Sounds Like Teen Spirit
Every fall, 55,000 talented students from across Texas try out for a coveted spot at All-State, the Super Bowl of high school band geekery. Music means everything to the 1,500 who make the cut. I should know, I made it three times (not to toot my own clarinet).
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Looking back, I’m not sure what my high school narrative would have been had I not played the clarinet. I spent countless mornings, lunch hours, and afternoons inside Mr. Guajar-do’s blocky, damp band hall, rehearsing with the rest of the Golden Eagles, or in a carpeted practice room by myself. In those rooms my problems melted away—a disappointing test score, a contentious family matter. My sophomore year, I made it past regionals and all the way to area tryouts. I felt it was time to put the Normandy to rest and play what the professionals played, so I pleaded with my mother to buy me a French-made Buffet clarinet. I knew she couldn’t afford the $1,300 instrument on her school cook’s salary, but I also knew the humiliation of showing up at the increasingly competitive auditions with my brown plastic case. I promised her that if she figured out a way to buy me the Buffet, I would make the All-State band. She did, and I did.
The trips to San Antonio in 1992, 1993, and 1994 were the highlights of my high school years. For me, as for most of the other Brownsville students who attended the All-State convention, it was the only chance to see what the world held beyond the physical and psychological borders of the Rio Grande Valley. We got to fly in an airplane and sleep in fancy hotels. The band boosters raised money for us, and at the start of the convention, our band director gave us $100 for meals and incidentals, more cash than any of us had ever possessed. Still, we’d have to eat fast food all weekend to have enough left over for our All-State patches and maybe a cleaning swab and a new box of reeds. In the exhibit hall we’d gawk at the pricey instruments. We’d roam the mall and the River Walk unsupervised, jumping inside of moving glass elevators or launching stink bombs in hotel lobbies where our bandmates were on break. On Friday evening, our directors would treat us to a rib dinner at Tony Roma’s, where we picked at salads and learned to place cloth napkins on our laps.
I never got first chair at state, nor did I aspire to it. The experience of attending the convention was enough for me. But I guess I did buy into the idea that being there made me one of the nation’s best young musicians. And so, when I got to college and lost an audition for an open chair in the school’s orchestra, I disassembled my instrument one last time, put each part where it belonged inside of the precious leather Buffet case, and stowed it away.
I have not touched my clarinet since.
EVERYONE ARRIVES IN SAN ANTONIO an All-Stater, but placement within the convention’s thirteen musical groups is determined only after one final audition, a contest as tense as a Friday night football game. After a torturous wait, the students learn their rank in a hierarchy with inherent artistic as well as social distinctions: Symphonic band is better than concert band; symphony orchestra is better than philharmonic orchestra; mixed choir is better than either the men’s or women’s choir. The top-ranking non—string musicians are allowed to pick either the symphonic band or the symphony orchestra. (Most choose the latter.)
I arrived at the 2007 TMEA convention on its first day—Valentine’s Day—just after the auditions had begun. Although the tryouts are closed to the public, I had received permission from the TMEA to watch. Naturally, it was the clarinets I was itching to hear. I made my way to the second floor of the vast convention center and found 64 teenagers scattered throughout a wide hallway, blowing vigorously into their instruments, waiting to be called into the second of three rounds. Some sat cross-legged on the floor; others paced nervously as they played, their fingers flying over their horns like strings of firecrackers. A handful were playing it cool and sat yogi-like against the walls, eyes shut.
A slope-shouldered man with glasses surveyed the mass of bodies. Time had grayed his hair, but I recognized his squinty eyes and warm face. He was Roel Elizondo, a clarinet instructor at Rio Grande City High School. When I was at Hanna High, Rio Grande City was known as a clarinet powerhouse, and Mr. Elizondo’s students made me tremble at tryouts. Over the past 29 years, he has sent 23 clarinet players to All-State. Since my own teacher, Mr. Guajardo, was also a clarinet specialist, he and Mr. Elizondo were often asked to judge the clarinet auditions together. They would give us their backs as we played to preserve our anonymity, but both my director and Mr. Elizondo learned to pick out my sound from the dozens of students who played the same material. This was not so much an indication of my musical greatness as of their extraordinary ears.
Amazingly, when I walked up to him, Mr. Elizondo remembered my name and the number of years I had made it to state. “This young woman was an All-Stater three times,” he told the two clarinet players he had brought this year. The girls turned to me and eyed me with reverence. It is an unspoken commandment to honor one’s All-State ancestors.
One of the girls, Jennifer Castañeda, a pretty, ponytailed senior, was a third-year All-Stater herself. Come May, she would graduate from high school and enroll in the music education program at Texas A&M—Kingsville, where Mr. Elizondo had studied 33 years before. Jennifer was the third person in her family to join band. She played first chair and had placed at the top of her area auditions this year, outranking students from 188 other schools. In the past weeks, she’d done nothing but practice her All-State audition material—she quietly hoped to nab one of the top chairs.
Mr. Elizondo stood over her like a father. He was trying to be optimistic, but he understood that the final All-State ranking system reproduced certain inequalities. Because of the great number of auditions that take place at the convention, students are judged on six short segments of music—a total of about six minutes of playing. And since the music comes from the final concert programs for each All-State group, at least half of the audition pieces are orchestra pieces. But there are no orchestras on the border. Though Mr. Elizondo’s students tend to be technical wizards—“We teach notes and rhythms,” he explained to me—the only experience they bring to San Antonio is in band. In larger urban and suburban school districts, the better musicians often have played in both a band and an orchestra. Plus, students from wealthier areas routinely hire private instructors. Jennifer had never even owned her own instrument.
The clarinet players form the largest group at All-State, so they’re always the last to finish their auditions. It was ten-thirty in the evening by the time one of the convention organizers emerged from behind closed doors and asked the musicians to gather in one large group. The tension in the room was palpable. The students took seats at the back, and as their names were called, they came forward and sat in ranking order. When I had attended the convention, the results were printed out and taped to the glass window of the organizers’ office. The new process, if more precise, seemed cruel to me.
They started with last place. The first three students whose names were called hurried to the front and slumped in their chairs, as band directors and other students crowded the open doors and craned their necks to see. The mood grew increasingly anxious with every announcement. Hearts raced and hands trembled. Let it be someone else next. Oh, please, let it be someone else!
“Jennifer Castañeda,” the announcer said.
Her name came much too early. The Rio Grande City star had ranked thirty-eighth—probably not even good enough to get her into symphonic band, where she had played the year before. She’d have to settle for concert band, but if Jennifer felt disappointed, she didn’t show it. She gave the usher a polite smile and took her chair.
Eventually, only one student remained standing at the back of the room—a slender-framed, dark-haired boy in a brown leather jacket. He was a junior from Duncanville, a suburb of Dallas.
“Elias Rodriguez!”
There were cheers, whistles, hollers. Elias’s private instructor, a young man named Jeff Garcia, let out a euphoric “Bravo!” The smiling teen strode toward the front of the room and took the one chair that remained—the chair that, at least in dreams, had at one point belonged to every other musician in the room.
PRACTICE SESSIONS FOR THE ALL-STATE concerts began immediately the next morning. Students headed off in droves toward their assigned rooms, the results of the previous night’s auditions still sinking in. Jennifer was headed to concert band, and Elias had picked the symphony orchestra, but I decided to sit in on the rehearsals of the symphonic band. I’d heard that the guest conductor, Larry Livingston, a University of Southern California music professor and a sought-after motivational speaker, gave a particularly rousing show.
Livingston had directed Texas All-State orchestras five times, but this was his first year at the helm of the band. In slim black jeans, a black mock turtleneck, and a black jacket that contrasted with his powder-white hair, he looked more like an avant-garde artist than a band director. He took the conductor’s stand and described the diverse repertoire he’d selected for Saturday’s concert—a collection, he said, designed to provide the students with an experience that would be “powerful, helpful, enlightening, transformative, provocative, memorable, interesting, and musically valid.” The compositions ranged from a newly released band fanfare called “Nitro” to an Aztec- and Catholic-inspired, three-movement piece called La Fiesta Mexicana. One of the pieces was by Livingston’s own daughter, Kasia, who’d also written the recent Pussycat Dolls radio hit “Stickwitu”—a fact that gained him major credibility.
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