Klarinet Archive - Posting 000587.txt from 1998/04

From: Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@-----.net>
Subj: Re: Smart people and Music (was Music and Science)
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 05:01:58 -0400

At 10:04 AM 4/12/98 EDT, you wrote:
>
>In a message dated 4/12/98 9:57:23 AM, you wrote:
>
><<Either
>way, it is an incredibly valuable part of the education process for the
>more advanced students in secondary education, and (forgive the heat) a
>goddamned crime that it is among the first things to get cut by
>brain-dead adminsistrators finding a way to keep the funding for the
>football team.>>
>
>BRAVO! Well put.

And you hit my hot button. One of them.

Several years ago, in Glen Ridge, NJ, several miles from where I live, we
had a notorious case of sexual assault on a retarded high school girl by
four guys who used a broomstick. The kids were convicted, FINALLY, but it
took years because the case was covered up before someone broke silence and
talked.

Why was it covered up? Because one of the kids was the son of the Glen
Ridge, NJ Chief of Police, and because all four were on the high school
football team.

My reaction then as now was that if they'd been oboists or clarinetists in
the concert band, they'd have gotten 20 years.

My younger son plays trumpet and baritone horn in his high school marching
and concert bands. And every year the same damned thing happens: Oh We
Can't Afford This, Boo-Hoo, cries the School Board. And every year, after
the band parents raise holy Hell, the same thing happens: the band budget
gets salvaged because Wayne Valley High School can't lose face by fielding
a football team without a marching band. But I know damned well that if
the township could get away with it, my son would be working his musical
chops on a wax paper kazoo in the boy's room.

Ken

"The East River. But it was not a river at all. Merely a column of water
connecting the upper harbor to the Sound. Yet everyone called it a river.
They chose not to think about it. They clung to the surface of things."
--Peter Quinn, "Banished Children of Eve"
Ken Wolman kwolman@-----.com/SoHo/Gallery/1649