Not Everyone Can Be John Williams

The other day, I was sitting in my church listening to the young adult choir belt out a song they had clearly just learned, while the mixed band of bell ringers, brass, woodwinds, drums, piano, electric guitar, and any other instrument that makes noise, feverishly tried to keep up. In their defense, it is a volunteer music group and their director (who is supposed to keep them all together) plays the piano so his hands are not able to wave around in the air directing everyone. As I sat there listening to the "music", I thought about this one day in middle school band class.

Yes, I was in band in middle school. Played the Clarinet... quite mediocrely I might add. But who's bragging?

So our teacher Mrs. Dreager was absent that day. And that's pretty much how chaos started.

Our poor substitute probably knew nothing about directing an entire band of puberty-ridden kids with instruments. Our class-time started with our sub raising his hands thinking, this must be how John Williams does it.

And then wham! Musical abomination happened. The saxophones started playing the Star Wars theme song, while the flutes played what they were supposed to play. The clarinets missed our intro measure so we all just held the instrument in our mouth pretending to play. The brass played loudly, but very off time, a few of the trumpets made that horse whinny sound that's at the end of the Sleigh Ride song, and the percussion just banged on the drums.

When it was all finished, the sub just looked at us and said, "Well, I think that sounds pretty good. Let's try it again."

And that's when we all learned a very important lesson: Not everyone can be John Williams