From The Storyteller
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Jan. 6, 2020 Hello All: I suspect many of you will be able to relate to many of the different parts of my music journey. Enjoy, Doug Music “Play or sing, play or sing, play or sing, PLAY, play or sing, play or sing” - audition time for my college freshman, music class. During the semester the “recorder” was the musical instrument we used as we learned to read music. For the final we first sang the scales and then were told what our options were. If you re-read the first sentence carefully you will quickly recognize what my option was. I failed to make the children’s choir at my childhood church. I think it had something to do with my singing too loud and throwing the others off. Being busy year-round with basketball, baseball, football, swimming and ice skating, the piano lessons my sisters had simply didn’t fit. In high school my music world consisted of a green, a.m. radio tuned to WLS in Chicago, and dollar-a-piece records played on a 45 rpm record player. My musical tastes include everything from Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again” to the Eagles' “Hotel California” (I actually have the vinyl album) and the Beatles (entire collection), to a broad selection of folk, jazz and classical, with traditional and contemporary church music filling in any gaps. Which brings me to football. The music I like best is played at half time, during high school and college football games. It’s real live young people, who have worked their butts off so they could march various difficult formations, while playing difficult memorized music. It’s fantastic! The reason I enjoy this so much comes from knowing how hard these young people must work to accomplish this. Which brings me to recognizing that band directors and music teachers are the unsung heroes that work hard at making a huge difference in the lives of young people. Moral: Saying thank you to the people behind the scenes is important. |