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Rejoicing in predicted failure
May. 7th, 2003 09:21 amLast night I went out to a restaurant to meet up with my friends Tank and Jana. Tank, I'll have to deconstruct him for you later...there's a lot a weird to this guy, and he's a fraternity brother, his wife janna is one of my sorority little sisters.
They asked me out to the Red Robin restaurant to try to get me involved with this concert band they play in. I've gone to one rehearsal and hated it. I've said it before, but concert band just sucks. Give me marching band or basketball band anytime. Easy songs, movement, play it and forget it. Is it art? probably not, but it's making music, getting the crowd going, etc. I loved marching band because it was nice to get outside and practice. It was hard in those Texas summers, getting ready for the new season. I've passed out of a few occasions, barfed on a practice field after a bad lunch at Burger King heated up inside me, even cut my lip open on Kyle Field at Texas A&M, but in total it was still fun.
The endless hours of concert band practice can be boiled down to one phrase, "We will keep practicing measures 24 through 42 for the entire hour or until the tubas get it right." The same stuff over and over. In high school it's all about the contests and the pressures put on band directors to do well at them, or be re-evaluated by the school board. Never mind if the band director had any real impact on his/her students or knew how to turn a group of 14-18 year-olds into men and women, in Texas, if you don't score a one at contest, you're not successful.
My high school band director was an alcoholic, probably brought on by this system. He can also be summed up by this story. Heck, he even looked like the picture there. (For the record, my high school drama teacher was a bigger influence than Mr. Rucker ever was.)
Once again, I have veered from my topic. So, the director of the concert band, Ralph, was there. He wanted to talk to me about joining the concert band, and to pick my brain about the Fraternity and Sorority's alumni group...the one I was running up until about a week ago when I resigned. It just wasn't worth running a group that wasn't growing, wasn't doing anything and wasn't wanted by the University of Houston's administration.
Ralph wants to start an alumni concert band at the school. He's a member of the school of music's board, and has been charged with building alumni support. Let me tell you this in all seriousness. UH is a commuter school. people get their degree and leave, never to look back. It's not a place many remember fondly. It has no alumni support.
This band idea is doomed to fail, but, rather than be the negative one, I just nod my head, I just sit there, providing some advice when warranted.
Ralph, a graduate of the University of Florida, feels that there needs to be a texas-wide traveling concert band made of fraternity and sorority members. How in hell is that going to work? Who would ever make a rehearsal? The ideas this man comes up with are insane.
Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Ralph states that he wants to get funding for the band from the school, the state, and the National Endowment for the Arts. I already have a problem with this, since I think there's much worthier projects than this stupid pipe dream, but if you're handy with words, you can write a grant request that will wow people, and get just what you don't deserve.
I thought, well, sometimes you just have to let people learn their lessons by letting them fail. Sure, he might get the funding, the government can be bamboozled, but he'll find he doesn't have a band.
To top this off, Ralph mentions that to get NEA funding, you must have some -I'll clean this up by paraphrasing- African Americans -not his choice of words- in it. He states that he can take some pictures of the apparently all white (there are some hispanics) concert band he runs now, Photoshop them to "create" some black people, and put them in the grant request.
I was shocked.
Being the nice guy I am, rather than just blasting him for this ortrageous stunt, I said, "Why don't you just recruit some people from Texas Southern or Prairie View (the two traditionally black colleges in the Houston area, both with fraternity and sorority chapters) or even from UH, we have integrated, you know. Seems like it would be easier to actually get some diversity rather than computer generating it."
There was no response. He went on with other plans for the group.
I needed to hear no more of this. I wash my hands of it.
They asked me out to the Red Robin restaurant to try to get me involved with this concert band they play in. I've gone to one rehearsal and hated it. I've said it before, but concert band just sucks. Give me marching band or basketball band anytime. Easy songs, movement, play it and forget it. Is it art? probably not, but it's making music, getting the crowd going, etc. I loved marching band because it was nice to get outside and practice. It was hard in those Texas summers, getting ready for the new season. I've passed out of a few occasions, barfed on a practice field after a bad lunch at Burger King heated up inside me, even cut my lip open on Kyle Field at Texas A&M, but in total it was still fun.
The endless hours of concert band practice can be boiled down to one phrase, "We will keep practicing measures 24 through 42 for the entire hour or until the tubas get it right." The same stuff over and over. In high school it's all about the contests and the pressures put on band directors to do well at them, or be re-evaluated by the school board. Never mind if the band director had any real impact on his/her students or knew how to turn a group of 14-18 year-olds into men and women, in Texas, if you don't score a one at contest, you're not successful.
My high school band director was an alcoholic, probably brought on by this system. He can also be summed up by this story. Heck, he even looked like the picture there. (For the record, my high school drama teacher was a bigger influence than Mr. Rucker ever was.)
Once again, I have veered from my topic. So, the director of the concert band, Ralph, was there. He wanted to talk to me about joining the concert band, and to pick my brain about the Fraternity and Sorority's alumni group...the one I was running up until about a week ago when I resigned. It just wasn't worth running a group that wasn't growing, wasn't doing anything and wasn't wanted by the University of Houston's administration.
Ralph wants to start an alumni concert band at the school. He's a member of the school of music's board, and has been charged with building alumni support. Let me tell you this in all seriousness. UH is a commuter school. people get their degree and leave, never to look back. It's not a place many remember fondly. It has no alumni support.
This band idea is doomed to fail, but, rather than be the negative one, I just nod my head, I just sit there, providing some advice when warranted.
Ralph, a graduate of the University of Florida, feels that there needs to be a texas-wide traveling concert band made of fraternity and sorority members. How in hell is that going to work? Who would ever make a rehearsal? The ideas this man comes up with are insane.
Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Ralph states that he wants to get funding for the band from the school, the state, and the National Endowment for the Arts. I already have a problem with this, since I think there's much worthier projects than this stupid pipe dream, but if you're handy with words, you can write a grant request that will wow people, and get just what you don't deserve.
I thought, well, sometimes you just have to let people learn their lessons by letting them fail. Sure, he might get the funding, the government can be bamboozled, but he'll find he doesn't have a band.
To top this off, Ralph mentions that to get NEA funding, you must have some -I'll clean this up by paraphrasing- African Americans -not his choice of words- in it. He states that he can take some pictures of the apparently all white (there are some hispanics) concert band he runs now, Photoshop them to "create" some black people, and put them in the grant request.
I was shocked.
Being the nice guy I am, rather than just blasting him for this ortrageous stunt, I said, "Why don't you just recruit some people from Texas Southern or Prairie View (the two traditionally black colleges in the Houston area, both with fraternity and sorority chapters) or even from UH, we have integrated, you know. Seems like it would be easier to actually get some diversity rather than computer generating it."
There was no response. He went on with other plans for the group.
I needed to hear no more of this. I wash my hands of it.
