Reflections on a Career Change

I am happy to share that I have been asked to take the position of Assistant Professor/Director of Bands at Lone Star College - Montgomery! In addition to the added financial security of moving from a freelance/adjunct gig to a full-time position, I’ll have the opportunity to focus my teaching on one campus, rather than split my influence among 5 or 6 schools. Of course, I am going to miss my private lesson students but I know they will go on to do great things.

I wanted to write this reflection so that I could share my story and hopefully communicate how much this new position means to me. In order to do that I have to go way back to the very beginning of my college days.

The Beginning

I started at Lone Star College - Kingwood back in 2008 as a young student who wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do. I had never really committed strongly to anything, but was generally a good student who got As and Bs in his courses. I decided to start as a music major to see what it was like, and because I had enjoyed high school band. Although I was not particularly talented and lacked a lot of work ethic (at first) I fell in love with music, especially the classical saxophone repertoire and sound, and in 2009 I decided that I wanted to be a band director.

Understand that in my mind I was only thinking of the music. The reality of any career is that it comes with a plethora of demands, communication, coordination, and various tasks/responsibilities, many of which lack any sort of glamour and simply need to be done. Unfortunately, this was not something that I would realize for many years. I kept pushing on, focused only on developing myself as a musician, with the understanding that I would become a performer one way or the other, but always with the end goal of becoming a band director.

Music Education Degree (but actually, not)

It wasn’t until 2012 or so, after I had transferred to Sam Houston State University, passed course after course, and begun my formal training as an educator, that I got the opportunity to observe actual rehearsals and speak with band directors across the Houston area. As a music education major, this was a formative part of my experience…and I just couldn’t stomach it.

I went to some of the top programs in the area; nationally recognized powerhouses that proudly displayed row after row of trophy and were known throughout the US as “the program to beat” or “the school with a really good band program” or any number of accolades. The band directors were exhausted, the students were driven but the majority of them lacking in some major fundamental abilities, and the culture in many of these programs was a zero-sum “work as hard you can so we win” mentality, which to me is antithetical to what music should be.

Now before I go on, these programs are extremely valuable and provide a wonderful creative outlet that carries on an important musical tradition in the United States. A lot of the students were very well developed as musicians. I was well aware of this even at the time, but nevertheless I realized that a lot of the public music education system is set up to benefit and validate the programs and their directors regardless of the quality of the students they produce en masse; that the programs are judged by their top 15-20% or ability to win competitions or receive a 1 at UIL, etc.

But none of the programs I observed had chamber music built into their program, none had a passable jazz program or a director who could teach it beyond how it differed from concert band. Some of them had students winning All-State competitions who couldn’t play all 12 of their major scales cleanly or didn’t know how to execute vibrato. So to me, these high-octane programs didn’t appear to be truly serving their students to the maximum potential, instead playing the game of music education year after year in an endless cycle. It was just not something that I knew I would be happy doing…the true music making opportunities would be few and far between, and I wanted that to be an every day experience for my students. After a week of thought and discussion with friends and professors, I decided I couldn’t function in a system like that and I abandoned my dream from 2009.

Performance degree (yes, actually)

So, in my final year of undergraduate study, at literally the worst possible time, I switched to a performance degree. Music performance degrees are difficult, but especially when you switch to them as late in the game as I did, they are DIFFICULT. I graduated with a Bachelors in Saxophone Performance, sporting many fundamental issues that I had not taken the time to develop because until that point, saxophone was a means to an end. Now that saxophone was everything in my life, I had a long way to go. In the style of Seinfeld, I’ll yada yada over the best part and skip ahead to the fact that I graduated in 2016 with a Masters in Saxophone Performance.

I then, finally, began to build my saxophone studio, resolved to the fact that I could make a much deeper impact with students in the private lesson environment. For 7 years, I built that into a sustainable career, maxing out with a studio that averaged about 50-60 lessons each week over the last 3 years. And I was happy. I got to teach, affecting the lives of these young students, I got to perform both serious classical saxophone recitals and the occasional entertainment gig on the side, I even managed to survive the chaos that COVID-19 wrought on the private lesson industry, the effects of which are still present to this day. I was still performing, and still teaching my students how to perform.

Perseverance

I suppose what I’m getting at is this: no matter what form my career has taken, I have never compromised on who I am as a musician - a performer. Even in 2009, when I dreamed of conducting a band, I didn’t think of running the group through a sightreading session at UIL and I certainly never imagined standing on the marching field. I thought of standing on the podium in a concert hall, stirring the hearts of the audience and I thought of the bond between all the musicians on stage, and how grateful I would be if I could create that little world.

Now, as the Director of Bands at Lone Star College - Montgomery, I get to begin working towards that. We don’t have athletic bands and we don’t have endless program-focused competitions to satisfy every year. We get to make music, we get to perform. It’s the perfect fit; it is exactly what I dreamed of when I felt that pull in my soul back in 2009. Again, that is not to say there isn’t inherent value in those programs, they certainly serve their purpose. But in my heart of hearts, this will be pure music-making, and I will also have the opportunity to share that with my college students.

There are many reasons why this is a bittersweet moment, and those are probably best saved for another writing. The circumstances that led to this position being available and my interim position followed by this job search were probably the worst they could have been. But for now, I am choosing to focus on the positive and remained focused on my students and their future.

If anyone has read this far, I would also encourage you…it took me 14 years of uncompromising, patient, determined grit to develop and maneuver until I accomplished my dream. It wasn’t easy…there were many hard moments where I almost quit. It took blood, sweat, and tears, both metaphorically and literally. I cried, stressed, worked, lost sleep..almost every difficulty you could imagine. But I’m still here, and the best is yet to come. There will be more work to be done, and some if it will require that grit yet again.

But I won’t give up, and neither should you. Never. Give. Up. Follow your dream, be honest with yourself, be patient. It might not look exactly like you think and it might take longer than you’re ready to accept. But if you’re meant to do it, you will be unstoppable, and you’ll love it.