Changing the World - One Life at a Time
Much has been written about the arguments advocates
use to make the case for music and arts programs in our schools. Are such
programs vital because of the intrinsic value (music for music's sake), or
because of the extrinsic values, such as better grades and higher test scores?
Personally, I think it is a little bit of both.
But when all is said and done it comes down to this, at least for me: music
education changes lives – and changes the world.
As educators, we all have our own stories about the ways in which we have
witnessed music positively transforming the lives of specific children. Over
the years I have witnessed hundreds of such instances, in both affluent and
poorer communities.
So as we embark on a new school year filled with promise, hopes and dreams, we
would like to share with you the words of just one of the many lives that have
been transformed by the work that we do:
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The Musical Journey Starts
Farther down Park Avenue was a little barbershop, where Mr. Brizendine cut my
hair. About a quarter mile past the barbershop, Park Avenue runs into Ramble
Street, which then led south up a hill to my new school, Ramble Elementary. In
fourth grade I started band. The grade school band was composed of students from
all the city's elementary schools. The director, George Gray, had a great,
encouraging way with little kids as we squawked away. I played clarinet for a
year or so, then switched to tenor saxophone because the band needed one, a
change I would never regret. My most vivid memory of fifth grade is a class
discussion about memory in which one of my classmates, Tommy O'Neal, told our
teacher, Mrs. Caristianos, he thought he could remember when he was born. I
didn't know whether he had a vivid imagination or a loose screw, but I liked!
him and had finally met someone with an even better memory than mine.
Leadership Skills Emerge through Music
My junior high band directors encouraged me to improve and I decided to try.
Arkansas had a number of summer band camps back then on university campuses and
I wanted to go to one of them. I decided to attend the camp at the main
University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville because it had a lot of good
teachers and I wanted to spend a couple of weeks on the campus where I assumed
I'd go to college one day. I went there every summer for seven years, until the
summer after high school graduation. It proved to be one of the most important
experiences in my growing up. First, I played and played. And I got better. Some
days I would play for twelve hours until my lips were so sore I could hardly
move them. I also listened to and learned from older, better musicians.
Band camp also proved an ideal place for me to
develop political and leadership skills. The whole time I was growing up, it was
the only place being a "band boy" instead of a football player wasn't a
political liability. It was also the only place being a band boy wasn't a
disadvantage in the adolescent quest for pretty girls. We all had a grand time,
from the minute we got up for breakfast at a university dining hall until we
went to bed in one of the dorms, all the while feeling very important. I also
loved the campus. The university is the oldest land-grant college west of the
Mississippi. As a high school junior I wrote a paper on it and as governor I
supported an appropriation to restore Old Main, the oldest building on campus.
Built in 1871, it is a unique reminder of the Civil War, marked by two towers,
with the northern one higher than its southern counterpart.
The band also brought me my best friend in junior high, Joe Newman. He was a
drummer, and a good one. His mother, Rae, was a teacher in our school, and she
and her husband, Dub, always made me feel welcome in their big white wood-frame
house on Ouachita Avenue, near where Uncle Roy and Aunt Janet lived. Joe was
smart, skeptical, moody, funny, and loyal. I liked to play games or just talk
with him. I still do - we've stayed close over the years.
High School Music
Experience – Lessons for Life
It was in high school that I
really fell in love with music. Classical, jazz, and band music joined rock and
roll, swing, and gospel as my idea of pure joy. For some reason I didn't get
into country and western until I was in my twenties, when Hank Williams and
Patsy Cline reached down to me from heaven.
In addition to the marching and concert bands, I joined our dance band, The
Stardusters. I spent a year dueling for first chair on tenor sax with Larry
McDougal, who looked as if he should have played backup for Buddy Holly, the
rocker who died tragically in a bad-weather plane crash in 1959 along with two
other big stars, the Big Bopper and seventeen year- old Richie Valens. When I
was President I gave a speech to college students in Mason City, Iowa, near
where Holly and his pals had played their last gig. Afterward I drove to the
site, the Surf Ballroom, in neighboring Clear Lake, Iowa. It's still standing
and ought to be turned into a shrine for those of us who grew up on those guys.
Anyway, McDougal looked and played as if he belonged with them. He had a
ducktail hairdo, crew cut on top, long hair greased back on the sides. When he
stood for a solo, he gyrated and played with a blaring tone, more like hard-core
rock and roll than jazz or swing. I wasn't as good as he was in 1961, but I was
determined to get better. That year we entered a competition with other jazz
bands in Camden in south Arkansas. I had a small solo on a slow, pretty piece.
At the end of the performance, to my astonishment, I won the prize for "best
sweet soloist." By the next year, I had improved enough to be first chair in the
All-State Band, a position I won again as a senior, when Joe Newman won on
drums.
In my last two years I played in a jazz trio, The 3 Kings, with Randy Goodrum, a
pianist a year younger and light-years better than I was or ever could be. Our
first drummer was Mike Hardgraves. Mike was raised by a single mom, who often
had me and a couple of Mike's other friends over for card games. In my senior
year Joe Newman became our drummer.
We made a little money playing for dances, and we performed at school events,
including the annual Band Variety Show. Our signature piece was the theme from
El Cid. I still have a tape of it, and it holds up pretty well after all these
years, except for a squeak I made in my closing riff. I always had problems with
the lower notes.
My band director, Virgil Spurlin, was a tall, heavyset man with dark wavy hair
and a gentle, winning demeanor. He was a pretty good band director and a
world-class human being. Mr. Spurlin also organized the State Band Festival,
which was held over several days every year in Hot Springs. He had to schedule
all the band performances and hundreds of solo and ensemble presentations in
classrooms in the junior and senior high school buildings. He scheduled the
days, times, and venues for all the events on large poster boards every year.
Those of us who were willing stayed after school and worked nights for several
days to help him get the job done. It was the first large organizational effort
in which I was ever involved, and I learned a lot that I put to good use later
on.
At the state festivals, I won several medals for solos and ensembles, and a
couple for student conducting, of which I was especially proud. I loved to read
the scores and try to get the band to play pieces exactly as I thought they
should sound. In my second term as President, Leonard Slatkin, conductor of the
Washington National Symphony, asked me if I would direct the orchestra in
Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" at the Kennedy Center. He told me all I had
to do was wave the baton more or less in time and the musicians would do the
rest. He even offered to bring me a baton and show me how to hold it. When I
told him that I'd be delighted to do it but that I wanted him to send me the
score of the march so I could review it, he almost dropped the phone. But he
brought the score and the baton. When I stood before the orchestra I was
nervous, but we got into it, and away we went. I hope Mr. Sousa would have been
pleased.
The Fork in the Road and the Decision that
Changed the World
Notwithstanding the setbacks, sometime in my sixteenth year I decided I wanted
to be in public life as an elected official. I loved music and thought I could
be very good, but I knew I would never be John Coltrane or Stan Getz. I was
interested in medicine and thought I could be a fine doctor, but I knew I would
never be Michael DeBakey. But I knew I could be great in public service. I was
fascinated by people, politics, and policy, and I thought I could make it
without family wealth, or connections, or establishment southern positions on
race and other issues. Of course it was improbable, but isn't that what America
is all about?
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It certainly is.
This one life just happened to grow up and become the 42nd President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton.
I had the good fortune to help produce a concert on the White House lawn to
celebrate music education in October of 1999. President Clinton and First Lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton were the hosts. During one of the commercial breaks, the
President rose to address the crowd. He spoke of why he wanted to host this
event at the White House. He spoke with great passion about his elementary music
teacher and his junior high and high school band directors and the life lessons
he learned through his music education. He ended by saying, "I would not have
become President if it were not for my school music program"
We will never read in print or hear from the stage of a concert all the stories
of the many lives our work has changed. It is important however to remind
ourselves that this is exactly what we do and why it is so important that we
fight for our children to have these experiences. Not because this will
necessarily make them great musicians. But, because it will help them be great…
in life.
Special Thanks to President Clinton, Jim Kennedy and the fine people at Alfred
A. Knopf for allowing us to share these excerpts with you.
From the Book: My Life by Bill Clinton.
Copyright (c) 2004 by William Jefferson Clinton
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.