A recent post of mine attempted to update a much older post with additional context. I’d like to make another such attempt right now.
Back in 2022, I alluded to my love of Randall Thompson’s song “Choose Something Like a Star,” based on a Robert Frost poem, while mentioning that I had once sung the song in choir. It now seems important to add that my appreciation of the song comes at least partly from the efforts of my high-school choral music teacher, Dr. Morton Gold.
Dr. Gold was nobody’s idea of a hip teacher. He was an older balding bespectacled Jewish guy who was not particularly adept at handling the sarcasm and melodrama that we threw at him daily. Even his doctoral degree and his own compositions, which we could have taken as markers of professional accomplishment, seemed to reinforce his other-ness. What was this doctor of music doing at a public high school in Rutland, Vermont, anyway?
The thing about Dr. Gold, though, was that he really really cared about music.
I can’t recall him talking about this explicitly, but you could sense it in his body language. The way he peered out at us over his glasses, checking our readiness for our next line. The way he shushed us during the quiet parts so that we saved our volume for the next crescendo. The way he inhaled deeply after a song, as if savoring its final reverberations.
In short, Dr. Gold took music very seriously.
We, his sometimes-reluctant pupils, took it less seriously.
At the time, I thought this disconnect represented a failure of communication. Why couldn’t Dr. Gold get on our wavelength more consistently? And why couldn’t we listen better to his directions?
Looking back now, I still see the communication gaps, but I now see these as arising not from incompetence or immaturity so much as a difference in values. Our teacher just loved the subject matter more than we did.
When Dr. Gold grew impatient with our shenanigans — when he’d bark at us, “The clock, she’s running!” — I think he mostly wanted us to respect the music as he did. He wanted us to give it our full attention, to immerse ourselves in it, to bring it alive by attending to its fine details.
Sometimes, with some songs, we eventually did well. Our performance of “Choose Something Like a Star” must have been quite nice, for example. But what I ultimately took from Dr. Gold, more than any particular song or skill, was his unspoken but emphatic claim that music matters. Making music together matters. It is worth your time and energy. It will feed your soul.
Since becoming a teacher myself, I’ve often been reminded that most of our students are not like us, and that we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Educational practices continue to move toward more “student-centered” teaching, a necessary and vital shift. Still, in the face of that, I want to remember that some teachers shine simply by demonstrating their deep, unabashed love for their chosen discipline. A love that might rub off on us if we are paying attention, or perhaps even if we are not.
As a teenager, I was rather unlike Dr. Gold. In the end, I became a bit more like him, and was better off because of it.
My Track Record 
Leave a comment