Ten flutes.
Ten kids who can take one home.

The room

The band hall is still there. Three tiers, right next door to my room, full of instruments. It has been turned into a piano lab. I was given the choir room, and from the tables and the closet full of art supplies, the last person to use it taught art. On my second day I moved every table to the walls, set the chairs in a circle, and wiped down fifteen flutes with sanitizing wipes from the front office, because that is what I was handed: fifteen flutes in cases and a room.

One of the fifteen leaks. I have never had more than ten students in the room at once. On paper the class holds fifteen.

What two hours actually is

The class runs four to six in the afternoon. The kids come to me from the after-school meal. Dismissal announcements start at ten to six, so instruction has to stop around twenty to. Take out the walk from the cafeteria, the restroom trip, the roll, and putting the flutes away clean, and what is left is nowhere near ten hours a week of a flute against a lip. It is a fraction of that.

That matters more for flute than for almost anything else you could teach a twelve-year-old, because the first months of flute are physical. Getting a sound out of the head joint. Holding the instrument without twisting your wrists into something that will hurt later. Sitting on the edge of the chair so there is air behind the note. Picking the flute up from your lap and having the sound come out now, on the downbeat, instead of after a few seconds of searching. None of that is knowledge. It is muscle memory, and muscle memory is built by repetition, and repetition needs the instrument to be in the same place the kid is.

Right now it is not. The flutes belong to the school. The same fifteen have to survive three groups of students, twelve weeks each, so a flute that goes home with a kid in the first group and does not come back is a flute the second and third groups never get. I understand that decision and I agree with it, for the school's inventory. It is still the wrong outcome for the kid. She practices when I am in the room and not otherwise.

What they are already doing with a fraction of the time

They can play B, A and G, and they are learning what the thumb does to B. They know what a downbeat and an upbeat are, and they can rest for three beats and clap on four together, which is the first thing you need before you can ever play in a band without being the one person who plays through the rest. I showed them a page of quarter notes before I had explained a single one, played it, and they followed the shape of it with their eyes and their ears. That is the whole plan working: play first, so that reading, when it comes, is reading something you already know how to say.

None of them had heard The Stars and Stripes Forever. None of them knew who John Philip Sousa was. Every high school flute player in Texas will meet that piccolo solo eventually, so they have met it now, along with the trio, the break strain, Chaminade played by Galway, and a lot of big-band trumpet so that a drummer does not surprise them later. The principal has asked for a concert. They are going to give one.

I have taught them all of this out of my own pocket. The handouts are printed at home. The sound in the room is a soundbar I carried from my living room. There is no metronome and no baton; I beat time with my hands. I am not complaining about that. I am telling you what the floor is, so you understand what one flute at home would change.

What this used to be

I grew up in these programs. A middle school like this one had a band director and a band, and hundreds of kids across the building touched an instrument. Now it has a piano lab and a flute class, two part-time contractors, and something like thirty students a year who get music at all. One of my eighth graders told me that when he was in sixth grade, band met every other day. The sixth graders I have now do not know what they are missing, because they never had it, and I find that the hardest part. People who have something taken away and are told to be grateful for what replaced it get worse at asking for it back.

If I were a parent at this school, I would feel cheated. I would vote to bring back the old program even though it would cost me this job, because a full music program is better for every child in the building than a good flute class is for ten of them. That is not the vote in front of anybody, though. What is in front of me is ten kids, twelve weeks, and fifteen flutes that cannot leave the room.

What Cadenza Arthouse will do about it

Cadenza Arthouse is starting an instrument library. Not a giveaway: a library. The company buys the instruments and owns them. A student borrows one for as long as they are a Cadenza Arthouse student, takes it home, practices on it, and gives it back when they move on, at which point it goes to the next kid who needs it. If a particular kid needs a flute to keep, I will give one. Mostly the flutes keep circulating, which is how a hundred dollars ends up serving more than one child.

A hundred dollars is the right number. A student flute at that price is not a professional instrument, but it is a real one. The flute I play on in that room every afternoon is one of them, and it was good enough to get me the job. A beginner does not need better, and a beginner with a flute at home will outplay a beginner with a better flute in a locked cabinet.

Ten flutes is one thousand dollars. That is the campaign.

Where the money goes

• Ten student flutes, closed-hole, C foot, with case and cleaning rod, at roughly one hundred dollars each.
• Square's processing fee comes out of each gift before it reaches the library. There is no other overhead: no platform, no fee to a middleman, no salary.
• Anything over the goal buys more flutes first, then cleaning supplies for the ones we have, then the next instrument the library needs.

Every flute this campaign buys is listed on this page when it is bought, when it goes home with a student, and when it comes back. Cadenza Arthouse is a Houston company, not a registered charity, so a contribution is a gift to the company in support of what is written here and is not tax-deductible. The progress figure at the top is kept by hand from Square's own records and dated so you can see how current it is.

What I am not asking for

I am not asking anyone to fix the school, the district, or the way arts education is being staffed in this city. That is an argument for another page and another kind of writing. This page is smaller than that. It is ten instruments, for ten kids I can name and you cannot, so that the hours they spend with me are not the only hours they ever hold a flute.