ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Silencing School Music Programs: A Sour Note

She was, I remember, tall and lean with short hair and a big grin and she could play the piano with both hands, which was, as far as we third-graders were concerned, miraculous. She invited us to sing along, and who could resist? She was the greatest musician we had ever heard. When she showed up to teach at Raymond School in Fullerton each week, we begged to sing with her.

It was like that then and throughout my public school education in Southern California. Music instruction was available, abundant, and kids clamored to become a part of it. The deep-burnished wood of cellos, the bright brass of trumpets and saxophones, the heft of timpani sticks, the drape of choir robes--it was glamorous. And if you couldn’t afford an instrument of your own, the school provided one.

And it kept getting better. If you learned to play John Cacavas in junior high, you had a shot at playing Sibelius and Rimsky-Korsakov and Copland in high school. And in Long Beach, where I went to high school, each campus had a large band and a large orchestra, and sometimes two of each. All had several choirs, and some had jazz bands and chamber groups. And all, naturally, had big, field-size marching bands that regularly competed against regional band powerhouses like Anaheim and Loara high schools. Hundreds of kids wanted in, and most made it.

For many, even that wasn’t enough. They sang in church choirs, played in youth bands, regional honor orchestras, went to summer music camps. The wider and deeper their involvement became, the more they thirsted for new challenges. And the schools were the wellspring.

My musical friends and I knew we were lucky. We knew that the Long Beach/Orange County districts were among the finest bases of music education in the country. Also, we knew what we were learning: perseverance, teamwork, discipline, esprit de corps, confidence and an ear for beauty that would never leave us. And it inevitably dawned on each of us that we were the living continuation of a centuries-old musical tradition, that we were responsible to our art.

No matter how far any of us continued in our musical lives, we realized that we learned all of that, first, in school.

Last August, at my 20th high school reunion, I found that many members of the old band/orchestra/choir crowd still played and sang in community ensembles. Others had become professional instrumentalists, singers or music teachers. Nearly all had gone to college. And when I opened my old senior yearbook later that weekend, I found what I expected: photographs of most of the student musicians appeared not only in the arts section, but in the section reserved for the highest scholastic achievers.

We talked about something else at that reunion: how the music program at our old high school had nearly dissolved, how choirs and bands and orchestras simply didn’t exist anymore, how most school children didn’t know an oboe from a lug wrench and didn’t care--indeed, how nobody seemed to care. How our own children might never truly sense the crackling anticipation of hearing an orchestra tune up, feel their throats tighten in the last bars of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, know the joy and freedom and communion of making music with friends. How they might never have what we had.

Those who are trying to deny children a musical education in the name of fiscal expediency are killing a birthright. They are barring the path to imagination and self-knowledge and a lifetime of renewable beauty, all for the ubiquitous bottom line. They imagine that they are trimming fat in order to shore up the core of the curriculum (which has in many districts been failing nicely on its own for some time now). Music, they reason, is something that students are simply going to have to get along without if they expect to be properly trained in a competitive world.

Trained, is the word here, of course, not educated. Those who would do away with school music have not made the connection--so obvious to musical students and their teachers--that musical knowledge and facility inevitably produce keenness in other subjects. A student without artistic sensibility, however, has lost an entire dimension to his personality.

But do you suppose anyone is brave enough to talk about eliminating football instead?

I miss the thin, cheerful music teacher with the fine piano technique, who loved children. Today, we all miss her.