The Endless Concert

Newsletter 2024-12-13

And the band played on. And on. And on.

Middle school music is serious business. It takes more equipment than a small army and more people than a large one. This week, we went to my twelve-year-old’s band concert. Mae’s first recital last year as a sixth grader was an unhinged auditory experience. The young players weren’t constrained by such pedestrian concerns as rhythm or tune. Their instruments were tools of creation. Mostly, what they created was noise, which they made with much enthusiasm. Everybody starts somewhere. These students started at maximum volume. I couldn’t have been prouder.

That was a year ago, which is approximately a decade in kid time. Things have changed since then. Tuesday night, Mae brought home her saxophone. Usually, she leaves it at school, which is the best thing about this band program. She plays everyday, but in a concrete building on the other side of town. I only hear her at concerts a few times a year. There was one scheduled for Wednesday night. She wanted a tune-up before the big show. She set up a chair in front of our dancing mirror and played. To my surprise, what came out wasn’t noise, but music. She was using that weird brass tube to make something orderly and beautiful. It was a far cry from what my children usually produce, which is unadulterated chaos. Perhaps there’s some wisdom in having music programs for children after all.

My misguided doubts were inspired by my own short-lived music career. In middle school, I lasted for less than a year as a saxophonist. For all I’ve written about how I never used to quit anything, I abandoned band almost immediately and never looked back. I lacked both the desire and the ability to play well. I’m the most unmusical person you’ll ever meet. There’s a jerky, discordant anti-rhythm to my entire life. I also have no hand-eye coordination, which was less than ideal for an instrument that requires you to use nineteen different fingers at once. My mom recognized my lack of potential from the start. Instead of spending good money on a lost cause, she bought me a beat-up old saxophone from a newspaper classified ad. That’s how people used to sell things back in the Bronze Age. I think my mom paid forty dollars, which was a far cry from the hundreds required for a new instrument. After my six months of futility, I believe she resold it for the full forty dollars. Her only loss was the trauma of having to hear me practice, which I seldom did, much to everyone’s relief. You should always encourage your children, even if that means encouraging them to quit for the good of humanity. There were other ways I could be creative. Thank goodness writing is quiet.

Despite the twenty-seven-year gap between purchases, there wasn’t much difference between how much my mom paid for my saxophone and how much I paid for Mae’s. The band program wanted us to invest in a new one that could cost well north of a thousand dollars depending on the payment plan. Instead, I found one for seventy-five bucks on Facebook Marketplace. That’s how people advertise now thanks to the invention of social media and electricity. At that price, we could buy Mae a used saxophone every year, throw it away, and still come out money ahead. My ideal price point is disposable. That charming old hunk of metal has done well so far. It looks like a saxophone, and it makes saxophone sounds. At least I assume it does. If you blindfolded me, I couldn’t tell any instruments apart. Except the triangle. I’ve got that one locked down.

The concert Wednesday night was a huge production. The logistical challenges started with the venue. The middle school is under construction, with most of the parking lot being taken up by heavy equipment. The concert was moved to the high school auditorium, which sounded like a big upgrade over the middle school gymnasium. We soon discovered it was actually a step down in total seat count. You can fit a lot of people on folding chairs on a basketball court and the bleachers behind it. The high school auditorium, on the other hand, has tiered theater seats that look fancy but can’t hold nearly as many butts. Comfort always comes at the cost of capacity. I dropped off Mae at the school at 6:30 p.m., then drove home to get the rest of the family. When we returned to the high school, there was a huge crowd milling about outside the auditorium. We thought that maybe the doors had been closed until the last possible second, but they’d been open the whole time. It was just taking that long for people to filter in. The mass of family members overwhelmed the theater. I suddenly felt bad about making my other three kids come to support their sister. They didn’t want to be there, and they took the spots of some people who did. By forcing them to love their sibling, I was once again the bad guy. To accommodate the herd, the band director unroped some of the blocked-off sections saved for the band kids themselves. They didn’t need seats in the crowd while they were playing on stage. When they were done playing and needed to make way for the next group, they’d just have to figure it out. They could always use those fancy instruments as weapons to battle for more space.