“He tells me that every scale has a shape
and I have to learn how to hold
each one in my hands…
He says the scale is the mother of the chords.”
~Billy Collins
A few weeks ago, I attended my son’s end-of-year middle school band concert, and I can’t stop thinking about it. The experience has settled in my mind, not just because I was proud as a mom. I was. But there was something more intangible and unexpected that keeps pulling me back—something in the feelings the students’ play evoked that I think we could all use a little more of.
To start, I have absolutely no idea how band teachers do what they do. Most of the students who performed had never played their instrument before joining the band in the fall, and yet here we were in June listening to them not only play music but play music together. So, the impressiveness of the instructional achievement is certainly part of what has stuck with me.
I have a decent amount of adjacent experience that ought to make this accomplishment feel less mysterious. I have degrees in teaching and in theater. I’ve wrangled chaotic children as well as professional orchestras. And I grew up playing with dolls underneath the piano of a deeply gifted musician, an experience that wove music into my bones. Yet, how one goes about teaching dozens of twelve and thirteen year olds to play instruments they’ve never played, read music, and then coordinate these skills with one another as a cohesive group…I wouldn’t know where to begin.
But beyond the technical feat that the teacher had managed in developing their skills so quickly, there was also something transformational about what had occurred among this group of kids that ran deeper than learning to produce melodies and rhythms.
They took the stage with all of the awkward, anxious, unsteadiness that marks this transitional period in development. Middle schoolers are teetering between two worlds. Part of their identity still lies in childhood, while the pull of adolescence is both tantalizing and a little terrifying. Of all the periods of disequilibrium we experience over the course of growing up, this time of middleness is perhaps the most confusing and destabilizing. Most of us cringe a little just thinking about ourselves at this age!
It would be easy and poetic to say that all of their nervous, precarious, new teen energy melted away when they took the stage—the turbulence of hormones carried off by the notes. This is not what happened. As the kids made their way methodically from Vivaldi and Mozart through The Beatles and Booker T. & the MG’s, both the young children they had so recently been and the teenagers they were becoming were palpably present on stage.
What was also palpable, though, was an intensity of focus, a camaraderie, and a courage that belied their middle school selves. Over the course of months, in addition to learning the music, they had also internalized a commitment to the work it takes to progress toward mastery, the empathy and humility it takes to surrender to the group and become part of something bigger than yourself, and the bravery it takes to put a new skill on display for an audience.
And there was something moving about the audience, too. There were, of course, many parents, willing their love toward their children, who seem far more fragile in this teeter-totter of early adolescence than they ever did as kindergarteners, when they sang and danced with unselfconscious abandon. Now, their intense awareness of the audience was visible in their furrowed brows and unusually upright posture.
But the audience wasn’t only parents. There were also other middle schoolers watching and cheering their friends on. And, when I say cheering, I mean shouting and applauding with the same boisterous abandon one would expect in the stands of a basketball championship. Many were standing along the side of the seating area for the best view. It was all wildly inappropriate to the context. And it was also utterly moving. It was 6pm. The students in the audience were not required to be there. But these kids—who I’m sure are sometimes cutting or even cruel to each other in all the ways that teens can be—were, in this moment, loudly and unabashedly here for each other.
In the days immediately following the concert, I was struck mainly by feelings of pride as a mom for what my son, who had not played an instrument prior to this year, had accomplished, and by my professional admiration and gratitude for his music teacher, who had achieved something my twenty years in the classroom plus twenty more would not prepare me to accomplish. My parent and educator heart swelled for the public school that made this experience possible. But the evening lingered with me because there were more powerful lessons on display in the gym-turned-concert-hall.
Last year, with my colleague Nancy Schulman, I had the privilege of interviewing author and educator Tony Wagner about the value of play and exploration throughout our lives. Wagner is an impassioned advocate for the importance of learning environments that cultivate play well beyond the early years we usually think of as the time of play. In particular, he describes “disciplined play” as the form of focused exploration and experimentation that early play transforms into as we get older, and his research has shown that this leads to the development of a sense of passion and purpose, which persists throughout life and fuels other achievements. Wagner says, “Disciplined play is foundational to the human experience, to human aspiration, as well as to human accomplishment.”
I think disciplined play is precisely the work these kids had been engaged in with one another, with their teacher, and with their instruments all year. And, in fact, I suspect that their music room probably exemplifies many of the qualities Wagner identifies as key indicators of transformative learning environments, where students develop the competencies they will need to thrive in an uncertain future.
As they played together, the students were also engaged in what Wagner terms, “accountable teamwork,” each student responsible for a piece of their collective accomplishment. They were clearly motivated both by their own internal drive to learn their instrument and by something bigger than themselves, eager to do well, not only to bolster their own feeling of success, but also to contribute to the success of the group. The students had leadership power in their learning. This was evident in the role they held in selecting their own music, as well as in the autonomy they demonstrated on stage, moving conscientiously between pieces and groups of musicians. They were not merely consuming knowledge; they were acting as creative agents in the process. And, perhaps most notable for this tenuous and self-conscious age, it was clear that they had developed an environment of trust, where they could take risks without being overwhelmed by a fixation with perfection or a fear of failure. Nowhere was this more vividly on display than in the students who played shaky but determined solos.
Like Wagner, the coach and researcher Jill Vialet also argues that the kind of collaboration and courage I saw on display that night emerge out of environments that foster playful experience. She says,
“Play matters because it gives us a brief respite from the tyranny of apparent purpose. Play matters because it compels us to choose, to put a stake in the ground and say, ‘I care.’ And in doing that we better come to know ourselves. Play matters because people matter. It reminds us of our interdependence, to really see other people, and in turn to be really and truly seen.”
Through their experience in the band, it was clear that the students had internalized these lessons—the power of engaging in an activity for it’s own sake and of caring about and enjoying your work enough to risk making that care public. They had learned that it is possible to survive and surmount imperfection and maybe even a little embarrassment. They had learned to listen closely to one another. And, as they absorbed the applause and shouts of encouragement from their peers that night, I hope they also learned that we all deserve to be unabashedly and raucously cheered on from time to time.
In a stage of life overflowing with so much uncertainty, I can’t imagine a greater set of gifts. Perhaps in any stage of life. And I’m left wondering how we create more of these opportunities for our children and for ourselves, and how we ensure that there is equitable access to these opportunities.
Some of the answers are certainly systemic and economic. They involve prioritization of both funding and time for the arts and, more broadly, for activities that don’t fit neatly into the academic boxes that standardized tests measure, but where children have opportunities to experiment and discover the passion and purpose that will motivate them well beyond their school years. Committing to these priorities requires equitable resources and recognition of the inherent value in experiences like middle school band for all children. And it requires investment in teachers like my son’s, who not only convey skills but catalyze students’ creativity, engagement, collaboration, and determination.
Additionally, and perhaps most immediately attainable, I think it requires that we all be more intentional audience members for our children and for each other. The willingness to give oneself over to the kind of transformative experience these kids had becomes more possible when we remember to look for opportunities to cheer each other on with abandon. When we are willing to embarrass ourselves a little through our unfettered encouragement of others, as the students in the audience were, we help to nurture the courage to persist in pursuing passions and to risk putting those passions on display—a risk that is ultimately necessary if creativity and innovation are to contribute to wider progress.
Looking for opportunities to cheer each other on the way these middle schoolers did isn’t about offering praise; it’s about declarations of connection and care. The students in the audience were not calling out compliments on tricky chord progressions, after all. They were shouting their friends’ names. They were expressing and making public their enthusiasm for their relationships and their joy and pride in watching their friends strive at something that mattered to them.
Their cheers reminded me of the survey that coaches Bruce E. Brown and Rob Miller conducted with athletes, which revealed that the most valuable words a parent can say to their child about a game are simply, “I love to watch you play.” These words aren’t an affirmation of skill or achievement. Rather they are an affirmation of the pleasure and pride in the relationship and in observing the emergence of passion and purpose in one another.
Thinking about how we can encourage this spirit of disciplined play has taken me back to memories of sitting underneath that childhood piano I mentioned earlier. Kenneth Cooper, the musician who played that piano and whose notes swirled through my childhood, was the embodiment of disciplined play in every aspect of his life and work. I think he was simultaneously the most serious and the most playful person I’ve ever known. Ken once said of his music, “It’s almost now an adventure to see what new is waiting.” He was also a dedicated teacher, and I was stopped in my tracks recently listening to an interview he had done in 2020 when, at the end, as the young musician interviewing him thanked him, he responded by saying, “I would love to hear you play!” Of course, I thought. Of course he knew, intuitively, the power of those simple words.
This is a form of cheerleading we can all readily and broadly offer, as long as we keep our eyes open for opportunities to do so.
So, who do you love to watch play?
Wishing you playfulness and raucous cheers,
Alicia
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I love this essay. Three things stand out to me: how present you are as the eager parent; the cheering section of peers that rings so true despite having no obvious understanding of the real accomplishment of the young musicians; the way you parse the accomplishment of the unnamed teacher. Brava!