by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Dear Readers, I had the privilege of working with one of our state’s great high school orchestra programs yesterday afternoon. Maestro Doug Longman was kind enough to invite me to Issaquah for a rehearsal with his Evergreen Philharmonic. For those of you who do not know, the EP is a system-wide auditioned ensemble in the Issaquah School District open to students from all of the district’s high schools. Maestro Longman has labored many years to hone this ensemble into one of the region’s best.

I have been fortunate to stand in front of this group as a clinician before. Each time I do I feel compelled to remind these young people how lucky they are to have such an opportunity, and to have such a caring, capable and dedicated mentor—who is also a tremendous musician. The work ethic they unfailingly display tells me that they don’t really need to be told, but it seems like the right thing to do anyway, just to make sure all of them understand that these things don’t happen by themselves. Whatever joy they experience playing in this excellent orchestra comes at a price, one paid by their parents and grandparents, by Maestro Longman, by the taxpayers who fund their schools, the administrators and teachers who make them work, the section coaches and private teachers that many of them learn from, the luthiers and instrument makers who built their instruments, and on and on.

Yesterday, my short sermon on this privilege included some reflection on my time in other parts of the country where such opportunities are more rare and much harder to create. I was thinking especially of my years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Beautiful as it is, it is also rural, isolated and sparsely populated compared to Western Washington. The critical mass of elements needed to make any orchestra there is infinitely more difficult to achieve, let alone one just for high school students. Yet dedicated teachers and musicians do make it happen—in some places. But there are many students there who do not have such an opportunity. For them, any sort of ensemble in the school or community or the availability of an instrument at home can be a lifeline to a means of reflection and communication that seems to be essential to human beings. It is essential because so many have, and so many continue to find their voices in these opportunities. Whatever people eventually do for a living, many realize their sense of agency when they are making music.

Herein lies the intersection between my life as a conductor and orchestral educator, and my research project this year on the provenance of my 1910 Miller piano. When it came to our household twenty years ago, it had clearly been maintained and used during the first eighty-seven years since it’s manufacture. It had been taken to Upper Michigan, probably in the early part of the twentieth century, to a community that, though isolated, aspired to sponsor a thriving musical culture. There was a new public opera house—one of the first in the country built by a municipality. There were company bands, ballrooms, union halls, churches, recitals, perhaps even salons. Whatever part this instrument played in that scene, it represented an investment in the musical present and future of a community. Given its size and character, it was a considerable investment.

The Evergreen Philharmonic is evidence that we continue to make those investments today. Yet once one leaves our urban corridors, these investments become much harder to sustain. Perhaps this is yet another reason for the isolation and division that we increasingly experience today. We are the most prosperous nation in the history of human kind. If we can’t find a way to provide for ourselves and our posterity the types of cultural opportunities that allow us to find our voices together, then who can?