Memories – Faculty – Joel B. Harrison

Here’s what we remember about Mr. Harrison

Joel Harrison

From SchoolGirl57:

It’s always seemed to me that Mr. Harrison, our bandmaster, was one of the most unhappy teachers I encountered any time, anywhere, any subject. I don’t think I ever saw him smile. Of course, given how badly I played, that was probably only to be expected. (By the time he and I made it through the 56 Progressive Duets, I think the poor man was in permanent pain.)

It must have galled him that he had to take all comers – even extremely inadequate players like me – due to the tiny number of people willing to be in the band at the time. Still, he had only himself to blame. That had to be the most embarrassed band ever.

I remember that we would take to the field at halftime with almost no marching practice, compared to other area bands (some of which could actually mambo in unison as they accompanied themselves), also that he did not encourage a lot of musical practice of the pieces we were to perform. As for the pieces themselves, he expected us to play much of the same stuff over and over and a lot of it was way out of date. I remember once, when several band members protested the material we had, he ordered the arrangement for an extremely difficult symphonic piece and tossed the parts at us when they arrived. When we couldn’t go from “omph-pa-pa” to concert quality overnight, he said that proved we should stick to John Philip Sousa and be glad and we went back to the usual band trios. Which was OK with me. I liked Sousa marches.

And the odd thing is that many of the musicians in the band were excellent instrumentalists. If he’d gone about it in the right way, he could have had a decent group to lead.

From Woody Wilson:

Tell me about it !! I remember one summer when the band members had just had it with ol’ Joel B. and his rigor mortis halftime directions, so we decided to take it into our own hands. We met during summer vacation and drilled ourselves with some real marching and music with spirit and precision. The first time we performed for him, he almost had a cow and insisted that we go back to the OLD way of doing things. I do remember pulling one trick on him where I got the band to, when he raised his baton, just sit and look at him, but not to raise instrument to lips. He turned pretty white at that and glared at me. Then on my signal, we picked up our horns and began to play. Afterward, he told me that was one of the most frightening moments of his career. I didn’t really mean to scare him because you couldn’t help but feel sorry for him in his lifes career choice. I think he meant well, but I have to agree, he was a very unhappy man. In spite of all that, he was able to give a lot of us our shaky start in music and for that, I’ve always been grateful. And you know, we really did have some great musicians in his bands. I’ve often wondered if he ever regretted not doing more with them .

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