“…sponsors deliver the ideological freight that must be borne for access to what they have.”

As a group of 30 sixth graders walk timidly through the long hallways of the elementary school, heading towards the band room, I stand somewhere near the back, as per usual when lined up by alphabetical order. We arrive indoors after a brisk moment of standing in the rain, the sudden warmth touching our eager, yet anxious, small and awkward bodies like hot chocolate radiating throughout the body on a snowy day. Not but a moment afterwards are we struck by the shine from brass plated instruments, polished to perfection, showing their elegance and grace in visual appearance alone, leaving us all to wonder how beautiful they can be when one softly presses their lips against the thin bamboo reeds or the cold metal pieces at the end of the simple coronet.

I already had the instrument I desired to play in the back of my head, and had for a year in advance with the purchase of a set of three blue harmonicas in different keys, toiling hard the year before so I could get a leg up on the other students and impress them with my natural affinity to music. As all of my peers wandered, exploring the unknown, attempting to squeak tones out of their newly acquired sax, I already knew I could ham it up on harmonica and blast them out of the ballpark with my blues licks.
Walking up to the instructor with swagger and my harmonica in hand, I told him of my decision. He replied, “I’m sorry, but we don’t have a book with songs for harmonica in the class, and you need to play an instrument that has a book so you can learn the songs.”

An entire year of prior practice had been destroyed in one sentence, but I didn’t want to give it up that easily. “No, I can learn by ear,” I cried pitifully, hoping to hold on to my treasured harp more than anything else at the moment. His response was a resounding, “No.”

At this moment I began to panic as all the other kids had to check out the sounds and feels of their instruments, I sat around with my petty ego that had just been shattered. I hastily scrambled around the room, looking for something that would at least emulate what I had learned on harmonica so the practice wouldn’t be entirely for naught. I soon realized that the piano was the only option, due both the layout of the notes and the ability to play multiple notes at once due to said layout. I told the teacher that I would play piano. One week later, I purchased my first keyboard after a football game in LaConner.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The instructor came to me later and told me that since piano was part of the rhythm section, I would also need to learn the parts to the music on either the snare drum, the bass drum, or some form of auxiliary percussion. ‘This didn’t make any sense at all,’ I thought. Why couldn’t we have the kids who wanted to play the drums play drums, and the kids who want to play piano stick to those beautiful ivory keys? How come nobody else has to play two instruments aside from us? I began to believe that this instructor’s sole existential purpose was to try to annoy me. But, then again, who the fuck was I to question authoritah? The class was required, and I didn’t care to play the other instruments either, so I went along with it until I could drop out the following year.

But then, I never did end up dropping the class. In fact, I stayed in band throughout the entirety of my public school career. I even went so far as to pick up as many instruments as I could, taking multiple band classes at once. My instructor enabled me to see not only the importance of exploring unknown territories, but also the importance of understanding music from a multidimensional point of view wherein one can see the theoretical relations of instruments that seem diametrically opposed to each other. But most of all, my teacher taught me a valuable lesson about being comfortable with being uncomfortable.