Considerations of a former Band kid

So in reading Sarah Vowell’s “Music Lessons”, there were a number of times that I was able to identify with the experiences she was describing, having been in band and played multiple instruments. She was definitely writing so that even people who were completely outside of the situation could get a feel for some of the aspects that she was highlighting, but having that extra experience made the stories all the more relatable and humorous. She utilizes a lot of hyperbole in her tales but keeps it grounded enough to not make it seem like she was overreacting. The other theme that comes up a number of times is the anachronism of her interests, with many of them by her own admission being out of style by the time she got to them.

I was particularly drawn in by phrases that described the different types of kids in Orchestra and Band. The “Teutonic last names” and “dark blond aura of a Hitler Youth brigade” certainly caught my attention there but it was the later three that I really appreciated and resonated with: “These were the sons and daughters of humanities professors. They took German. They played soccer.” None of these three are outright insults but they read as almost an scathing review of who these kids were to her and give us a glimpse of her values and perspectives on life. Her use of selective diction and where she places them (following something that is clearly bad) gives us an immediate impression of these kids we know nothing about. This can also fall under shared stereotypes but I think the ordering and punchiness of the text inclines me to diction as a better descriptor.

A side note I just want to make is that she casually brings up that she had an “electronic music lab”, which is not a thing I have heard being at any school I can remember. Was there just a teacher who was super stoked about EM and was able to convince the school to fund a class with various equipment to aid in this? I know that isn’t the crux of the passage but it caught me off-guard.

I appreciated her purposeful use (or misuse) of punctuation to emphasize her points and to play into the sort of overexaggerating that was a through line for all these stories. The best example is the section on Jon Wilson: “Jon Wilson could play the piano. Like REALLY. PLAY. THE PIANO.” While I don’t know if this is the best descriptor for this section, repetition and juxtaposition are the mechanisms by which her humor is delivered in this section.

After completing the reading and perusing back through the stories, it sort of dawned on me that they progressed based on how confident she was in the stories. She grew more and more confident, or perhaps had a better understanding of herself (not quite confidence but in the same family), as the stories came and went until at the end she ends with a triumphant statement about just being you. It was a relatively small realization but it did make me appreciate the stories a little more.