Piccolo Pros

The “Stars and Stripes” Muppet clip (see post by the same title) has made me think back to nine years ago – nine years this month, actually. I was a starry-eyed sophomore playing flute in the Midland High School Band. I was always near the top of the section, but my band director, Mr. Doherty, caught me unawares when he walked up to me one day after rehearsal and handed me three piccolo cases.

“What are these for?” I asked.

“I need you to find me two other piccolo players,” he answered.

“But – I -” I sputtered. I’d never picked up a piccolo in my life, though we’d all joked about our section leader, Summer, playing the dark wood “baby flute” during marching season.

He knew full well I didn’t know how to play. (I realize now that he was handing me this challenge because he knew I could do it.) He just smiled at my red face, repeated, “I need you to find me two other piccolo players,” and walked off, his Irish blue eyes twinkling.

So I found Summer and Stefanie, and explained, with much stammering, that we were, um, supposed to play piccolo on “The Stars and Stripes Forever” when the band travelled to London in December. (December! Six weeks to learn a new instrument!) We each took home a small dark case lined with scratchy blue shiny fabric, and for the next month my dachshund, Molly, ran out of the room every time I lifted the tiny, silver-keyed instrument out and fitted it together.

Six weeks later, we were standing on the front edge of a stage in London, in black dresses that reached down to the floor, fingers flying as we trilled through runs of sixteenth notes and octave jumps. Behind us, the band, conducted by Doherty in a suave tux, supported us ably, tubas and horns and clarinets rounding out the sounds of Sousa’s march. At the end of our section we bowed briefly and returned to our seats – where Stefanie’s music stand promptly tipped forward and dumped its load of sheet music on the floor. Laughing, we switched our piccolos for flutes and finished the song – we’d played it eighty million times already, and we had the whole thing memorized.

I found the sheet music to “Stars and Stripes” last week, in an old green folder that holds a pile of band pieces, each one with reams of memories locked inside the black notes and straight staves. There are copies of “Amazing Grace” and “Air for Band” and Gustav Holst’s “First Suite in E Flat,” and lots of music by Percy Aldridge Grainger, an Australian composer Doherty loved. Each piece reminds me of the people I played it with – some of their names are even scribbled in the margins. They evoke the marching field on sweaty August days, Friday nights under the lights at Memorial Stadium, musical venues in Dallas and New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

But “Stars and Stripes” will always be Summer and Stefanie to me. Nervous in our black dresses and carefully brushed hair, half a world away from Texas, on the trip that officially started my love affair with Europe. Playing on instruments that could sound like demented mice if you weren’t careful, but which sounded to me, on that night in London, like the laughter in Doherty’s eyes.

He knew we could do it, and he made us believe him. He pushed us hard and worked us too long and yelled at us sometimes, but he knew when he handed me those piccolos that we would find a way to play them, and play them well. And I am still proud of that night nine years ago, when we played one of America’s most iconic pieces, and represented our country, our families and ourselves.