Harmony and humanity

There was a time, late in the storm of my adolescence, when the dark clouds inside my head and home swirled so thick I struggled just to breathe. By Grade 12, as my mental health collapsed, every day of school felt overwhelming, and I started skipping many classes.

Instead, when I should have been learning math, I’d slip into the band room at Fort Richmond Collegiate, finding its music director, Orvin Anderson, in his office between classes. He’d greet me with a friendly wave as I made a beeline for his vast collection of cassette tapes.

“Is this that symphony we’re learning next week?” I’d call out, plucking a tape from the shelf.

That year, the band room was my refuge, and Mr. Anderson my counsellor. We did not talk about my problems. Music was the language he knew best, and thus the one we spoke together: we’d pass hours in front of the stereo, listening to Shostakovich and Miles Davis as the pain inside my chest fell quiet.

He’d show me how to play new instruments: the trombone, the flute, the trumpet. We’d talk about keys, and time signatures, and the art of crescendos and silence. Sometimes, we’d listen to tapes of past FRC performances as he reminisced about the best players he taught.

So that is what we were doing one day, when I heard the distinctive tap of dress shoes coming towards us down the hall. Without a word, I jumped up and fled into a tiny practice closet in the back, hiding in its shadows with my ear pressed to its door.

I listened as the band-room door creaked open and the vice-principal walked in.

“Have you seen Melissa Martin? She’s supposed to be in math class.”

Mr. Anderson hemmed, convincingly. “Nope,” he replied, cheerfully. “Haven’t seen her today.”

The vice-principal left. When I emerged from the practice room, a little sheepish, Mr. Anderson met me with a tender look. “You should really be going to class,” he said, gently. But I kept coming to the band room instead of learning algebra, and he never brought it up again.

At the time, Mr. Anderson was already a legend in Manitoba music education. Originally from Minnesota, he was midway through what would become a 35-year teaching career at Fort Richmond, and renowned as one of Canada’s top youth conductors.

His bands won countless awards at provincial and national competitions. Dozens of FRC alumni went on to earn music degrees, becoming band teachers and even professional musicians. He helped create and guide many of Manitoba’s youth music institutions, including the Manitoba Band Association and the Winnipeg Wind Ensemble.

“You should really be going to class.”

So when Mr. Anderson died on June 26, that community rallied to mourn him. “We’ve lost one of the greats,” the Manitoba Band Association posted on Facebook. Hundreds of colleagues and alumni wrote messages describing how he’d shaped their love of music, and their lives.

“I never understood at the time how much of a good teacher he was,” wrote former student Brett Dixon. “He sure put up with a lot from us and still produced amazing music with his students.”

It’s true that the nature of Mr. Anderson’s genius wasn’t immediately obvious, at least not to a teenager. We knew his peers spoke about him with a palpable reverence, which made us proud to play for him; but at the time, we didn’t yet have the maturity to recognize why.

Partly, it’s that Mr. Anderson — or “Orv,” as we called him fondly, though usually not to his face — was not an imposing figure. He rarely raised his voice, or got angry. He was affable, with a persistently bemused twinkle in his eye. A light smile lifted his rosy cheeks most of the time.

As teenagers tend to do, we took the inches afforded us by his gentle nature, and ran a mile. Band rehearsals could be chaotic. He turned a willfully blind eye to a lot of evening mischief on FRC band trips, which were infamously wild. (Thousands of FRC grads will understand what I mean when I say that what happens in Bismarck, N.D., stays in Bismarck.)

Despite this lack of discipline — or perhaps, because of it — when it came time to perform, we played our hearts out for Mr. Anderson. We knew his reputation rode on us, so at competitions, we did our best to polish it further. We dazzled a lot of judges. We won a lot of awards.

Yet as I reflected on his passing, I realized: which awards my bands won for him, I no longer remember. What I remember is the talks we had, the cassette tapes we played and the hours I spent in the band room, when I definitely had other places I needed to be.

I remember the teacher who believed in our talent. The one who gave us room to test our fledgling wings. The one who could see that sometimes, what a student really needs isn’t a math class but a refuge where the rest of the world can’t find them.

“I always knew you were skipping.”

Once, just a few years after I graduated, I went back to FRC to talk to Mr. Anderson. We caught up like old friends, and I told him how much I appreciated him lying to the vice-principal that day, even though he must have been caught off-guard to find out I was skipping math.

He just chuckled. “I always knew you were skipping,” he said.

Last week, our province lost a legend of music education. Mr. Anderson taught thousands of Manitobans how to love music, and through loving music, something even more vital: how music and humanity go together, and how an education in one allows us to more fully perceive and express the other.

He taught us how to swing, how to sing with our instruments, how to pour out our hearts, all together. Above all, he taught us how every composition — even the most challenging — must leave space for the musicians to breathe.

Free Press writer Melissa Martin is currently on leave, living in Ukraine.