Bringing together people through space and time: Huron High

BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER IN BOTH SPACE AND TIME – HURON HIGH

 

I recently toured the USA as violinist with the Philharmonia Orchestra. On the Michigan stop I briefly broke away to coach the Huron High School senior orchestra in Ann Arbor. This was a particularly moving experience due to the layers of teacher lineage in the room.

 

Tim Krohn, Director of Orchestras at Huron is an outstanding pedagogue. Soft-spoken, inviting, gentle, patient, encouraging. The quality of the string playing is impressive. The kids clearly feel safe, thrive, and enjoy being there. Puches hanging on the walls are filled with the kid’s phones during rehearsals.

 

Gabriel Villasurda had driven me there and organised the day with Mr. Krohn for me to work with the orchestra. Villasurda had held Mr. Kron’s post at Huron decades before, at about the same time that I met him at Interlochen, when I was 15, attending the World Youth Symphony Orchestra, taking the conducting and percussion electives. Villasurda taught the conducting course, and it was he who dragged Maazel into the sessions the week he conducted WYSO to work with us. And so, when I met Maazel years later and worked with him professionally for two decades, I was initially able to refer back to that first Interlochen encounter.

 

Villasurda was the second Director of Ochestras at Huron (and other high schools) and has one of the longest and most distinguished pedagogical careers imaginable. He is now retired but the deep, positive imprint left by him in both people and institutions is undeniable. The love for him through his work was palpable, even for those who had never met him. As Mr. Krohn said to them, none, not one of us in the room would be making music the way we do were it not for Mr. Villasurda in the corner.

 

Mr. Krohn asked the orchestra if there were any 15 year-olds present. There were two or three. He asked them to imagine a 15 year-old me, now coming decades later to work in the same school his predecessor had, all because the pull of the love of music, and of music teaching was so strong in us all. He then told them of the many connections between us. ‘It is rare opportunity to bring together people in both space and time’, Mr. Villasurda remarked. It took all of us for it to happen. Just like orchestral playing.

 

The coaching session itself, my first in the USA, was a joy. The students were good-humoured yet serious, receptive and responsive. We played Mozart and Mendelssohn, transforming sound and phrasing almost instantly.

 

At the end Mr Villasurda, encouragement personified to the last, approached the orchestra and encouraged them to, when they are 30, 50 and 80, to also continue to help others to develop in their musical path, in the same way that they had felt helped forward in their journey today.

 

We bid each other farwell, and left the kids in the most capable hands of Mr. Krohn.

 

These quiet heroes are what build the vast base of the pyramid on which all sorts of music-making, and love of music, is built. I hope to be lucky enough to return one day.