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).
(Page 4 of 4)
For these teens, it was a challenge to make the convention money last. “We’ve been eating McDonald’s and Dairy Queen all weekend!” Jennifer told me. Out of necessity, they had found all the bargain activities on the River Walk. That night, they’d explored the opulent Menger Hotel, which was supposed to be haunted, then had made their way out onto Alamo Plaza, where the trees were laced in dangling threads of white lights, giving the scene a festive feel. A line of white horse-drawn carriages decked in artificial flowers and loops of garland awaited customers, but the group had already investigated that option and found it to be cost prohibitive. There was, however, always the Ultimate Mirror Maze Challenge. The day before, a staffer had offered them a good deal: If they each bought one $9 ticket, he’d give them unlimited weekend access to the 2,100-square-foot glass jungle.
They ran up to it now, and though they’d left their tickets in their hotel, the man at the door remembered their faces and stood aside as they charged ahead and vanished behind a set of drapes.
Each had developed his or her own style for getting through the maze. One girl ran blindly, repeatedly bumping her head into walls. Another turned corners at a usually moderate but occasionally hazardous speed. One of the boys hid expertly in the corners, jumping out to terrify them just as they stumbled past.
Jennifer’s method was the most determined, reminding me of her approach to making music. “I’m real stubborn,” she had told me the night before, as we’d talked late into the night in the lobby of a La Quinta Inn, where her group was staying. “If I don’t get it, I’ll go back and I’ll work at it until I get it. I can be real funny about some stuff. But when it comes to music, I can be real serious and into it.”
With this same measure of intensity, she now confronted the mirrored puzzle: one section of glass at a time, her arms outstretched to find what stood ahead, her hands working their way out of the complicated passages.
“GOOD MORNING!” LARRY LIVINGSTON said to the sleepy-eyed symphonic band at the beginning of their nine o’clock Saturday rehearsal.
By this point it was evident that the relationship between the West Coast conductor and his Texan apprentices had changed. He had memorized many of their names, and he spoke to them as though they were longtime friends. Some of them had stayed for almost an hour after the previous night’s rehearsal. “I just want to say, it’s been a great pleasure,” a baseball-capped boy had told him reverently.
Still, the eight-hour rehearsal days were taking a toll. Several players were missing when the Saturday rehearsal began, and the ones who were there on time looked dazed. The flutes sounded flat, the clarinets seemed airy, the tubas were not together, and the trumpets kept running off ahead of everyone.
The rehearsal started with the fourth movement of the Shostakovich symphony. Observing band directors clapped after nice passages, but there was clearly more work to be done. “Discombobulated” is how Livingston described the sound. One section in particular seemed insurmountable. The top two clarinetists and flutists were supposed to be playing background to a splendid French horn melody, but they were terribly out of tune. Two women spectators wrinkled their noses in disgust. “The pitch!” one of them whispered to the other. The other one whispered back, “They must’ve partied last night.”
“Band,” Livingston said, studying his score. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve . . . twelve measures after I. The clarinet and flute people, who have this really hard stuff . . .” He motioned for those students to play. The sound they produced was irritating. He motioned for them to stop, then tried starting them up again.
“And, now,” he said, waving his baton, but the intonation was still off.
“We need to find the same version of this,” he said, growing concerned. He spoke to the first chairs in each section. “Could you just play, Eric and Kim?” Kim Barr was a blond flutist. She and Eric sounded distorted at first but gradually managed to mesh their notes.
“Let me hear Jared and Candlestick Maker,” Livingston said, referring to Jared Hawkins, the second-chair clarinet player, and a flutist named Catherine Baker. Jared and Candlestick Maker played the note and nailed it.
The interest in how all of this would work out had been piqued among the peanut gallery. “Okay,” Livingston said, “now the top people play. All four.” He motioned with his hand. The playing sounded worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.
The observing music teachers cringed. Livingston made the students stop.
“Two things about this passage,” he said to them, grasping for a concept that might save the day. “One is the intonation. But another is timbre. If you have a bright timbre, you’re going to sound sharp. So try to integrate your timbre, or color, and your pitch, and let’s do it right. You’re doing great. And, now . . .”
The four students played a solid first note, but when they reached a set of sixteenth notes, their sound fell apart.
“ Think, think, ” Livingston said to the flute players. “You have to believe in yourself. Remember when you were auditioning about six months ago? And you were worried—‘Am I going to make the Colloquial Interstate Nineteenth Band Junior High last chair?’ You got here, and you earned it. And, now . . .”
The sound was absolutely perfect.
The conductor turned toward the band instructors in the audience, who were astounded by the tuning miracle they had just witnessed. “Did they get better?” he asked them. “No. They were already better. I just asked them to use the better they had.”
ON MY LAST NIGHT IN SAN ANTONIO, as the 154 members of the 2007 Texas All-State 5A Symphonic Band gathered for their final concert, a sense of loss began to settle in the pit of my stomach. I’d always known, back when I was an All-Stater, that I was not going to end up as a professional musician or a music instructor. There were too many other things I was curious about. But watching the teenage musicians stroll into the warm-up room in their gowns and tuxedos, looking a little taller than they had three days before, I felt as if some grander sense of myself had been left behind when I put away my clarinet.
The old band directors who’d known me back then saw things differently. I had thought that it would be embarrassing when I ran into them and confessed that I had stopped playing, but no one I talked to was disappointed. These teachers had committed hours and days of their lives to my musical education, yet what they were most interested in was what I’d done after I quit playing. They were proud of my accomplishments and proud that I had come back to visit. It reminded me of something that Tim Lautzenheiser had told the other instructors at his clinic: “We don’t do it so that we can be their favorite teachers. We do it so that they can connect with their own potential. Then we get out of their way.”
This sentiment was surely shared by Larry Livingston. Before he could begin his final rehearsal, his students asked if they could take the conductor’s stand for a moment. Between them, they had collected $500 ($120 alone from the French horn section) and bought him some gifts: a windbreaker in the design of the Texas flag, an eighty-gig iPod, and a sheriff’s badge engraved with his name. They had also filled a card with heartfelt dedications such as “You are such a kick butt band director!”
“All right,” Livingston said, after thanking the group. “Could we, my friends, just play through ‘Nitro’?”
Following his cue, the group dove into the three-minute fanfare. When that was finished, the conductor ran them through a few bars from the second piece in the program, a Johann Sebastian Bach composition called Fantasia in G Major. As the students began to play, Living-ston closed his eyes and momentarily lost himself in his conducting, fingers twirling in the air, hands as graceful as swans. The students responded with a lovely passage.
Soon, band and conductor would file out into the auditorium next door, where a TMEA official would explain to the crowd of two thousand what an arduous series of auditions had led to this night and announce, to the audience’s great delight, that this year, All-State band members’ SAT scores were 378 points higher than the Texas average (and 344 higher than the national average). A guest conductor would lead a zesty rendition of the National Anthem. Finally, Livingston himself would be introduced. The band would drive through “Nitro” and Shostakovich, and at the close of the program, as the students left the stage, parents, siblings, teachers, and proud girlfriends and boyfriends would crowd around, flashing their cameras and showering their loved ones with praise and congratulatory bouquets.
But in the warm-up room, as the band worked through Bach’s rich harmonic progressions, all that seemed to belong to another reality. Everyone comes to music for a different reason, and everyone walks away from it with a different gift. For some, it’s a higher GPA or admission to a prestigious college. For others, it’s the first shot in a family at a professional career. In my case, music gave me a little key to the rest of the world. When I left Texas and began to travel, I’d sometimes hear a classical song playing on the radio in a taxi or over the PA system in a department store. I would recognize it instantly—The Flying Dutchman or Carmina Burana or Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, which I played my sophomore year at All-State—and I’d smile to myself as I fingered the notes. It was as if music had provided me with a secret code to the rest of the human experience and to our shared artistic history, as well as an assurance that I, a high school clarinet player from Brownsville, was somehow part of it all.
My Library
