In First grade we learned and sang a number of songs during the year. Johnson and Johnson supported that program with rolls of cotton for the teachers.
Second grade we made drums out of Quaker Oats boxes and Ovaltine containers; guitars out of cigar boxes, rulers, and string; rattles out of papier-mâché around large light bulbs (whacked after the papier-mâché set up to shatter the bulb glass inside); cymbals out of pie plates; and gourd castanets.
In third grade we all learned to play a Recorder…something I thought of then, and now, as a store-bought cheap whistle. After all, my brothers and I had learned to make variable note whistles from a piece of bamboo, a shaped wooden plug, and a whittling knife long before I was introduced to a Recorder.
Finally the Fourth grade came around and I was assigned the Cello to master. Okay, so “master” is a stretch for fourth grade music class and all, but at the time, it felt like it to me.
And I was tremendously excited.
I mean, the Cello; deep, melodic, moving foundation on which all great concert music is built. And the music teacher sizing up the class immediately sensing my prodigal skills had assigned me this most critical of instruments.
Ok, so it is more likely that the music teacher simply sized the class up and realized I was the only one big enough and strong enough to haul that sucker back and forth.
But, whatever the reason, I spent the next several months toting that thing in its fabric case around the school and back and forth from home to school for nightly practice. I suspect I wasn’t the most diligent of students. Not that I didn’t apply myself in school, I did, but after-all when I had to be in class, and it was listen to some teacher drone on about something I had no connection to, or “fiddle” with a cello, the cello won out hands down.
Practicing at home though was a bit of a different tune. I can recall doing some, but suspect that I spent more time trying to get out of it to go outside and ride, skate, throw rocks, eat bugs, heck, almost anything else as long as it was outside.
Two notable things happened in my cello playing career. One of them even had something to do with improving my sound.
The first happened while carrying my cello back from individual instruction one day and stopped off to get a drink of water at the water cooler in the main hallway. Turns out, unknown to me (they had different privacy laws back then) some news photographer was wandering around and happened to see me getting that drink of water holding a cello that was taller than I was. He snapped the picture and the newspaper content editor decided to run it in the home town rag. I was the only kid in school to get his picture in the paper without holding up a number plate across his chest all year.
The second , musical improvement, happened when someone apparently fell against the cello at some point during the school day. I picked up cloth case to carry it home one Friday and immediately realized the neck was busted on the cello. I was distraught. Not because it meant that I wouldn’t be able to practice over the weekend, but because I knew Mom and Dad had signed a form to accept responsibility for any damage to the instrument.
I showed Dad, expecting a two-belt whoopin. But either he believed that I had nothing to do with it, or more likely he was so busy trying to figure out how to patch it that he just plain forgot to punish me.
Over the weekend, he and I pulled the strings, carefully drilled holes in the neck and cello body, and glued that thing back together, then restrung the cello.
That Monday was the only time I remember the music teacher being impressed. He said; “Wow, you must have really practiced this weekend, your sound has really improved since last week”.
By the end of the school year, it was apparent that I was not going to solo at the Met, at least, not on the cello.
Summer passed blissfully amid chores and crawdad fishing, camping and biking out to the lake, dodging our babysitter and swimming.
Music class returned in September.
Since the Cello had proven to be a cantankerous critter, I changed to Trumpet. Herb Albert, Luis Armstrong, and me. Yep, that obviously had been the problem all along. The Cello was obviously intended for a more refined person than I aspired to be. But the trumpet, yea, Jazz, Marches, Ragtime. That was the ticket.
And it was a lot easier to carry back and forth to school too.
Blowing into a small metal mouthpiece is a lot harder than you might think at first. Sure, elephant flatulence is easy to do; Moose and Polar Bear only a little harder. But try and get up to mouse, or mosquito level….and no matter how you look at it, that takes some crazy skill.
Oh, and thank God and good design for spit valves.
Although, there must have been a better place to put them, cause at first, it was awfully hard to miss my shoes.
Gradually over time I got the hang of sputtering into the mouthpiece in just the right manner to approximate the notes that I was being called on to create. Although in truth, there was at the time a bit of discussion as to how well I was doing, but as any of you know who have ever dealt with a music teacher, they are unrepentant unreasoning perfectionists.
That left me with one minor failing as a trumpeter. It turns out my typing and trumpet playing both suffer from some unknown genetic defect. For some reason, every time I try to type certain words, they come out garbled; like instruemtn, or whatveer, or uncorodanitde.
Trust me on this one; Hello Dolly,When the Saints Go Marching In, and Tijuana Taxi just don’t benefit from dis-ordered valve keying.
Another wonderful summer interrupted the great musician’s development.
Sixth grade was a shot at the Tuba. I’d like to tell you I had some plan as to why pressing fat levers in case of small mother of pearl valve keys was supposed to help….but enough time has gone by that I sure have no idea what the “logic” was.
For some reason, I had to spend some time in Summer school that year. And so, having learned that valves and their order of activation was critical, and effectively beyond my skillset, I moved on to the Trombone.
Very cool instrument. Spit valve was placed better on those as well. And I was the only kid in the summer band whose arms were long enough to run the full slide.
Problem with that one was that not only was there no way other than your ear to tell if you had the right note, but once or twice those long arms cleared the slide right off during a concert.
By the end of that summer session I had finally figured out;
It really wasn’t the instruments’ fault.
© Copyright 2016 Marty Vandermolen
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