Band (Part 2 of 3)

The most difficult thing for me to learn was the drum roll. I was very tense when I first tried doing a roll. I thought it had to be fast, which it did, but I tightened up and that wasn’t good. I soon found out that being relaxed was the important thing. Mr. Hoganson was our band leader. It seemed he knew how to play all the instruments, which he did. He not only directed us, but shared musical experiences he had during his life. He didn’t hesitate to speak his mind either. “Before kids go to kindergarten, they are composers,” he said. “They make up their own songs. But then they go to school and the teacher says, ‘You sit in that chair and you sing this song.’ That takes away their creativity.” He was actually one of the founders of the Granite Youth Symphony in 1957. He lived in the trailer court near our school. I saw his obituary in the newspaper a few years after I left elementary school.
The first year in band we played mostly simple arrangements. That meant that the drummer was relegated to mostly “boom, tat tat, boom, tat tat” stuff. But occasionally, the music was more creative. Sometimes the music called for more percussion parts than we had drummers. I loved those times. It made me feel important to play the triangle with one hand, the snare drum with the other, and a cymbal crash thrown in for excitement.
Life was pretty easy in the fourth grade beginner band, except for one thing -- I had to contend with Steve, a big sixth grade kid in the advanced band, for use of the snare drum. Since another drummer named Craig had taken one of the drums home to fix it and kept it home for quite some time, only one snare drum was left at school. Steve was the best drummer in the school. He would later be drummer for the Jazz Band in high school as well as the student body president. But in sixth grade, he was just a good drummer. And mean!