This is an installment in a multi-part story, which begins here.

From the last episode…Nobody in history ever set out to be a euphonium player. God knows I didn’t. No, I was an unwitting victim of that insidiously corrupt machine that is the high school band farm team system.

Everybody knows how the sports farm machine works. Very few people, outside of tear-jerker movies, ever just show up for tryouts and make the team. The stars, at least, the big time players, are cultivated from an early age. Most likely they are given footballs in their hospital incubators instead of a warm blanket. Elementary school phys ed teachers exist for one purpose: to spot these Converse-shod Mozarts and cultivate them for their predestined futures on the high school team.

What is not so well known is that school music programs operate under the exact same paradigm. They know that just as there are kids out there born to hurl pieces of leather around a field, so there are those of us who come into this life itching to produce melody. For us foreordained band geeks music never could be just something that comes out of the radio in the old man’s Chrysler. Music was something we needed to do, not just listen to. The school music machine knew this and exploited it to the max. Their first diabolical ploy was to make us wait, to tell us that we were not yet “ready” to do that which we in our mewling, puking little skulls knew was the only thing we wanted to do with our lives. They well knew that the best way to change an interest of a human being from a casual preoccupation to a raving monkey on his back is to simply tell him that he can’t have it.

In the education mills of Pine Grove, New Jersey, this particular form of torture was focused upon the boys who wanted to play brass instruments. The rule was that you could start a string instrument in fourth grade but not take up a band instrument until fifth. In our later mythology we convinced ourselves that this was a secret plot to sift out the True Believers from the Great Unwashed Masses. Guys whose very names foreshadowed their lot in life—Melvin, Chauncey, Francis—succumbed too easily and allowed a violin bow to be placed in their delicate little mits in that fateful fourth year. While the rest of us were sorely tempted, something in us made us hold out for the promised land. And when those gorgeous, gleaming, gilded trumpets and cornets arrived from Manny’s Music Emporium in September of our fifth year, we knew that the suffering, the perseverance, had all been worth it.

Yes, I said trumpets. Every fifth grade boy in the music crowd who makes it through the forty-days-wilderness of the fourth year orchestra temptation does so because he has his eye on the true sex symbol of the American concert band, the trumpet. The trumpet was the quarterback, the starting pitcher, the point guard of our world. I said it before and I’ll say it again: no one ever set out to be a euphonium player.

Yet not everyone with the talent to be a football player gets to quarterback, and so it goes in the band world. Though we could never prove it, we later knew it must be true—some time around August each year, all the elementary school music teachers in the town are summoned to a clandestine meeting in a smoke-filled room behind the pool tables at the local jazz joint. Their mob captain, the high school band director, gives them their assignments. “Migliori, yoor over dare at dat South End School, right? Yeah, right. We don need no more of dese trumpet players you been sendin’ us, capiche? So find us sumpin’ else, or yool be playin’ Sousa marches outa parts a yoor anadomy dey ain’t meant to be played from, capiche?”

So as we filed in for those first few weeks of trumpet lessons, each of us holding our long, slim mass of golden tubing like it was the Holy Grail, we had no way of knowing that some of us were being singled out, like lambs for the slaughter. Vainly we all thought we were going to be quarterbacks. But the team needed some defensive linemen as well; and the slow, the lame, the halt would just have to be sacrificed for the Gipper. Sitting in my squeaky metal chair in the practice room, Hougher to my right and Whistman to my left, I did not know that Mr. Migliori had already decided my fate. Actually, as things would turn out, both Hougher and Whistman had also already been checked off a list of non-quarterback-types. The former, his already large frame setting his doom, would go on to spend his Memorial High years lofting the brontosaurus pair of the music world, the sousaphone and tuba. The latter was granted a less ignominious fate, being handed the supporting actress sex symbol of the band, the trombone.

For me, however, it was to be a journey into truly uncharted waters, an instrument none of us had ever dreamed could exist, never mind had we ever even heard of it. The fateful turn came near the end of the third week of trumpet lessons, when Migliori suddenly called on me to play the full octave of the basic C scale.
To be continued….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 11:51 pm and is filed under It`s All About Me, Music, Pop Culture, Tell Me a Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.