The Conductor

Dear Readers,

When i woke up this morning and checked my phone, a message was on the screen - typed onto my phone by theokwek himself! theokwek sends us a message that is strangely personal. For those of you school musicians out there, theokwek presents a view from a different angle.

The Straight Times Editor.

He sighed.

Sitting at the cluttered study desk, clutching his new ukulele, staring at the computer screen and feeling his hand phone buzzing away is his front pocket, he sighed.

One glance at the stained, oily screen and an all-so-familiar name greeted his eyes – that of a boy who asked to be allowed to play as assistant concertmaster in the end-of-year concert.

That was the downside of conducting one or more high school ensembles, he reflected. There would always be that dreaded troublesome first-year brat, begging for roles that lay far beyond his caliber, or that lethargic graduating-batch punk pleading to be let off early from rehearsals. All these nitty gritty of the human teenager – sometimes he would think back to his childhood, and however much he tried, he couldn’t reconcile the music-loving boy he once was to the kids of today.

He grunted to himself as he laid aside the ukulele he was experimenting with and carelessly tapped the ‘open’ key on his weathered phone.

“Dear Sir” he read.

Not bad. The boy was learning manners.

“Could you please let me play front-desk for the concert? Please?”

A hand passed involuntarily over his forehead in anguish, smoothing back his shock of Beethoven-like unruly hair. What should he do? Clearly he couldn’t concede to the boy’s request – but if he didn’t, he was quite sure the boy wouldn’t let him sleep tonight.

Just then, one word, lying somewhere two roles from the bottom of the screen, caught his tired, bespectacled eyes. A three-letter, monosyllabic word that most linguists would give minimal importance to.

“Joy.”

His eyes widened a fraction and he found himself reading the message that he so loathed. “Please don’t deny me the joy of this music! Let me play to my full potential! I promise I will practice!”

He gasped. Those words, in tiny black print sprawled neatly on the screen caught in his throat with a double-edged sting. This was a boy who actually loved his rehearsals! His mind wandered backwards through time and he found himself sitting at this very desk, a teenager.

As a boy, he’d been a member of the school orchestra where rehearsing was a chore. In the first two years he and his buddies would slip out with their instruments and head for the city centre to busk for an afternoon, before returning to school in the evenings and using the money earned to bribe their concertmaster to hush up their lack of attendance. After some time, though, he came back to rehearsals a prodigal son and realized the sheer joy of synchronized bow-strokes, combined power and the realized ambition of the stage. And right here, in the message on his phone, was evidence of a kindred spirit.

The phone vibrated again, shaking him back to the present. Another singular word burst onto the screen. Five letters.

“Please?”

In those innocuous words lay the bittersweet tinges of pleading, love, sorrow and a child’s dream. For a moment – a split-second moment – those tinges reverberated through his heart. And he almost relented. Almost.

But that moment passed quickly, and before he knew it, his irritable self returned. His reflexes fired tiny signals to his calloused fingers and mechanically, they tapped out a harsh “NO WAY!”, sending the message flitting up and away in a chorus of radio waves.

In those few keystrokes, he realized with a jolt, that he had returned to childhood and back, and denied a potential violinist of the era the chance to shine – that golden opportunity of fame and acceptance that a child clung so tightly to…