Grading the Band

I found myself, with family, seated in the local high school gym for our daughter’s season-ending fifth grade band concert.  It is an event — a ritual, really — that is repeated inumerable times across America as spring rolls toward summer and another school year winds down.  I’m sure many of you have attended one of these musical events — no doubt many times, if you have several children — and if you’re like me, you probably don’t have much in the way of expectations that there will be soaring music or startlingly original solos. Instead, you count on your son or daughter doing well, not dropping the instrument on the gym floor and completing the evening with pride intact amid a light rain of polite applause.

These concerts are worth noticing for what they may say about how the ebb and flow of household life in America unfolds in such a surprisingly uniform way. How everyone ends up at one of these concerts on a mid-week May night — students, teachers and family members alike — is the culmination of many individual and community decisions stretching back months:  the decision that your son or daughter is going to play in the band; the choice of instrument that will be played (flute or saxophone or drums or violin or trombone), and the over-arching decision of your child’s school district that band is a desirable and necessary component of a elementary school education. (There is, of course, the even farther back decision to have children and see to their upbringing).

Kids play in band, school administrators insist on having band, and band teachers teach band earnestly if not entirely successfully, because there is a fundamental belief that youngsters need to be exposed to music.  What better way to learn about music than to play an instrument, even if it is not one of your child’s choosing!  Once, in the fourth grade, someone had the bright idea that I was a tuba prodigy and so, for six agonizing months, I twisted myself into the giant instrument and nearly blew out my innards attempting to create the sound a tuba makes.  I wanted to play the clarinet (then and still), but apparently there were already sufficient numbers of clarinetists in the band, so tuba it was for me.

Fifth Grade Band Concert

As parents, we must support band, and of course our child’s participation.  However, support in this sense is largely one of logistics, in that parents are expected to drop off and pick up their children for band practice. Parents are also expected to be on hand whenever a concert is scheduled, even if it conflicts with soccer, private piano lessons or fast pitch softball practice.  Somehow, everyone gets to where they are supposed to be, more often than not. I sometimes feel that delicate surgery would have to be postponed if it meant missing a performance.

But it’s more than logistics, of course. By some cultural imperative, parents are all but required to cheer and applaud at the appropriate moments, and bestow praise on their children afterwards.  Truth be told, if you can make out even one note played by your child, you have the ears of a field hawk.  The point of it all is the show of support for the effort expended, and it’s not just applicable to band, but also to the science fair, the Holiday pageant, the book fair, and so on.  You could reasonably conclude that much of elementary school is a series of showcase events, with our children playing the lead roles before a ready-made, captive audience.

No one really likes any of this, candidly.  You see a lot of fixed smiles on the faces of parents at band concerts.  And who can blame them; very few mothers are excited, at the end of the typical school year day, to check the calendar and see, with dismay, that the spring concert — all hands on deck — is starting in just 45 minutes and dinner prep hasn’t even begun. Parents can become nearly unglued trying to leave work on time to make the drive through rush hour traffic for two or three minutes of actual playing time.

Yet we all do it, every day, in cities and towns all over the United States. These school-related activities are an integral part of the lives we lead, like it or not. They represent the compact we have made that our children have priority status in everything we do, and we would not want it any other way. We gather together, us parents, like atoms collecting, to hear the muddled, halting renditions of “Home on the Range,” or “Ode to Joy,” with our eyes and attention fixed on our son, our daughter — the flautist third from the right, second row — who is sitting on the edge of her folding chair, precisely as instructed, blowing air into a perforated pipe.  Maybe she’s not Jethro Tull, but from where I am sitting, her playing is perfect, as good as good can be.