My Musical Career- Part Three

 

My Musical Career – Part Three

1966 was a seminal year in my musical education – this was the year that I not only entered high school as a freshman, but was involved in all three musical groups that the school offered. The school in question was Yorktown High School, which was completed in 1961 and was entering the sixth season of its existence. The music department at the time consisted of three teachers – Mr. Swain – who had the band program and doubled as department chair; Mr.Szabo, a young Hungarian emigre who had the string program and directed the orchestra; and an energetic young musician by the name of Ira Ebel who headed up the vocal department and had the chorus.
I was very much looking forward to going to high school, not least because they had a much newer (or so I thought) set of two timpani -the WFL Symphonic model – sizes 25 inch and 28 inch. These were the models with internal tension (the tuning spider was inside the kettles) and a balanced action pedal mechanism – but with the supporting struts around the outside of the kettle. The drums were a lot newer than the old Ludwig Universals that I played on at the old junior high – the kettles were free of dents and knicks.
ludwig_symphony
Ludwig Symphony Model -ca. 1960

I was looking forward to getting my hands (or should I say, sticks) on them.
However, I was to learn that in high school – the seniority system ruled. In junior high, when you are an eight grader, you are king of that hill, but when you get to high school, you go back to the bottom of the heap, and this was largely true in the music department at YHS.

Band and Orchestra at YHS – ca. 1966 -1970

As I mentioned earlier, when I entered YHS in the fall of 1968, there was a fairly active music program which covered band, orchestra and chorus. The band, which was under the direction of Mr. Swain, numbered 110 and had two distinct seasons – marching band from September through November (covering the football season); and the concert season, which lasted from November through May. The percussion section was huge – myself and five fellow freshmen joined a group of ten seniors, junior and sophomores. In the marching/football season, there was a lot to do – what with tenor, snare, bass drums and cymbal positions to be covered. Timpani and mallets were not used until concert season. The percussion section was pretty large at the beginning, but as the season went on it settled down into its most manageable form. I did my duty in the marching band – playing bass drum or cymbals – the juniors and seniors did the snare and tenor drum positions. I didn’t mind at all. There was a good reason for this. It had to do with my introduction to the orchestra.

I had met Mr. Szabo during my days at Yorktown Junior High. He had the string program for the entire district, and taught some of the string players at the junior high level as well. However, there were not enough of them to constitute a full orchestra – just a small string orchestra. In high school, things were a bit different. There were enough string players to make up (together with the required winds, brass and percussion) a school orchestra, and the timpanist at the time was a fellow by the name of Pete Greenland (his brother Jeff was a freshman like myself). Pete was a rather nice fellow – he and I hit off from the first day in band, and he kind of looked out for me during that first year. Sometime in the middle of that first freshman year, Pete decided it he wanted to concentrate his energies on being the principal percussionist in the band, rather than double as timpanist in the school orchestra, so he (for reasons only known to himself) recommended me for the job. This was both a boon and a bane for me. A boon in the fact that it put me in line to learn from the ground up some interesting orchestral repertory, and a bane in that it put me in the crosshairs of some of the sophomore percussion students who resented being passed over.
I had already shown some ability on the instrument – having developed a keen sense of pitch through singing in the church choir as a boy and continuing to do so in high school as well.
Even though the orchestra was small in number – I think we numbered about thirty-five, Mr. Szabo was not one to let us have an easy life.
We worked for several weeks on Beethoven’s 1st Symphony – not the easiest symphony in the world, and worked from the real music – no “excerpts from” or “arranged by” – we jumped into the pool, so to speak, and had to swim. The scherzo movement is notoriously tricky, and I was just an innocent at the time as I blithely attempted to make sense of the piece. Mr. Szabo was a smart man – he had us cut our teeth on the Beethoven in an ultimately successful attempt to prepare us for the Spring Concert – the musical event of the year at YHS back in those days.
I really got to know those Ludwig timpani. As I stated earlier, they were a cut above what I had played on in junior high. My guess is that they were early 1950s vintage Symphony models – they had casters instead of wheels, but the kettles were in excellent shape, and they had early Ludwig Ensemble heads on them. In addition to the pedal mechanism, they had t-handles round the counter hoop for fine tuning. I got the hang of them fairly quickly.
For that first Spring concert. Mr. Szabo had planned two big works – Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 – “The Drum Roll”, and a pretty decent arrangement of the “Bacchanale” from Saint-Saen’s “Samson et Dalilah”. Pretty heady stuff for a beginner – the Saint-Saens arrangement was not your run of the mill school arrangement – it contained all the good stuff!
So, my orchestral career started off with Haydn and Saint-Saens, and in my freshman year, to boot.
Band, while enjoyable, was a different story. There, I was but one of fifteen percussionists, all of whom were senior to me in one way or another, and they let me know it. Pete made sure I got a few decent timpani parts to play ( a decent arrangement of the Scherzo of Brahm’s Fourth Symphony, for one), but it was Pete and a sophomore who did the bulk of the playing. I was indebted to Pete, but the sophomores tended to lord it over us freshman, thus justifying the term sophomore – for sophomoric behavior! Orchestra was a lot more fun than band, but I learned to enjoy band after a fashion. The sad fact is that over the course of my four years at YHS the band diminished in size from 110 in my freshman year to about 35 in my senior year. This was due to politics and the schedule changes (due to overcrowding, we went to a double schedule and the band period was eliminated -( band having to be held in a twenty minute homeroom period). Orchestra in my second year was relegated to a sting orchestra – the main work was Vivaldi’s Magnificat – Ira Ebel and the choir held center stage that year. The band had their concert in the court yard of the chool – it was still a sizable group of 80 members (this was before the draconic cuts of my senior year).

Memorable Moments

If I had to pick the best moments of my musical life at YHS, there were several. I already mentioned the orchestra concert of my freshman year. In my third year, Mr. Szabo led the combined orchestra and choir in Zoltan Kodaly’s “Psalmus Hungaricus” – quite an ambitious undertaking, as well as a short but interesting orchestral portion of the concert, which included an arrangment of Berlioz’ Rakoczy March. For this concert, I needed extra timpani, and Mr. Swain and Mr. Szabo arranged to borrow the old Universals that I used back in junior high school – which by now had moved from downtown Yorktown Heights to the campus right across from the high school and was renamed the Mildred Strang Middle School (after our recently retired school superintendent). Needless to say I felt that I had come up in the world – playing on four timpani -even it was only for a few days! The orchestra was strengthened by a contingent from the neighboring John Jay High School in Katonah. The concert was played in two locations – once at John Hay and the final one at YHS. This was actually the high point of my school music career. The last year was a real comedown – Mr. Ebel resigned his position over differences with the administration, and was replaced by David Becker; Mr. Szabo took a year’s sabbatical, which meant there was no orchestra, and the band had shrunk to thirty-five members due to the fact that it had only twenty-five minutes a day to rehearse due to the double-shift – overcrowding in the school necessitated this measure. However, Mr. Swain and Mr. Becker taught the general music classes at the time, and I had enrolled in both and I learned a good deal from both men. It was at this time that I had to think about college, and since I had devoted all of my time to music, I skimped on the academics, and was going to need a miracle if I was to make it into college. That miracle was to happen, but it took a lot of hard work on my part to learn to practice for college auditions, as well as a determined effort on the part of a few teachers and my guidance counselor. More on that in my next blog.