High School Orchestra

By the time I reached my senior year in high school, 1969-70, my parents freed me from cello lessons and playing in the high school orchestra. I enjoyed the music, and I enjoyed the people, but academically I could not afford to be in the orchestra. I was already missing one academic course by being in the concert choir. It didn’t make sense to be in two music performance groups. There were some academic courses I needed and wanted to take, and orchestra was in the way.

As a runner on the cross country team, and a distance runner on the track team, I carried a pretty big chip on my shoulder (still do) for the lack of recognition and respect given to my sports, and particularly, to my beloved distance events. If you didn’t play one of the BALL sports, and you weren’t a sprinter, you were nobody. It was natural for me to also carry a chip on behalf of the orchestra, band, and drama departments, which I also felt were under-recognized. I went to every band, orchestra, and drama production I could get to in order to show my support.

I’d been playing with half of my classmates in the orchestra since middle school, and most of them the first two years of high school, so I made a special effort to attend the orchestra concerts. The one concert I remember particularly during my senior year featured Beethoven’s famous and most recognizable Fifth Symphony. They were doing it “ala Bernstein”.

Leonard Bernstein and the New York Symphony appeared on TV several years prior where Bernstein explained the symphony and the orchestra demonstrated what he had described in short segments. It was a huge hit at the time and made classical music understandable to Joe Six-Pack.

I was a little bit nervous for my classmates. I was worried the piece might be too difficult for them. Also, I was worried about the orchestra director pulling this off. He’d never impressed me as having any dramatic ability whatsoever. I worried needlessly.

The director, whose name escapes me after 40 years, did a great job explaining the symphony in segments, and the orchestra did a bang-up job playing it piecemeal. The director even exhibited some personality; something he rarely showed in rehearsal. He wasn’t the showman that Bernstein was, but he did an impressive job, as did the orchestra.

While still impressed with the performance the next day, and still carrying a chip on my shoulder on behalf of all under-recognized groups to which I belonged or had belonged, I wrote a note of congratulations and thanks to the director and the orchestra. I wrote it on a piece of notebook paper, stuffed it in an envelope addressed to the director, and dropped it off at the principal’s office.

A couple of days later Jerry Moore grabbed me in the hallway at school and told me I was a hero to the entire orchestra and especially to the director. The director had read my letter to the entire orchestra at their next rehearsal and had talked glowingly about the contents, and about me, at length.

It was one of my better moments.