For Love of Music II

It had taken a long year of fighting to get the headmaster to approve of offering music as a legitimate elective and course of study rather than an after-school club—and another, to get him to agree to the stringent audition policy we wished to have set in place.  After the fiasco that had been made that first year by forcing the overflow from the study halls into the chorus, he’d promised: Sworn that it would never happen again, and that new procedures would be set in place over the summer. 

Then Carolyn retired because of her health, and I discovered in short order that the headmaster had lied.  My arrival that humid August morning was greeted by the discovery that not only had there been no auditions, he’d not even bothered to inform the director who’d taken over for Carolyn that there was an audition procedure to follow.  Needless to say, by the time I reached the choir room—which had been moved over the summer into the maintenance loft above the cafeteria and was still in complete disarray—I was fit to be tied.  And hadn’t the new director even attempted to tidy things when she arrived…?

Then I caught my first glimpse of Laura Soles, and felt my stomach lurch.  This was what the headmaster had gotten for us, this youngish and slightly gawky woman, so unimpressive to look at, and so utterly disorganized?  She looked as frazzled as I felt, and it wasn’t even the end of first hour.  She claimed though that she’d taught before, was an adjudicator for the Regional Chorus and a part-time instructor for the Governor’s School.  I wasn’t reassured. 

OK, honestly?  I hated her at first sight. 

She was so determined, hell-bent on doing things her own way, when it was obvious she hadn’t the slightest clue of what to do with us—or how to deal with the fact that the headmaster had once again allowed the study hall overflow to be dumped into the music program—saddling her with a tenor section that wanted to be anywhere but there and didn’t know the first thing about reading music or concert etiquette.  And the space of a few moments, and a ‘You’ve been here longest, be a dear and make some sense of this for me’ I’d been demoted from assistant director to filing secretary.

But I’d learned a few things from Carolyn about manipulation, and I used every one of them to my advantage.  Behind Laura’s back, those of us in the choir who knew a thing or two about music voted.  Scores we didn’t approve of, quietly and permanently disappeared; those we wished to perform, conveniently found their way to the top of the pile stored inside the piano bench.  Moustaches and devils’ horns mysteriously appeared on the heads of composers we disliked—but whose work we couldn’t conveniently dispose of.  Personal belongings were held hostage, bribes of chocolate cake for breakfast offered in exchange for better concert scores, and more contemporary hymnals for chapel.

Laura bent, but didn’t break.  She learned: Learned that we needed someone on our level, someone who was just human and not trying so hard to be perfect and always in control, who admitted that they couldn’t do it all, all the time.  And we gave, in equal measure: Shared the inside jokes she’d never been a part of, explained what had really happened to those thirty-some copies of Shenandoah that had been used once and never been seen again, and the incident on the bus with the bananas one afternoon on the way home from a concert.  Laughed, when after the winter festival we drove off and left several thousand dollars worth of sound equipment sitting in the airport parking lot… We were pulling together at last, all of us moving on.

Days later, Carolyn was dead.