Orchestra Takes the Spotlight

So last night we had our annual all-district all-inclusive instrumental music extravaganza. We take every high school band, every middle school band and every elementary school band combine them them into larger performing units, then into one giant juggernaut of sound. This all goes down at the school that has the largest gymnasium. It's a logistical nightmare that turns all of the involved music teachers into an army of screaming maniacs.

This year, instead of throwing the sting players in with the mass-band, the organizers decided to let the string groups perform their own pieces this year. The fun part - there was no "combined high school orchestra".... because there is only one string orchestra at the secondary level in our district... mine. That means that while every other performing group consisted of at least 200 kids from at least 3 different schools, the secondary string group was made up of the 17 kids we brought from Empire High.

I wasn't nervous about how my kids would do... I knew they were prepared. I was, however, very nervous about whether or not we could get a gym full of people quiet enough to hear them. The dress rehearsal didn't do anything to alleviate my fears: the horde of fidgety middle school band kids wouldn't shut up and even with all those kids conversing at near whispers, the over-all clamor washed out the sound of the orchestra. They almost couldn't hear themselves.

One middle school band kid who was sitting only ten feet away from the string players started yelling at his friend in the middle of our run through. Without even cutting the orchestra off, I immediate turned and started breathing fire on him.

Understand this... I'm not a screamer. If my kids have any kind of criticism of my teaching style at all... they'll tell you that I'm too nice, too forgiving, too tolerant. But when I tell you that I went ballistic on this kid, I mean I think they could hear me outside the gym with the doors closed.

His regular teacher yanked him out of the group (she may have sent him home) and I just went back to running the piece. At one point, however, I realized that it was useless: even with my VERY public temper flash, the noise level wouldn't stay below the orchestra. 30 teachers in the room and there was nothing we could do. I just had to resign myself that they wouldn't be heard, and that maybe the whole thing was a bad idea. The thing that was eating at me the most was the fact that my kids play well, and that they deserve better than that.

The concert started at 7, and the string group was on second, just after the combined high school band. When our turn came around, the district music coordinator got on the mic and begged the audience to be quiet for us....

...and that's when the miracle happened...

Something about the parents-in-the-room factor created a pin-drop silence... so much so that people in the audience later told me they could here the upper-string solo-trio with no problem. The crowd let us play, and play we did. Well. So once again, a situation I thought would be disastrous ended up being a total victory.

Today, instead of rehearsing, we passed around a few boxes of doughnuts and had a grand old time.