My Music Career Ends

As I said before when I got to high school, I was in the Beginning Band. There I met another drummer, Bill. He was a football player as well, but as a freshman, he only played on the lower squad. He left the next year and concentrated on football. I don’t remember much about that year in the band except I liked it and worked hard. I wanted to skip Intermediate Band and go straight into Senior Band (I think that was what it was called) my sophomore year.

My sophomore year I did make both the senior school marching band and orchestra. During football seasons, I started by playing the cymbals and bass drum, but quickly got “promoted” to snare drum. I enjoyed everything about the marching band, from the intricate formations we’d do at halftime on the football field, to coming up with new and snazzy drumbeats that we played to keep the band in step when we marched without any music.

The winter season brought indoor concerts and again, in the spring. I played mostly snare drum and bass drum my sophomore year, but my junior year I became Head Drummer and played only snare drum and tympani. I was very good on snare drum, but I was tone-deaf. I tried to tune the tympani but had to rely on the Band Director to tune it for performances. He didn’t worry about practices, letting me find a higher tone and then a deeper tone that sounded close. “Kansa” was a favorite on the tympani for me.

My senior year I was selected as the Drum Major for the Marching Band so I led the band onto the field. The Head Majorette was in charge of the other majorettes. I stayed as Head Drummer since when concert season began, I didn’t have any other responsibilities as Drum Major. My senior year I also finally made it all State Band. I had made County Band and District Band before, but never State. I played the bass drum for the concert held on Penn State campus during the winter.

Finally, what I consider the most important thing I did in my drum career was when I was a junior. My younger brother was three years behind me and wanted to play football in high school. He was too small for football and I told him that. I kept encouraging him to let me teach him the drums. If he couldn’t play football, he wasn’t going to do anything, he said. I kept on him until, as he told me today when we Skyped, he got off the bus just before his 8^th grade Christmas vacation, and told Mom to tell me that he wanted to learn to play the drums. We began that evening; every evening for 45 minutes for the rest of the year.

He went to high school the next year and made Intermediate Band. He made Senior Band the next year and went on after that to make State Band several times, as well as Honors Band, an exclusive regional band in the tri-state area centered on Pittsburgh. I had tried but never made it. He made it the first time his sophomore year. He went on to major in music at Carnegie Tech, then Carnegie Mellon by the time he got his masters, got drafted into the Army and played in the NORAD Band in Colorado, got out, stayed in Colorado, taught music in the Colorado Springs school system for years before he retired around 1990. He still gives private lessons and coaches local high school percussion sections.

When I graduated from high school and went to college, I didn’t join the band. I never picked up a set of drumsticks again.


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