The Music Teacher

The music teacher has many forms, band director, strings teacher, choral conductor, accompanist, elementary school music teacher, minister of music, piano teacher and vocal coach. I started thinking about this species and the special relationship that the folks that follow this calling create with their students. As I recently had a front row seat to the miracle of this mental and emotional synthesis, I realized that I had to expose the wonder of it all.In the early years the music teacher is a planter of seeds, plowing the fallow ground of tender hearts and fertile minds. As young children, we were exposed to the great classics ( Mozart, Beethoven & Bach) as well as modern music (Ellington and Gershwin). The recording of “Peter and The Wolf” introduced our generation to the mystical instruments of the orchestra. A few years and a hormone awakening later and we were on to Steppenwolf. I started out playing the “Tonette” and then graduated to the “Recorder”. I am sure I am the greatest “Blues Recorder" player of all time (see my note “The Radio” and you will know why). "Baby Boomer" children were given a healthy dose of piano lessons. I was always amazed that my Sunday school class had at least one hundred years of combined piano lessons in attendance and no one could play “Jingle Bells”.The junior high school where I attended was blessed with a band director with the most incredible and unorthodox sense of humor. He had an ability to fire the creative furnaces of countless acne faced kids. I still remember him pleading with a thirteen year old oboe soloist to play the passage with "Sex Appeal". Now tell me, how is she going to do that?I have been shaped by every music teacher that I have ever encountered. Early on, in carpenter like fashion, they work with grinder and lathe. As we matured, their works became hand finished and polished. When you really think about it, these teachers are at such an incredible disadvantage; teenagers have so little life experience to draw from in the interpretation and expression of the music.

I had a friend who begged me to try out for the Chorale at my high school. This was a very prestigious group and it required an audition for the director. I played a horn in the band so I could read music, I knew a good bit of music theory and I sang a lot at my church. I was selected for the group but I think it had more to do with gender and music theory than vocal ability. I was blessed to have been a part of that choir and it was so special that only a very few things I have experienced in my lifetime compare to what happens when an assembly of naive hormones and emotions come into vocal focus. I can tell you that every time I walked out on the stage to sing with that innocent assembly of God given talent, I was always in awe of the beauty of the those blended voices. The talented people that stood next to me during that year will always have my respect and admiration. The man who helped to create it was rewarded with the chance to stand in front of that otherworldly sound. The friend that prepared me for that audition gave my spirit a chord and a key.

I have friends who count their high school band director as the only positive male role model in their lives. I have a friend, the most accomplished of professional musicians, who has worked with legendary conductors throughout the world and she names her high school choral director as her most important musical influence. I recently sat and watched a vocal recital with the performer’s teacher, I was inspired as I witnessed a teacher illuminated, as if it were her own child performing. They (the teacher & the student) own a singular piece of each other’s lives and no one else on earth could possibly enter that sacred space. They are melted into one in those mystic moments when all the tones find their proper place in the air and become a glimpse into the realm of the unseen and yet believed.I have stayed up half the night banging out tenor harmonies with my vocal teacher, I have spent summer days trying to march and memorize a long list of band music, I have sat in the back of a bus and attempted to duplicate the intricate harmony of beach boys tunes on the way home from a choral contest and I have played a pathetic rendition of a class one trombone solo for the UIL Solo and Ensemble contest (thank God for my blessed accompanist, she did everything she could to help me). Far beyond any of those things, I have been moved to tears by tapestry sound created by my peers. For many of us, the gifts given by our music teachers are the brush strokes of color on what would otherwise be a blank and flavorless soul.

Dedicated to Mrs. Everett, Scott Lewis, Dan Green, Ike Nail, Robert Mays, Doug Brown, Doris Bruce, David Campbell, Paula Edwards, Carol Hall, Ruth Ann Griffin and Susan Lowery.