told her I found the major scales boring, and certainly not utter boredom. Utter was a better word than fucking, the word I sometimes use in my head; I’d use utter in the future. I’d have passed out from blushing if she thought I ever used that other word! I was sure she knew it. She seemed to know everything.
“You are smart, Artie, and you’ll think of this soon enough, so let me put your mind at ease. You’ll ask if there are other kinds of scales you’ll need to learn after the minor ones, and the answer is, yes and no. There are modes to learn, and odd scales like the pentatonic which only has five notes, but if you want to learn those, you’ll have to do it on your own or decide to become a music major in college. I’m not going to spend our time with them; we have more important stuff to work on.
“Anyway, the minor scales. You know every major scale is the same, except for what note it begins on. The distances between the ascending notes of the scale are all full step, full step, half step, full step, full step, full step, half step. Every major scale has that spacing. Each minor scale has a specific spacing as well, but it’s unique to the type of scale it is.”
She played each minor scale for me, and she was right, they all sounded different, but really nice, too. I liked them all and realized they all seemed to create a different mood. I could understand why composers would like to use them. The three scales had the names she’d already used: natural, harmonic and melodic. I especially liked the harmonic. Its steps were whole, half, whole, whole, half, then a gap of one step-and-a half, and finished with a half step. Sounded strange but almost erotic. If you went that way.
I practiced all of them at home that week. These weren’t boring at all, and it was actually fun working on them. Even in awkward keys. Funny, that. The more I worked in five flats or six sharps, say, the less awkward they became. Go figure.
So, enough background. Too much, I’m sure. But if anyone thought music lessons and playing were just rote key pressing, this might give them pause. So yes, I play the flute, have done so for a few years now, and my teacher says I’m quite proficient for my young age. Let’s move on, shall we, to Band.
-- -- -- --
After the incident with Rudy, Mr. Landry didn’t have any more disciplinary problems. He directed both bands, so I got to play under him. It was night and day different from last year. He established the difference right away.
After a week of junior-band practices, Mr. Landry told me to take the first chair in the flute section. I think I blushed. I blush easily and even though I don’t have the lightest complexion in the world, I’m light enough that when I get red, it’s noticeable and embarrassing. I don’t know if the girl I replaced in the first chair was pissed or accepting. I never looked at her at all. I guess one could think I was rude and stuck up. I wasn’t; I was just uncomfortable speaking to people I didn’t know. I never knew what to say.
Band’s been fun so far. Much different from last year. As I’m now first chair in my section, I’ll get to play any flute solos that are in the music.
Of course, this is band music. So far, there haven’t been any flute solos.
But one thing stands out that would fit well in this semi-sort-of blog, not-a-journal I’m writing. I’ll slip into past tense here because it’ll be less embarrassing that way. Our school had a football team, two, actually, varsity and junior varsity. Toby played on the JV squad. Like most high schools with a varsity football team, we also had a marching band that played at games. During the eight week football season, the junior band wasn’t just a concert band; it also was the marching band. We used band practice time to learn to march, eight steps for every five yards. Exactly, with the ball of your foot on the eighth step landing right in the middle of the yard line. We had spiffy uniforms. I hated it. Have you ever seen flutes out marching with a band? You might have seen them, but you’ve never heard them. No, you’ve heard the drums and the trumpets and the trombones and sousaphones, but not the woodwinds. I didn’t care how loudly we played, we couldn’t be heard. It wasn’t very rewarding to march all over the field playing our hearts out with never a note being heard.
But, here’s the thing. Like many marching bands, there was a tradition at our school: freshmen marching-band members were initiated into the group by the sophomore band members. And while the school’s anti-bullying edicts protected us to a degree, any project run by sophomores in high school needed close supervision, and this group didn’t have it. They would run amok at any opportunity and throw caution and common sense to the winds, and the guys doing our initiation should have had tighter reins than most. They’d been initiated the year before, and this was their turn to reciprocate.
Anyway, this is long enough and I wanted to write an entry here to show I could do it and not involve sex of any kind. And I did. So there. My mind isn’t in the gutter all the time and my heart is pure.