Music and its connections.

Its 1990- I’m four and my father is sitting on the edge of a couch made from a porch swing, pillows made from old t-shirts, 2x4s, and cinderblocks playing the guitar and singing Hank Williams while I’m dancing on the floor. This is one of the ways I know I am loved; my fathers voice singing sad, sad, songs.  

It’s 1992, I’m 8, and my father’s band, Zydeco Swamp Thing, is playing songs by Buckwheat Zydeco and Clifton Chenier out to a crowd at a party by a big lake, out in the woods of Maine. The sun is going down, turning the lake gold, the bonfire is getting started and the whole place is filled with what must be 200 people, its one of the first times I’ve been let go to run around on my own. I remember my Father’s bass and voice carrying through the air and the music making it feel like everyone there was together as a family. I could see the music making people feel joy, I could feel it myself, and I knew it was coming from someone. 

It’s 1996, I’m ten, sitting in a drafty, creaking, kitchen with the broiler on and open to fight off the cold with my mother and my “other mother” DJ. DJ has her old Gibson acoustic guitar and she’s filling the whole room with Drag Queens and Limousines by Mary Gauthier while my mother, who has just lost her father to cancer and found out she is pregnant is sitting in her hand-me down kitchen chair with her eyes closed, singing along. The sound is stronger than the biting fall cold coming in the cracks. The music is home. 

It’s September and I’m trying to talk to my 5th grade band director about my alto sax. I had to use a hand-me -down horn and I notice that it looks different than the shiny new rental Yamahas everyone else has. “Can you learn to play on a Bundy?” I’m nervous because I desperately want to play, music is so important to me and my family, and I know that I can’t afford to get anything better than this horn my aunt played in her middle school band, 20 years ago.  The Band director laughs about my horns quality to the class, in my face, and tells me “ I guess you can try?”  He would later kick me out of the band for being disruptive. My disruption was reading the book and working ahead of the class. He tells me “ you should never play music.” 

Its a few months later and I’m sitting on the couch with my father’s old ovation guitar, its got a bowl back and every time I try to get a hold of it it runs away from me, slipping out of my hands. My dad and DJ both have shown me a few chords and I’m working on Blister in the Sun by the Violent Femmes, and Needle and the Damage Done by Neil Young. I can almost play a C chord. I play back and forth from G to Cadd9 over and over again. Focusing in on it, making it right, so I can join them when they come back and play again. 

Its 1998 and I have a record player in my room, with big old headphones and an attachment that lets me stack records to play without changing them out. I spend hours listening to everything from my fathers record collection. He has about 1000 now, from every genre and era. I listen to Segovia, Joni Mitchell, Led Zepplin, Yusef Lateef, Cat Stevens, Queen, Leon Russell, Leon Redbone, Christian Death, Hank Snow, Doc Watson, The Beatles, Faure, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Who, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Lenny Breau.  I am hearing and feeling things for the first time every time the needle drops. 

It’s 2000 and I’m in High School taking guitar lessons and I enroll in basic music theory class, my teacher is a nice, small, man with a reedy voice. Mr. Foster is a euphonium player. Mr. Foster doesn’t understand why I’m in the class if I haven’t been in the concert band. Mr. Foster doesn’t know who Charles Mingus is, doesn’t care who the Beatles are and only thinks real music matters. Real music, composed by really dead, really white, really old men. Thats where the real value in music is.  The expert, with the degree in music, tells me in 100 ways both big and small that  music’s value isn’t in your father singing to you, your mothers singing together, your family celebrating, your own expression, your connection, the cultural messaging, the relationship of improvisation,  the affective experiences you give to others , or your own experience. Those things are base, real music comes from sitting in a room with 60 other people and waiting for 32 measures to play a pedal tone. Real music has lots of rules and comes from the 1600s. 

Its now 2013 and after a long time as a private lesson instructor on the guitar I have decided to go back to college. I’m much older than the folks who are entering the program. They are 18 year olds for whom public school music education was a joy. They talk about liking Taylor Swift but really  loving real, serious, music. Almost none of them have ever written a song, almost none of them have performed outside of a traditional ensemble. They don’t really understand the cultural importance of music outside of their one tradition. They’re all here to become Mr. Foster.

I became a music educator because music education failed me, devalued my experiences. I was a person for whom music was an inextricable part of my life. I was a student who loved music and wanted to learn but could only learn in one way, was told the other ways were less valuable.  When I would try to engage with formal music education in public schools its class divisions and value judgements consistently read me out of the category of real musician.  Too poor, too base, too popular, too simple, not serious, not REAL.

I have dedicated my teaching career to expanding the idea of what music education can be in my classroom. I honor student experience and expertise, start from a place of mutual respect, and create opportunities for collaborative exploration. In my music classes we’ve built instruments from scratch and composed with them, we’ve rapped, written songs, done electronic music production, and explored music from our own cultures as well as cultures around the country, continent, and the globe.  In my ensembles we compose, we play music written by living composers, we play music that is not typically performed by concert bands, we allow students to join with non-traditional instrumentation, at every step we prioritize the educational experience and access of students and balance it against authentic experience for their own lives.

A central question for me in my teaching practice  is “How does my classroom empower the young people in front of me to make music after they leave and forget about me?” My focus is never on creating great performances, or even on creating great musicians for ensembles. Rather it is on creating the ongoing tools and processes to empower those students who are in my classes to create or continue to collaborate with others to make the music they love and value. If that is Bach, great, if it is Taylor Swift or Beyonce or DMX- equally great. 

This has lead me into tension with other educators who, while nice people and fine teachers, do not understand the way I approach music and how I structure my priorities. This tension has helped me to frame my goals for continuing my education. I want to know how the music teachers  in the communities of American public schools (and perhaps the institutions that educate them) interpret the meaning of the music they teach and why does that community of music educators value the music that they choose.  What are the effects of those choices on their students and the musical culture of their larger communities? How is this understanding of meaning and value shaped inside the profession of music education? How does it interact with the wider cultural understanding of the value/function of music? 

Those early experiences, combined with my teaching experience, have lead me here. Now I look to the future to see where I will be brought next by staying true to music, community, and compassionate education.