HARMONY AT LIBERTY Three Decades of Helping Young People to Make Beautiful Music
	DECEMBER 2004

by Sue Stuart

I was born with East County in my blood. My connections with Brentwood go back to my maternal grandmother who married Robert Swift. He was a Byron farmer who had six brothers and three sisters, my great aunts and uncles.

When she was young, my mom and her family were residents of the famous Marsh House for eight years or so, beginning in 1916. Perhaps they were the last human inhabitants because, even then, the upstairs rooms were shut off and inhabited by families of bats.

Born a Teacher
I come from a line of teachers. My grandmother was a Brentwood School teacher who taught alongside Edna Hill herself. As a child, my mom took piano lessons from my grandmother. My mother went on to become a piano teacher, herself, and gave me my first lesson when I was six years old.

I had no thought at first of teaching music. I was an athlete and a very competitive person. I could beat most boys at sports and regularly did so, until I finally learned how inadvisable it was to do that in those days before women’s lib really did liberate us in some areas.

My dad inspired my athletic ability. He was my workout catcher when I was a softball pitcher. We went to ballgames together to watch Willie McCovey, Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, and Filipe Alou play ball.

My dad died during my freshman year of college. That was over three decades ago and I still feel his loss. I really wanted to be a PE teacher, but was always interested in music. I studied piano until high school. My teacher wanted me to be a concert pianist so I quit studying with her because I had serious performance anxieties. But on my own I continued playing the piano every day.

I also played tympani in the Jr. High orchestra and clarinet in my Burlingame High School band, sang all four years, and accompanied the choir.

Ambling Pathway Towards Music
I was floundering about my career during this time. For example, I had taken a few business courses and loved them. I put PE on the backburner when I went to San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton. I took some accounting courses, but a lot more music classes. I began singing in the choir and resumed my piano lessons. I became much more involved in the music program than in the business program.

My choice of Delta College turned out to be particularly great because, among other things, I met a trombonist there named Bruce Stuart while the two of us were in the pit during a production of “West Side Story.”

Bruce needed someone to accompany him on his trombone, so we started making music together. We began “making music” in more ways than one, actually, and became a couple just prior to his leaving for Coast Guard boot camp.

Bruce got out of boot camp with three days liberty the next Thanksgiving break. We were married on Thanksgiving Friday. Sunday night I went back to school and he went to his permanent duty assignment with the Coast Guard Band in Alameda.

I augmented Bruce’s tiny Coast Guard income by teaching piano lessons, and that, together with generous gifts from our parents, provided sufficient resources for us to survive (barely) our military experience.

I finished my junior year that January. We lived in Alameda for awhile and then I went to Hayward to finish my degree.

It was entirely unplanned on my part, but both colleges I attended — Hayward and Delta — just happened to have exceptional music programs. I graduated with a BA in Piano Performance and a Minor in Social Sciences.

I liked business, but math was never my strong suit. As it turned out, however, I had a big predicament with the music degree as well, because performance anxiety turned out to be a real problem.

Graduating music majors are required to put on a senior recital. One point in my recital turned awful in the most nightmarish sense of the word.

I knew the music forward and backward, but sitting there in front of all those faculty and guests I simply freaked out. The first piece I played had seven movements. The first six of these went pretty well but in the seventh I got to one point in the music where I just stopped. I was unable to go on. I regrouped, backed up, and then tried again, with the same result. That happened three times.

I performed the rest of the my recital without a flaw, but when my mind goes back to that afternoon, guess what part I keep thinking about over and over.

Years later I read a book by Barry Green, called The Inner Game of Music, in which he described my problem, which was trying to imagine what my audience was thinking instead of concentrating upon the music and what the composer was trying to accomplish.

A Chaotic Beginning to my Music Career
Bruce received his military discharge from the Coast Guard in 1974. I was doing some long-term substituting around the area with the Alameda High School District.

One of my tasks was to teach guitar to my students. I had never studied guitar before so I had to remain one lesson ahead of the students.

The Alameda School Board eventually terminated choral music in the high schools so I lost my job, moved to Santa Rosa, and lived for a few months in a little 17-foot trailer before moving to Petaluma. I was still subbing part time while Bruce was working at a music store and taking classes at Sonoma State.

I was the pit pianist for a couple of musicals at Santa Rosa Jr. College and became a member of the Sonoma County Chorus. To make ends meet, I worked over the holidays in a frozen food packing company. I remember freezing myself right along with those chicken breasts the entire time I was there.

In the middle of August 1976, Allan Jones called to tell me that the job here at Liberty was open. Allan was Bruce’s band director and knew me well. The week before school opened I got the job. I didn’t know until I reported for duty that I was going to be a choir conductor. I would sit at the piano and play while I conducted my two ensembles — an a capella choir and a pop chorus. I also taught two freshmen classes on map-reading and study skills.

That was an unforgettable year because I had a baby and Allan Jones had a heart attack. Bruce jumped in and took over Allan’s classes. He had gotten the John Philip Sousa award and had studied under Allan. He didn’t have credentials, but he had all the other things — skill, ability, personality, etc.

When I went on maternity leave in April, Bruce took over my classes, as well. He didn’t know how to play guitar either — and was teaching two guitar classes, two choirs, and my freshman classes.

I should add here that Bruce is a great trombonist. And he’s my hero. I couldn’t do what I do if he didn’t support me in incredible ways throughout the years.

During that next summer, I conducted two school musicals, “Godspell and Babes” in Arms. That was back when we had summers off and were able to work on these things morning, noon, and night.

We staged the productions in the cafeteria. They were both very successful. We have continued to produce great musicals almost every year since.

Three Steps Forward and Two Steps Back
In 1977 Prop 13 came on the scene and our music programs took a big hit. Guitar classes went away and I began teaching US History and team-taught the band with Allan, who had recovered from his heart attack. Allan Jones is a wonderful human being and a great mentor. He was very supportive of me and helped me improve my skills.

After my first year I considered dropping out of teaching, which is a common phenomenon for teachers reaching the end of their first year. I remember wise advice that Vernon Noble gave me. “Don’t worry about things you don’t have any control over.”

That first year really had been tough. Those ’70s kids were more than somewhat out of control; lack of respect for authority was a value that they held to dearly. To make matters worse, I was only a few years older than they were and started out too easy on them, which is a typical mistake for novices. I was too much their friend and not enough their guide.

I was learning from my mistakes. I took advantage of every opportunity to learn anything that came my way. I studied other conductors and attended every seminar and workshop I could find. I’m still doing all that, as a matter of fact, since a person never “arrives” in my kind of business.

One of the great things I did was to begin singing in a semi-professional choir under the direction of Bill Dehning, who just might be the greatest choral conductor alive. Bill is a professor at USC, formerly at the University of the Pacific. I auditioned in the early ’90s for his “California Choral Company.”

Every member of Bill’s choir had to audition every year. I sang with him for five years, and simply being a part of that choir dramatically elevated my knowledge of conducting. I had already been conducting choirs for fifteen years at that point, but the five years I spent with that man singing in that choir was invaluable. As a result, my own program began to really move.

Nineteen years after I started teaching music at Liberty High School, the growth of the town and the school finally allowed for five choral groups, which justified my teaching music full-time. Until then I was always teaching in my minor for several periods a day.

The administration and school board make music a priority around here. Most notably, we dedicated our new music building and performance hall on April Fool’s Day in 1992.

That building was a dream come true and bears testimony to the support we received from the community, city, board, and administration. Very few schools have the quality facilities that we enjoy here.

Taking the Talent on the Road
Every year for the past 26 years I’ve taken my A Capella Choir, Women’s Ensemble, and Chamber Singers for tours around the state. I never imagined touring any further than that because I thought the singers could wait for college if they wanted to go on national or international tours.

Things changed a couple of years ago when a tour company director called me and said that our choir had been recommended for an invitation to go on tour. In particular, they wanted my A Capella Choir and my Chamber Singers to represent California in the National Festival of the States in Washington, DC.

I was suspicious of the offer, since it seemed too good to be true, but it turned out that the invitation represented a legitimate honor. Some of my peers — choral conductors in other schools — had actually recommended me for this privilege. “This is something I really can’t turn down,” I thought. Even though the tour really was outside our regular school year, I was confident that my kids could rise to the challenge.

We spent a year fund-raising and formed an organization, called “80 Volts,” to raise money for the trip. The ‘80’ in the name came from the “80 Voices of Liberty Tour Singers.” The fundraising was so successful that each student had to pay only 100 dollars for the trip. The ad hoc 80 Volts group subsequently reinvented itself as the permanent adult fundraising organization for Liberty’s Choral Program.

The experiences we had on that trip were unbelievable both for the choir and for its conductor. When we sang in the National Cathedral, for example, I developed a serious case of goose bumps. We provided the prelude music for the morning service at that awesome place and performed for a half hour while people filed in. We began with an empty room and finished with a room packed with appreciative worshippers.

Something seemingly magical happens when a full-voiced choir sings in an acoustically perfect room, like the National Cathedral turned out to be. The hall is a tall, volume space almost completely lacking in any furnishings that would muffle sound.

Such a space is too small for an echo, but the shape of the room reflects the sounds of the singers back to them. The singing and the reverberations mix together to produce a rich resonance so that at times you feel like you’re singing with a host of angels.

When the choir suddenly cut off a passage, for example, the sounds of “those other singers” rang for several moments in the stillness. The hair literally stood up on the back of my neck.

We also sang at the Fairfax — a military retirement center — and received a standing ovation. We sang at the Navy Memorial. In Arlington National Cemetery we participated in the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, laying a wreath in honor of the people who served our country and are buried in that place.

We sang at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Catholic Church in the Western Hemisphere, seventh largest in the world. We visited the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Viet Nam Memorial. We got an unforgettable tour of the White House — a rare experience in post 9/11 America.

We really took advantage of the opportunity being given us, as we consumed a buffet of all the wonderful sights and experiences our nation’s capital has to offer.

An outing to Mt. Vernon turned into a near-religious experience for us all. A tornado warning was issued right in the middle of the tour. When I found out what was happening, I brought our group inside. The afternoon quickly filled with sound and fury as lightening was crashing everywhere.

We all huddled together and I told the kids, “Let’s sing.” I teach a particular song to all my choirs as an exercise. It is called “Hashivenu,” which is a Hebrew prayer meaning, “Keep us Safe.” We sang that lovely song as a round there in the gloomy darkness while the skies stormed above us.

As we shoved back our fears and seemingly pushed away the storm by the power of our singing, a profound spirit of quiet calm and unity invaded our hearts. Some of the kids said later that singing that prayer in that beautiful place while the storm furiously raged around us was the most memorable experience of the whole trip. I know that I’ll never forget it!

Moving Outward
The Washington, DC tour was an important event for me professionally. It changed my philosophy about who we are. I’m living in kind of a bubble here. Around us are some tremendously successful high-powered choral programs. I’ve been hanging around those guys for years. To be recommended by them for this honor was a feather in my cap.

So my philosophy has changed. I’m asking the question “Why not?” these days. Why shouldn’t we raise the sights on what we can do? We have the talent and the experience to make us shine in venues all around the world. Now we also have the organization in the 80 Volts fundraising group. Their attitude has become, “Just tell us how much you need.”

Nothing succeeds like success they say, so next year, April 9-13, we’ve been invited to sing in New York City at the Lincoln Center. We are one of only eight high school choirs around the nation to be invited.

I feel like I’m just hitting my stride even though I’m now teaching the children of students I had decades ago. It’s fun! I can share things about their parents they might not know. Some families have a lot of kids and I can be teaching children from a single family for almost two decades.

As I write this, two of my girls are traveling through Europe in a touring choir. Two former students are studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Another student recently gave her Master’s performance at that school.

I remember how she came into my program with a glorious voice but not knowing how to read music. Now she’s singing arias in German, French, Latin, and English. She is moving down a marvelous road that we found together.

I’m having a great time! I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing as long as I can continue to stand up, lift my hands, lift my heart, and lift the spirit of those wonderful kids as we learn to make beautiful music together.