In the third-floor music room at Marshall Metro High School on Chicago’s West Side, the sounds of the future fill the air as students tinker with electronic keyboards and compose their own works on computers.
As he walks around the class, Delano O’Banion corrects some of his students’ wayward fingering. A former choir director and band instructor, he tells a visitor about the importance of the computer music class, which he began teaching in 1989.
“Computers are it,” says O’Banion, who has taught at Marshall since 1963. “I love live music but if you don’t get into this stuff (computer music), you’re finished. This is the 21st Century. The rest of the world is catching up to the music industry in terms of computers.”
Rare is the O’Banion student who begins his class with any previous music experience. The Chicago public schools stopped offering music in the elementary grades years ago.
But judging by the way students mix rap and Beethoven using their computer programs, music has become an important part of their lives.
“It is a valuable class,” O’Banion says. “I started this with the attitude that this is a grabber, this is the bait. And we’ve had very high attendance. Music is changing, but the kids are interested in the whole new technology.”
O’Banion’s foresight, diligence and ability to motivate students over a 35-year teaching career bring to mind the year’s most famous music teacher, Glenn Holland, the energetic high school instructor portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”
The movie chronicles Holland’s 30-year teaching career: his early desire to be a composer; the challenge of motivating students who are not musically gifted; his conflict with balancing a professional life with family responsibilities; and his retirement, forced by budget cuts.
The Holland-like enthusiasm that O’Banion brings to his job did not go unnoticed. Last month the Chicago chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented O’Banion with its Mr. Holland’s Opus Award in a ceremony at Piper’s Alley that featured a preview of the movie.
The academy considered the movie the perfect vehicle for setting up the award and honoring teachers like Delano O’Banion. The award was presented to music teachers in 50 other cities around the nation.
“We were looking for someone who had been teaching music education for 25-plus years and had developed a certain reputation,” says Hy Kloc, executive director of the Chicago chapter. “O’Banion’s credentials pushed him way out in front in people’s eyes. He met all the criteria and then some.”
O’Banion says “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” which earned Dreyfuss an Academy Award nomination for best actor, strikes a number of personal chords.
“I related to that movie a lot,” he says during a break from his general music survey class. “Especially when his wife said, `You care more for other people’s children than you do your own.’ It was all I could do to keep from shedding a tear.
“But it’s my job. I did give a lot of time to other people’s children. I’m a teacher, a servant of the people trying to do a job. I’ve done that all my life. The kids keep you moving.”
Familiar territory
There are many Mr. Holland stories around Chicago, and many teachers in a special position to comment on how truthfully the movie told its story.
Some note that Dreyfuss’ character shouldn’t conduct with the baton in his left hand because even left-handed conductors are taught to hold it in their right, and that no high school orchestra sounds as polished as the Seattle Symphony or London Metropolitan Orchestra (which were used for the soundtrack). But Holland’s motivational techniques, his struggles for a normal home life and his relationship with students are true to life, they say.
Early in the movie, Holland tells his wife he’ll teach for only four years so that he’ll have enough money to devote to composing full time. Four years turns into three decades.
“When I started out, it was just a job, a paycheck, a way to support yourself,” says Marjene Pappas, director of bands for the Oswego schools and one of the area’s few women in an instrumental leadership post. “Now I can’t get out of it. It’s a career and it’s important to me.”
“It’s a really wonderful movie,” says Pappas, who was not allowed to join the University of Illinois marching band in the 1960s because it did not allow females. “Someone has drawn attention to the lack of concern about arts in our country because it needs to be addressed.”
Holland’s time away from his family, which is demanded by show rehearsals and individual instruction, hits home with John DeGroot, a choral director at Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora, who has taught music for 23 years. He is busy preparing for the school’s production of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” and in March will take 175 students to New Jersey to perform at the North American Music Festival.
“If you’re out of school by 6:30 p.m., that’s early,” he says. “I have a son who is a senior, and while I feel quite close to him, that line in the movie about spending more time with your students struck home as a parent. That’s a potential shortcoming for me. A lot of soul-searching is going on.”
`I suppose I could learn’
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If there is a Chicago-area music teacher who best mirrors the life of Glenn Holland, it may be Jim Stombres, band director at Naperville North High School.
Stombres has taught music for 19 years, the last nine in Naperville. But his first stop, in tiny Downstate Bradford, was almost his last.
“If it wasn’t for the football coach down there, I would have gone insane,” he says. “He was very much like the Jay Thomas (football coach) character in the movie–he looked like him and he acted like him.”
Stombres then spent two years at Yorkville High before moving to Batavia. At Yorkville, his role again resembled Holland’s as he did three people’s jobs: band, choir and orchestra:
“They asked me, `Do you know anything about orchestra?’ I said, `I suppose I could learn.’ They said, `Sounds fine.’ “
When Stombres arrived at Naperville North, he found a band with just 38 musicians in a school that had 2,500 students. One of the oboe players never took her instrument home. She told Stombres she didn’t want to be seen carrying a band instrument out of school.
“I can relate to standing in front of a band and saying, `That’s good’ when it’s really bad,” Stombres says.
Just as Holland’s new band does, Stombres’ crew found an immediate challenge with Naperville’s Labor Day parade.
“In the past, people would laugh at our band,” Stombres says. “Here was this dinky little band with 38 kids, and everyone else had bigger bands with flag girls. Our uniforms were old and they smelled. I felt like we were starting all over.”
Over time, the Naperville North band improved, both in performance and in how the members viewed themselves.
“Somehow, we got the kids to believe in what we were doing,” Stombres recalls. “We were trying to convince them that what they were doing was important and they didn’t have to feel ashamed about being in the band.”
Turning a program around
One very average band member improved so much that he became drum major and, perhaps consequently, so popular that he was elected homecoming king.
During homecoming, Stombres presumed the student would prefer to skip all band activities and enjoy the festivities. Instead, he insisted on wearing his band uniform and performing all the music because he thought it would make a difference in how the rest of the school regarded the band.
“I remember telling the kids that this would be a real important day for our program,” Stombres says. “And it was.”
Membership in the band was no longer uncool.
Today, 230 Naperville North students participate in either marching band, concert band or jazz band. Stombres’ musicians have won state competitions and recently were honored by Downbeat magazine.
Lofty goals remain part of Delano O’Banion’s planning, just as they were during his years (1973-89) as Marshall’s band director, when many of his students won music scholarships.
As he nears 60, O’Banion is composing and arranging music for Chicago theater productions. He speaks of winning more awards for Marshall’s music program, and of his dream for a larger music room, three times the size of current cramped quarters, which would include a recording studio, video and a radio station–“the whole nine yards.”
“I’ll teach until it’s no longer fun,” O’Banion says. “I’m not finished. I don’t think the doors are going to close on me. I always feel the teacher is the spark that can light the fire.”
MUSIC TEACHERS DISCUSS THEIR `MR. HOLLAND’ MOMENTS
Chicago-area high school music professionals react to “Mr. Holland’s Opus”:
Raymond Nergaard, chairman of music at Lincoln Park High, and a finalist for the Mr. Holland’s Opus Award: “None of us went to school, or very few of us, to become teachers. All of us just wanted to play music. The movie is closer than anyone realizes to what it’s really like (to be a music teacher), very close; especially in the relationship with kids you develop and not having enough time at home.”
Daniel Gregerman, choral director of Niles North High School: “When I saw the movie, I had just finished my holiday concert. We sang the concert and the whole program in sign language. Then `Mr. Holland’s Opus’ comes out just a month later and involves all the things with sign language (Glenn Holland uses a sign interpreter during a concert at a school for the deaf where his son is a student). Having a student grasp a concept, like that football player in the movie (who learns to play drums) who finally connects and it makes sense–that’s more rewarding than anything else I do.”
John Fitchuk, director of orchestras for Wheaton North and Wheaton Warrenville South High Schools. (Budget cuts in arts programs eliminated his first two teaching positions at Proviso West and for District 63 in Des Plaines.): “It’s important that people understand how music can affect a lot of kids. Music teachers see the same kids many years in a row. We build up a special relationship that an English teacher who sees a student only one year out of four doesn’t have the chance to develop.”
William Johnson, instrumental music specialist for Chicago public schools, who taught music for 23 years at Simeon High School: “There were scenes in the movie that speak very well to the kinds of things that music people go through. . . . The first trip I ever took with my wife was a band trip. My experience has taken me to police stations to pick up kids and to bridal ceremonies. The movie really hit close to home. I’ve had teachers say the movie should be mandatory for all teachers in the area.”
Al Myren, choral director at Warren Township High School in Gurnee and a finalist for the Mr. Holland’s Opus Award: “About every scene I said, `Been there. Done that.’ I’ve tapped kids on the head so they’ve learned the beat. With piano players, they tend to rush or get the rhythm wrong so I have to tap them on the shoulder. In the scene where Holland had to pick up the boy’s feet to teach him the beat, I literally had to pick up some of my boys’ feet to teach them to dance for one of our programs. The main point of the movie was taking the love and joy of music and passing it on to kids. My son walked out with me after the movie, shook his finger at me and said, `That is your life.’ “