When music and reality meets at the age of GFC
A very good read:
This Land – At an Age for Music and Dreams, Real Life Intrudes – NYTimes.com
A story of an 18 year old high school girl:
She once explored the idea of going away to college to become a music teacher. But it just didn’t seem practical: spending four years studying the theory of music, which doesn’t interest her, while here in Newark, the school system is constantly adapting to real and threatened cuts.
Music programs always seem among the first to go, she says. No job security in Tchaikovsky.
So she is maintaining high grades, playing in the orchestra, working 35 hours a week as a Sonic Drive-In carhop, paying $345 a month for the small apartment she shares with an unemployed boyfriend — and planning to study nursing for two years at a technical college in Newark.
“Everybody gets sick,” she says, plotting her future.
A story of a music teacher:
When she struggles to pay for repairs to instruments, many of which are long-ago hand-me-downs from another school district, she recalls her 15 years as the music director in Bexley, a more affluent city where her budget was nowhere near as tight. She vividly remembers the Bexley student who celebrated graduation by smashing a $10,000 violin — his spare.
She cried then; it hurts more now.