Posted by Rick Denney on June 04, 2003 at 11:19:47:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: extravagant student ensemble trips posted by Mark Wiseman on June 03, 2003 at 16:41:40:
For what those trips cost, we could have had decent instruments, too. I confess that at the time I was not mature enough to make those choices responsibly, and I probably would have preferred the trip to Mickey-land to a better instrument than a plastic sousaphone, but that is why kids have parents: to make responsible decisions in their behalf.
We raised money for those trips, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. But door-to-door sales aren't allowed any more because of the risk, so the fund-raising schemes I've seen amount to a grossly inefficient way to collect money from relatives.
Would I have gained more from having a decent tuba than from seeing Disney World? From my current perspective as a grown-up capable of being responsible (at least sometimes), absolutely. And that would be true even if I'd played in one of those music junkets to Carnegie Hall. Even now, I could have gone on right nice vacations to far-flung parts of the world for what I've spent on decent instruments.
I'm trying to remember any details from my trip to Disney World, and frankly, I can't remember one single detail from this distance of 30 years or so. Every summer, my church youth group went to Colorado to work at a youth camp (painting, making repairs, landscaping, and so on--real work mixed with the play associated with doing real work for charity), and my head is full of wonderful memories of those trips. That tells me something was lacking in that band trip that was present in those church trips, and I think that something was a compelling reason to go in the first place.
But I remember even more from family vacations, even those going back to my earliest childhood. I suspect that had my sister and her husband had taken the whole family to New York and seen the same sights (including a trip to Carnegie to hear a famous performer or to the Lincoln Center to hear the NYP), the cost would have been the same, and the memories more dear in the long run. Certainly the cultural awareness benefits would have been at least the same if not much greater.
And the long term band program? That school (Robert E. Lee in Houston) still has over 2000 students but no longer has a band.
Rick "who wishes he'd had access to one of those King tubas" Denney