I no longer remember whether I was in a Boys Chorus I class that Mr. Posten taught during the second semester of my junior or during the first semester of my junior year. This Boys Chorus I course was one of the music or art-related coures that Broad Ripple required its male students to take in order to receive a diploma. And it was a course I was not particularly interested in taking. But I still have a few particular memories related to being in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class in one of those semesters of my junior year, in which I think most of the other high school guys in the class were still sophomores.
Being in a public school glee club had never particularly interested me, prior to moving to Indianapolis; especially because I had previously been much more interested in both playing basketball, stickball and touch football or older teenager-organized football with the other neighborhood guys in Queens, when not inside school, and playing a musical instrument like the saxophone in a band, than in being part of some kind of school choral group, like a glee club.
Yet I had enjoyed singing songs along with others around the campfire, after each meal in the camp cafeteria, and on long-distance hikes in Boy Scout summer camp; and I also had enjoyed being one of the Boy Scout members who helped lead the other scouts in songs in Troop 363 in Queens between 1960 and the end of 1962. In addition, during the two years before my Bar Mitzvah, I used to regularly attend the junior congregation services that were held in the basement of the Marathon Jewish Community Center synagogue each Saturday morning, fairly regularly during the fall, winter and spring.
To do so, I would have to get dressed up each Saturday morning, walk up the hill to the synogogue that was located about 15 minutes by foot from my family's garden apartment in the Beech Hills Development. And, once there, I would sing the prayers, whose Hebrew texts were printed in the Conservative Jewish prayer book we used, along with the other, mainly pre-13 year-old guys, including my two closest friends at the time, Marc and Eugene.
Also, the synagogue cantor, Mr. Rackoff, who gave me Bar Mitzvah lessons, had felt that I had a good voice. So, besides singing the Haf Torah section at the Sarturday morning religious service when I was bar mitzvahed, I also was assigned to lead the congregation in some of the collective singing of the regular Sabbath service prayers.
But in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus class, he instructed you to sing songs from the printed music song scores, not in the more natural way I would normally sing a song, but in a more artificial, voice-trained way. For exemple, if you needed to hold a particular word of a song for more than one musical beat, the vowels of the word would need to be pronounced, when singing the word, differently than how you pronounced the word when speaking or when singing naturally.
I could not foresee in my junior year of high school--when the thought that I would spend so much of my leisure time, in the decades after 1966, singing songs that I or other songwriters had written, in the various apartments in which I lived, while accompanying myself on guitar, did not exist in my mind--that becoming a non-commercially-motivated, amateur protest folk singer-songwriter, rather than a playwright, would be the kind of artist I turned out to be during my life. But even if I had foreseen this, the kind of singing that Mr. Posten taught in this chorus class would not have been that relevant to the style of singing I ended up using in singing both my protest folk songs and songs written by other folks.
Like I may have already indicated, Mr. Posten was a tall, white guy, who seemed to be in his 30's. He had been a drum major of the Indiana University marching band, before later living in New York City for awhile, while obtaining a master's degree in music or music education from Columbia University; and eventually ending up being the teacher who headed Broad Ripple High School's music department in Indianapolis.
Mr. Posten seemed to enjoy the music program-related job he had at Broad Ripple H.S.. He was a high school teacher who seemed also to prioritize spending time working with and interacting a lot with the Broad Ripple students at school whom he considered most musically talented; rather than just seeing his high school music teaching job as being a day job he only did because he couldn't make as much money doing some other music-related job or because he wasn't able to earn a living as a professional musician, concert conductor, composer of music, professional songwriter or professional entertainer.
And, despite sometimes relating to the students in his Boys Chorus I class who weren't much into having to take a required music class in too authoritarian, too strict or too sarcastically humorous or condescending a way, Mr. Posten was a skillful music teacher.
So many decades afer being in Mr. Postn's Boys Chorus I class for a term in my junior year at Broad Ripple High School, I now have only two particular memories of what I experienced, related to taking his class.
My first memory related to his Boys Chorus class is that, besides requiring us to read and sing Irving Berlin's "Say It With Music" song from printed sheet music, Mr. Posten also required us to read and sing a religious song whose lyrics praised Jesus Christ, expressed the religiously sectarian viewpoint that Jesus Christ was the son of God and included something like the phrase "Thy Holy name, be ever blessed, praise, Lord, adoration, Oh, Christ the Lord."
In the early 1960's, however, the Supreme Court had made some court decisions to the effect that the separation of church and state provisions of the U.S. Constitution meant that religion should be kept out of the public schools; and that students should not be required to join other students in saying or listening to religious prayers that did not reflect their own philosophical or religious beliefs.
Because I had been a television daily evening news show junkie and a regular reader of daily newspaper headlines since 1960, I had some familiarity with these early 1960's U.S. Supreme Court decisions. In addition, by late 1963 or early 1964 I had read Paul Blanshard's book about the influence of the Catholic Church in the USA and elsewhere, probably because, when JFK campaigned for U.S. president, there was some discussion on the corporate television airways about whether or not democracy in the USA would be more "endangered" if someone of Catholic religious background was then elected as the first U.S. president of Catholic religious background.
So, as someone who was not of Christian religious background and who then had not yet particularly questioned the assumed conservative Jewish religious or liberal pro-Zionist family tradition I had been born into, until I was attending college, I, naturally, didn't feel it was morally or legally right for Mr. Posten to require me to sing a religious song that praised Jesus Christ, inside a public school classroom. And after Boys Chorus I class one day, I mentioned my objection to Mr. Posten about being required to sing a religious song that contradicted my own religious beliefs in his classroom.
Because I was apparently the first student of Jewish religious background that Mr. Posten instructed in a Boys Chorus class who had ever objected to having to sing a religious song in his public school class, Mr. Posten didn't seem to really comprehend why I was objecting to singing the religious song; and, in order to pass the Boys Chorus I class, I ended up having to continue to sing the religious song in class that I had objected to singing.
But perhaps because I was from New York City, I reminded Mr. Posten of him having lived in the Big Apple when he had attended Columbia University, before returning to teach in Indiana; and for that reason, perhaps, he didn't seem to go out of his way to penalize me with a lower grade for expressing my objection to being required to sing the song that praised Jesus Christ inside his public school classroom, despite the early 1960's U.S. Supreme Court decisions related to separation of church and state issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment