so i did a little writeup for my high school alumni website
https://www.mvcds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=204&nid=779778&rc=1
In which i briefly tell the tale of forming a choir when I was still a student.
As an added bonus for my blog fans, below is a recording of one of the pieces we did, “Ain-a That Good News”:
These recordings have not seen light of day for 40 years. There were no auditions (anyone could join), most of the kids involved could not read music and had not sung anywhere previously. There was no vocal training in these high school kids, but they had spirit, and at 0:56 for a brief moment they sounded as good as any choir in the world. Says me.
It was not perfect but given that I built this choir from scratch, was only 17 years old at the time, and trained all the kids note by rote note, I’m kinda proud of what we accomplished. Many thanks to brother ben (now the choral director of kenyon college) ringing in the tenor section. –jl
ps complete article, below – jl
[Note this refers to Maumee Valley Country Day School, a private high school in Toledo, Ohio]
From Culture Shock to Success, A Life-Long Testimonial by Justin Locke ‘73
Back in the 1950’s and 60’s, Monclova was pretty much all farmland, and that’s where I grew up, on one of those many farms. I attended the local public school, and the kids there were, like me, mostly farm kids. The public school was not what one would call a nurturing environment. Discipline was strictly enforced. There was a lot of emphasis on being punctual, obedient, and uniform, and not much else. There was no room for any personal creative development. In fact it was generally suppressed, assuming anyone ever considered doing anything like that in the first place, which we didn’t.
That farm and that public school were the only world and culture I knew until I went off to summer music camp at Interlochen, and discovered a whole new world of people far more sophisticated than I had ever imagined. Being in a cabin with 14 other boys my age, all of whom were from large east coast cities, had a big impact on me. So much so that, when I came back to the public school environment, I sort of lost it. I was so terribly bored that one day I just stopped going to school. Yes, I was, for a brief moment (well, three weeks anyway) a real live high school dropout.
As fate might have it, at this time my parents had a windfall from a gas pipeline going through the farm. There was also some scholarship money available and enrollment was down, and so lo and behold, this somewhat troubled high school dropout farm kid, who had issues with authority, a penchant for classical music, and an attitude problem generally, found himself transported through the looking glass into the mystical shangri-la of Maumee Valley Country Day School.
The first hour at MV was unforgettable. In public school biology class, I had been given an “F” for a whole quarter because I had refused to kill and stuff an animal. Compare that to my first MV moment, Sam McCoy’s Biology class, in which he spontaneously started singing “Hey There, You with the Stars in Your Eyes.” Yes, for me, this was true culture shock.
And by the way, where were the study halls? The hall monitors? The detention slips? The bullies lurking in the restroom? And yes, the occasional paddlings for insubordination? I was endlessly stunned and confused. I sat silently in Dave Walsh’s English class for 3 weeks before he finally figured out I wasn’t some observing guest and was actually in the class.
Well, you’re adaptable at that age, and I got used to the student lounge and the free coffee in short order. Then one day Sandy McPeck, the assistant dean of students, rather casually said to me, “Justin, you are always doing these musical things, and the school has no music program, why don’t you do some kind of musical project?”
Now again, the idea of being encouraged to do a “personal project” was the exact opposite of my public school experience, where a student doing anything out of the ordinary was cause for suspicion, ridicule, or disciplinary action. But I gave it some thought, and in my youthful innocence I decided I would form a choir and conduct it.
Now bear in mind, I had absolutely no idea of how to do that, but I had sung in a choir at Tanglewood the preceding summer, under Leonard Bernstein no less (yes, more culture shock), so I was full of confidence born of total youthful ignorance. So I went to the powers that be and said, “If I form a choir, can I conduct it?” The response from all concerned was , “sure, go ahead.”
While the administration and faculty people gave their blessing to this idea, none of them took it seriously. They had seen many past attempts to form some kind of school choir at MV, and these had all failed miserably. There was a general presumption that I would also fail and give up in short order, but they let me try it anyway, politely restraining their laughter at the naive idea that anyone could ever get these kids to sing anything.
This opportunity could never have happened in my old public school system. There was simply no way a student there would be given that much trust and authority. That should be the end and moral of the story, but wait, there’s more.
To be honest, it was this newfound private school freedom and trust, combined, oddly enough, with my preexisting attitude problems and general pigheadedness, that made it all happen. I asked every single kid in school to join that choir. “Asked” is a actually a polite term. I wheedled, I cajoled, I harrassed, I nagged, and I even blackmailed when it was appropriate. If there was a tenor available, and he had English class the same period as choir, I made everyone’s life miserable until he was transferred to another section and made available to sing. And thus the hallways were filled with the sounds of Mendelssohn and Brahms every 7th period.
To everyone’s shock and amazement, I pulled it off. Granted, there were some unpleasant details, like my absconding with the lower school music budget to hire an orchestra, and my ordering sheet music and charging it to the school without authorization. But I had formed a real-life choir. And we performed. We did concerts for morning assembly, in December we went caroling to all the faculty’s houses, and I actually hired an orchestra and conducted a work of Brahms at the 1973 commencement exercises.
Wait, there’s more. By some strange quirk of administrative fate, “Justin’s Chorus” had become a course for credit. So I was, in essence, on the faculty before I graduated. Isn’t life strange? And by the way, this former high school dropout graduated cum laude. Don’t ask me how.
After Maumee Valley, I went to the New England Conservatory. That was more culture shock, but there was a new problem. I was just another freshman, but right from day one I already had almost two years of high school teaching experience, something my classmates would not begin to tackle for another 5 years yet. And even worse, the school offered some basic “humanities” courses which, after Chuck Lundholm’s English classes, felt like a kindergarten class in fingerpainting. I basically told them I did not care to take this “required” course, and after one incident of my raising my hand in class and telling the teacher that she had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, everyone decided to just leave me alone.
I tried to get along, but the MV experience had changed me so much, and I had grown so much, that alas, again, I dropped out of school. But this time it was to do what I had come to Boston to do, which was be a professional musician. Only two years after walking out the doors at MV, I was playing bass in the Boston Pops. By the way, that is really hard to do, but I have to say, it wasn’t anywhere near as hard as doing that choir project.
I am now an inspirational speaker, and I often refer to that MV experience in my presentations. The real difference was not in the books or the courses. It was in the freedom and more so, the trust that the MV environment accorded me, allowing me to discover the far reaches of what I was capable of achieving.
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You can read more about Justin’s speaking, along with his books and plays, at his website, justinlocke.com. Justin is the author of “Real Men Don’t Rehearse,” a fun memoir of his days playing bass with the Pops, and “Principles of Applied Stupidity,” an unusual take on the management techniques of the great conductors he worked with. His “Peter VS the Wolf” has been performed by orchestras all over the world.
