I was in band for all three years of junior high. I was in the last group allowed to audition. By then all the cool saxophone slots were taken, I couldn’t make flutes or any brass instruments work, clarinet reeds tickled my mouth to distraction, and my rhythms were judged inadequate for their percussion needs. By process of elimination they assigned me to the bass clarinet, an instrument that’s like the love child of a clarinet and a saxophone that lacks the clout and pizzazz of either of its parents. The mouthpiece and reed were a larger, better fit for me than the normal, socially acceptable clarinets. I liked the sound, loved the foghorn rumble of the lower register. Higher octaves were like fingernails raking across my brain, and our parts were usually boring. The percussion-section runt who played the triangle frequently had more interesting measures to play than we did.

When my high school years approached, I was relieved that the art classes I’d dreamed of taking left no room for band class anymore. After I turned in my tenth-grade schedule, one of our conductors sat me and a few other quitters down for a Serious Talk, as if our decision to opt out of the grueling rigors of high-school marching band would ruin our lives and resumés, possibly turn us into dope fiends. It didn’t work. I was free.

I was surprised and saddened when quitting cost me a few friends. I wasn’t a virtuoso, but I wasn’t last chair. I do miss the elation of nailing complicated pieces, which were maybe 5% of my lifetime playlist. I’ve never regretted walking away from the monotony of dwelling among the second-string rabble cursed to play nothing but “BOMP. Bomp. BOMP. Bomp. BOMP. Bomp. BOMP. Bomp.” It would be inaccurate to joke that my parts could’ve been replaced by a machine, because that would imply my parts were essential enough for music scientists to consider them worth replacing.

The experience taught me a lot about music-making firsthand, about the importance of dedicated practice sessions, about sheet-music literacy basics, about inequality between instruments, and about my apparent unsuitability to this career track. I haven’t held a bass clarinet in twenty-seven years, but some of the old songs and the vocabulary still bounce around my head and resurface on occasion.

A lot of the lessons that I’d forgotten since then, Whiplash brought vividly back to mind.

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