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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“What am I doing here?” Livingston said, as he paced before the ensemble. “Number one. I’ve heard everybody talk about the concert. I’m interested in the concert but way more interested in the rehearsals. Because I want you to take away not only how to play your instrument and how to play in a band but, hopefully, something on a humanistic and spiritual level. That is the real goal for being here.”
Livingston’s spiritual journey began with a tuning ritual. He turned to his left and asked the first-chair clarinet player—a bashful-looking, curly-haired musician named Eric Williams—to stand up. Eric’s red T-shirt read “I’m the Evil Twin.”
“Eric the Red,” Livingston quipped, eliciting a few snickers. Eric played a C, or a concert B-flat, in musical terms. The conductor signaled him to stop after only two seconds.
“First thing is, I’m a concept teacher,” Livingston said. “This is concept number one-point-one: The first sound made by any group is a symbol of its artistic level and aspirations.” He turned to Eric, whose face was flushed. “So, can you make something that starts beautifully and blooms? And, believe it or not, can you make a phrase on the tuning note?”
Eric glanced toward the floor and took in a lungful of air. He played his note. After a few seconds, Livingston motioned to the brass players, who joined unevenly. The director motioned for them to stop. He pointed toward Eric, who played once more. Again, Eric was ordered to stop.
“Okay, look!” Livingston said. “You are involved not with machines for the sake of machines. You’re involved with machines to explain your soul to the universe. That’s what art is.” He paused. “So art begins when you get up in the morning. It begins when your imagination awakens from the miasma of sleep.”
Livingston has a grand vision of the value of music and of its historical evolution. Once his tuning ritual was complete, he launched into a short lecture about the composition that would close Saturday’s concert, the finale from Symphony no. 5 in D Minor, by the celebrated Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Taking his students back to communist Russia in the thirties, he described a dark period known as the Great Terror, when Joseph Stalin sent millions to their deaths in Siberian labor camps. In 1936 the Russian despot had banned Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District for creating what he saw as an offensive image of the Russian people.
“Stalin had the newspaper write, ‘Shostakovich writes muddle, not music,’ ” Livingston told his students, whose interest in his monologue was beginning to grow. He explained to them how the composer, knowing he couldn’t respond overtly, had decided to try to fool the authorities. The following year he penned his now-acclaimed Symphony no. 5. The four-movement musical masterpiece begins with a despairing opening, proceeds to a somber goose-stepping march, then transitions into another melancholy procession. The final movement—what the All-State symphonic band would play in two days—is a shrill, intense selection that Shostakovich likely intended as a parody of the Russian people’s reaction to Stalin’s repressive regime. Yet the music was so transcendental that when the symphony was first performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, on November 21, 1937, it is said to have elicited a half-hour standing ovation.
“We’re now going to play the last movement of this fantastic symphony, which I think, arguably, is the greatest symphony of the twentieth century,” Livingston said. “Okay. From the beginning.”
His hands rose, and the flute and clarinet players entered with a high, trilling sound. The timpani thundered with notes like terror-induced heartbeats. The low-brass instruments joined with a driving, accentuated refrain—followed again by the flutes and clarinets, who punctuated the introduction with four succinct rips: prrim, prrram, prrram, prrram!
The band took off after that, playing a fast melody that alternated between fierce and exciting, delicate and swift. Livingston’s conducting was a spectacle in itself. He traced large circles in the air with his hands, raising them high above his head and then dropping them dramatically. His face mirrored the composition’s changing moods: He tucked his chin in and let his head bobble. His lips assumed the shape of an O. His eyes stayed closed most of the time, as he conducted without his score. After the band had played for five minutes, he signaled for them to stop.
“Concept number one!” he shouted. “I’m a concept junkie—concept number one! Many of you are getting your Ph.D. in staring at music. You have really mastered the art of having an almost neurotic, romantic attachment to what’s on the page.”
A few students tittered.
“There’s nothing there! There’s only my eyes, my ear, my heart. Your eyes, your ear, your heart. So, rule number one is I want you to watch. I would rather have you watch me and get in trouble than look at the music all the time and play perfectly, because I can’t use that. I cannot have a connection!
“Number two,” he continued. “Life or death, you must listen like there’s no tomorrow. You look in the mirror because you’re interested in how you look. Can I ask you, with concept number two, to listen in the mirror? Listen to yourself. Listen to how you fit.”
The students were beginning to see that Livingston had a point. They sat up a little straighter, and some of them picked up their pencils.
“It’s not about the clarinet part,” he told them, as they scribbled notes on their sheet music. “It’s about the piece. It’s not about the piece, it’s about Shostakovich. It’s not about Shostakovich, it’s about his life. It’s not about his life, it’s about everybody’s life!”
ONE OF THE MOST ADMIRABLE features of All-State is that it draws all kinds of students. Every race, culture, and region is represented. The 2007 class could be dissected in numerous ways: rich kids and poor kids, large-school kids and small-school kids, urban and suburban and rural kids. Each musician had earned his place at the convention, yet each had followed a different road there. Jennifer Castañeda and Elias Rodriguez, the two clarinet players, were a case in point. Both had practiced their audition music ceaselessly, had made All-State before their time, and were betting on a future in music education. But their experiences during their few moments of free time in San Antonio hinted at how dissimilar their trajectories had been.
Elias spent one afternoon having lunch at Tony Roma’s with Betty Macías, the state’s top flutist, and three other highly ranked students. During summer band camp at Texas Tech and Baylor universities, he’d nurtured a crush on Betty, a doe-eyed beauty from Baytown’s Lee High School who played a $22,000 platinum flute. But their relationship was strictly platonic. She was one year his senior and more polished than Elias, who was charming in a simple, boyish way.
The first matter the group took up as they waited for their meal was who did and who didn’t like Pop-Tarts. Then they tried to decide when a person officially grows old. Once they’d agreed that, at eighteen, Betty didn’t yet have to worry about wrinkles, they settled the question of whether puffy All-State patches were better than flat ones. The answer was a resounding no, which prompted them to discuss how they were going to fit all their patches onto the backs of their letterman jackets and how much all those patches might cost. They then compared what each paid for his or her weekly private lessons, which were required by the band directors at their suburban schools (Elias paid $100 a month; Betty, $200).
After the students had finished their lunches and dispersed to practice or rest, Elias confessed to me that getting first chair as a junior was going to create a lot of pressure for him the following year. He told me how the girl who sat next to him in the orchestra, a senior from Sugar Land, had ranked first her sophomore year. Then, when she was a junior, her parents had forbidden her to try out, because they wanted her to focus on her studies. This year, her last shot, she’d ranked second, after Elias.
The girl playing fourth chair also had an interesting story. Elias told me that the day before she had bought new A and B-flat clarinets at the exhibit hall. “They were both Buffets,” he said. “I think she spent, like, seven thousand dollars. She’s, like, ‘I know this is kind of sad. My parents asked me what I wanted for my graduation. They said they’d get me either a car or two clarinets.’ And she went for the two clarinets! I told her, ‘ You band nerd !’”
The following night, I met up with Jennifer and her friends from Rio Grande City. Although a couple of them had been to band camp at Texas A&M—Kingsville on an All-State scholarship, they knew few students who were not from their school or from the Rio Grande Valley. This year, their band had sent six members to the All-State convention, a high number for any 5A school, regardless of geography. All of them planned to study music in college. One of them, a junior named David Moreno, told me he might even go for a doctorate.
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