Finding Momentum

Every­body has a few role mod­els in their lives–the par­ent or teacher or coach who really left an impres­sion on them. Dr. Felder, my high school band direc­tor, was one of mine.

Dr. Felder, or “Doc”, as we called him, had been at Lyn­brook High for at least ten years when I entered the pro­gram my fresh­man year. I came in a ner­vous frosh clar­inetist and four years later, grad­u­ated a lit­tle more musi­cally pro­fi­cient, a lit­tle more con­fi­dent and with my head a lit­tle higher. I’d like to attribute some of that to Doc.

Now there’s a ton of things I could say about band. In fact, you could prob­a­bly dig way back in the archives of this blog and find many a band story (I was a seri­ous band geek, no shame about that).

Doc stood 6 feet and then some, slightly bald­ing with kind fea­tures. He was a man with high stan­dards, hav­ing grad­u­ated with a music doc­tor­ate from UCSD (hence, “Doc”). This meant that his ensem­bles were invari­ably at the top of our dis­trict. We sent kids all over the place, from state ensem­bles to music conservatories.

Whether you loved him or hated him (you rarely were in the mid­dle), Doc pushed you hard. He wasn’t afraid to let his emo­tions show–oftentimes, this would mean that he would raise his voice and express his frustration–“Come on, altos! Get it right!” or “Why can’t you pull this together?” For us slack­ers, it had a way of grind­ing us (reluc­tantly) into action. Some­times it even pushed us to greatness.

More often than not, Doc was out and about the band room, greet­ing us as we walked in for fourth period Wind Ensem­ble, giv­ing hugs and talk­ing it up with his students.

I have mem­o­ries of Doc dur­ing march­ing band sea­son: he’d be out on the bleach­ers bark­ing into a mega­phone as we marched from set to set in the muddy grass.

Doc was wid­owed a few years before any of us knew him. He had sev­eral adult sons who’d occa­sion­ally pop into the band room and Doc would intro­duce with a beam­ing smile on his face. He never talked openly about his wife’s death, and we never dared to ask.

Now that I look back on it, Doc almost played a parental role to many of us. He’d be firm with dis­ci­pline, always push­ing us to reach the musi­cal poten­tial in us and never allow­ing us to com­pro­mise. And as kids usu­ally are with their par­ents, we always regarded Doc with a mix­ture of awe, fear and loathing.

I became a sec­tion leader my junior year and I won’t for­get how the weight of that respon­si­bil­ity felt on my shoul­ders. Doc chose me! I sure hope I don’t let him down! And those years as sec­tion leader allowed me to see how much he cared about the musi­cal per­for­mance and the well-being of us kids.

I remem­ber him pulling me aside a cou­ple of times and just hav­ing pleas­ant con­ver­sa­tions about life. It was nice know­ing he cared enough about my life and didn’t always talk shop.

Sopho­more year, our band and orches­tra took a tour of China. That trip was par­tic­u­larly mem­o­rable, as Doc gave us his expec­ta­tion that we be inter­na­tional ambas­sadors along with his imper­a­tive to have fun. So we laughed as he strug­gled with the fatigue of eat­ing six­teen Chi­nese meals in a row, or made con­ver­sa­tion with the head of the Chi­nese musi­cal acad­emy we per­formed at, or con­ducted us with his usual grace and poise.

Doc even wrote my let­ter of rec­om­men­da­tion to Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. We all know how well that turned out.
Mid­way through sopho­more year, Doc remar­ried. His wife was a kind Japanese-American lady named Pam–his den­tist, as we all found out–who had a sweet lit­tle girl who we’d see play­ing on the bleach­ers dur­ing a few of our night­time practices.Doc didn’t have to stay with us. The man had an impres­sive list of musi­cal accom­plish­ment to his name, hav­ing jammed with many of the jazz greats in his day (Elling­ton, Monk, and Han­cock). But he had stayed with the Lyn­brook music pro­gram for over fif­teen years, build­ing it into a ver­i­ta­ble powerhouse.

I have a hor­ri­bly vivid mem­ory of play­ing the alto clar­inet for a piece we per­formed my senior year in the Wind Ensem­ble. The E-flat alto clar­inet is the big-brother of the stan­dard B-flat clar­inet; a lit­tle longer and larger and lower. It’s also com­pletely dif­fer­ent instru­ment to play. Doc chose me to learn it for this one song (“Oh gosh! I hope I don’t dis­ap­point!”), and so I tugged home the school’s beat-up alto clar­inet and attempted to get that mis­er­able thing to make sounds.

In the course of a month, I had a small degree of mas­tery over the instru­ment (but because that instru­ment was so darn beat-up, it still had its prob­lems). One of them was squeak­ing. The adjust­ment made to my embouchure (mouth posi­tion) was too much to adjust to, and so I invari­ably ended up squeak­ing once in awhile through­out the piece. And since this was a soft, flow­ing melodic piece, these squeaks were not trivial.

Then county music com­pe­ti­tions rolled around, and you can guess what hap­pened. I totally messed it up. Our wind ensem­ble took the stage, and every­body was quiet, and I was sit­ting front-row in the cen­ter. We played, I wres­tled with that blasted alto clar­inet. My embouchure wasn’t loose enough. I totally messed it up.
After the per­for­mance, my glar­ing errors still fresh in my mem­ory (and undoubt­edly the judges’), Doc came up to me and gave me a hug. “Great job,” he told me, and grinned. Before I could apol­o­gize for any­thing, he walked off to con­grat­u­late others.

There are few men I respected then as much as Doc. And he’s still there at Lyn­brook. They tell me he’s plan­ning on retir­ing soon, and I tell myself I should go back and visit. And it will be with a mix of fear and trep­i­da­tion and antic­i­pa­tion. I won­der what he’ll say to me, I won­der if he’ll even remem­ber me. And I won­der if he’ll know how he’s shaped the per­son I’ve become.