by Mr Know It All
My summer vacations were a bit shorter than those of many of my classmates when I was in high school. About a month into it, my fellow band members and I had to start attending band practices. They’d start slowly, just a few hours on a hot afternoon each week. We’d sit inside and begin work on the music for the marching show, and then go out and march on a football field painted on the spacious school parking lot. Roll steps. Right flanks. Left flanks. About faces. Marking time. Eight steps every five yards. Keep the rows and columns straight. One thing that I learned a few years earlier is that you didn’t want to wear your new running shoes to these things. (It was the early eighties; everyone wore running shoes, regardless of how fast you intended to be moving.)
It’s no secret that I don’t like marching band. I’ve never heard a band play as well when they’re marching as they do when they can sit down and concentrate on the music. Back then, I put up with it so I could do concert band and jazz band. Besides, all my friends were in band, and I was enough of a teenager to be that much of a joiner.
As the summer progressed, the practices became longer and more frequent. This culminated in a dreaded two-week period before school started called “band camp.” The band came early in the morning and stayed until mid-afternoon, sometimes later. We’d learn the music well enough to memorize it, and we’d go out to the faux football field and learn the routines that we would do while playing it. We’d carry chalk to mark the spots on the asphalt, and use those as reference points until we knew it well enough to do it without the marks. (Ideally, you want to get to know the show well enough that you don’t even need yardlines. However, high school bands almost never get that good.)
With any outdoor activity, you become a slave to good weather. So it was for band. We could go ahead and work outside if it was sprinkling, but if the rain started getting heavy there was the risk of damage to the instruments. Also, you certainly don’t want to be standing in the middle of an unprotected parking lot holding a metal instrument when there’s lightning. So, when the weather became nasty we would go inside and work on the music.
We were coming down to the end of band camp that summer and while out on the lot, the skies to the west became black and dangerous-looking. Even from a distance, we could see the strobe-flashes of lightning within the clouds. We finished the portion of the show on which we were working, and Mr. Thompson, the band director, had us move inside to the band room.
The band room was a large, cinderblock room with high ceilings and carpeting. Practice rooms and storage rooms sat along the side walls. There were no windows, and (in those days) no safety lights. The doors were painted steel, and when they were closed it was virtually soundproof.
By the time we were back in the room, the storm was hammering the building with even more fury than we had expected. Even within this fortress, the thunder was stunning. Not wanting to waste any band camp time, Mr. Thompson had us move the chairs out of the way and we stood in a large circle, facing inwards. Mr. Thompson and our field commander, Patrick, stood in the center of the circle. On Patrick’s command, we came to attention, raised our instruments, and started into our opener, an excerpt from “Slaughter on 5th Avenue.”
Halfway through the piece, there was a tremendous crash of thunder and every light in the room went out. Some of the students quit playing, as confusion or fear startled them. A handful kept going. I had stopped to listen for Patrick or Mr. Thompson to tell us to stop playing. After a couple bars, I realized that that command wasn’t going to come and started playing again. The darkness in the room was like a black wool blindfold covering my eyes. We had nothing to go on but our memory of the music and our ears. Then the magic happened.
Sections that we could not get to work right before came together. Portions of the music that I had been having trouble memorizing came out flawlessly. I wasn’t the only one. The whole band was playing at a level that we had not achieved in all the hours we had put in previously. The final chords of that piece sounded, and there was a moment of silence, nearly as palpable as the darkness around us. Mr. Thompson’s voice quietly said, “Next song.”
Patrick started us off on the next song of the show, using just voice commands and we dove right into it. As the rain pounded the roof and the thunder continued its menacing rumble, we proceeded to play through every song of the show, standing in the complete darkness. Earth, Wind and Fire’s “After the Love is Gone.” Kenny Loggins’ “Junkanoo Holiday.” A version of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” written for just the percussion section with a tuba trio in the middle of it. And finally our closer – a pop music piece based loosely on a Mozart melody that was called, ironically enough, “The Music Will Not End.”
We were a simple high school band, so the skeptic in me tends to think it didn’t sound as good as I remember it sounding. However, I don’t remember it for the quality of the music. What I remember is the feeling. For the few minutes that it took us to play through all of that, I experienced pure music. No distractions. No inhibitions. I played for the sake of making music. We all did. I play my horn now better than I could have ever imagined playing then, but I have not yet matched the elation and total immersion that I experienced for those ten minutes eighteen years ago.
But I keep trying.