What the Room Taught Me

I wanted to play trumpet. Failing that, drums. My parents had a different plan, something about how a house with a trumpet or a drum kit in it was not a house they were interested in living in. So I ended up with a trombone, the compromise instrument, the one nobody else was fighting you for.

I was in fourth grade in Santa Rosa, and I had no idea yet that the room I'd just been assigned to would end up mattering more than almost any other room I've sat in since. Rows of folding chairs, a trombone case that still smelled like it hadn't been used yet, and a band director trying to get a room full of nine-year-olds to land on the same beat at the same time. I didn't understand yet what any of it was building. Not yet.

That room came back to me a few weeks ago, unannounced, while I was putting together a lecture for a leadership course I teach. I wasn't thinking about band practice. I was thinking about how people learn to lead, and somewhere in the middle of it, I was back in Santa Rosa, trying to land on a beat I couldn't yet keep.

We talk about school music programs as if what they produce is musicians. Some of us are. Most of the kids in that room didn't go on to careers in music, and that was never really the point. What that room actually built, more reliably than any scale or etude, was the practice of coming together for something none of us could do alone. We rehearsed to align, not just to improve. A room full of kids who couldn't yet keep a steady tempo had to learn to listen to each other before they could learn to listen to themselves. Nobody called it leadership. Nobody called it community either.

That's the part of music education that gets lost in how we usually talk about it, as either an enrichment activity or a line item. According to the Arts Education Data Project, more than 3.6 million public school students in this country do not have access to music education at all. Look at the schools that do offer it, and the harder number comes from a National Endowment for the Arts analysis of federal survey data: 45 percent of them report not having adequate funding, facilities, or staffing to do it well. Access and adequacy are not the same question, and a school that technically offers music can still be a room where nobody learns what mine taught me.

A few years ago I wrote here about learning that advocacy in Washington begins with listening, not argument. I think now that lesson had an earlier draft, and it started in a band room, long before I ever set foot in a congressional office.

The first thing I tell my students now, in that same leadership course at Eastman's Institute for Music Leadership, is that leadership is not a title. It's a pattern of behavior, and most of us learn that pattern long before anyone hands us the word for it. I learned mine in Santa Rosa, in a room full of strangers slowly becoming an ensemble, under the same director, twice.

It took me until high school to actually see what was happening in that room. By then I'd had the same band director for years, the one who'd handed a nine-year-old a trombone he hadn't asked for, and something about watching him run the same rehearsals, with an older room full of kids, finally made the pattern visible. I'd spent years thinking the point had been the music. It wasn't until that second room that I understood the music had been the occasion the whole time, and he'd been teaching us something else entirely.

If you run a program like the one I grew up in, or you're deciding this year whether one survives a budget cut, think about it as less of an arts elective and more as the room where a kid learns, years before they have language for it, what it feels like to belong to something bigger than themselves. That was true for me in Santa Rosa. I suspect it's true in a lot of rooms like it right now, and I'd like to hear about yours.