“These Kids Will Never Be Real Musicians” — He Was Already in the Room D
November 14th, 2017. Bethnel Green, East London. The Algate Community Center meeting room B, ground floor. The room held 32 plastic stacking chairs arranged in five rows facing a folding table at the front. A projector had been set up on the table with a cable that did not quite reach the nearest socket.
So an extension lead ran across the carpet in a way that someone had taped down at the edges to prevent people tripping over it and that three people had tripped over anyway. The carpet was the kind found in community centers everywhere short pile blue worn through in the paths between rows, the specific shade of something that was chosen not because anyone liked it, but because it came in the right quantity at the right price in the year the center was built.
On the wall to the left, a notice board covered in flyers for activities, yoga, language exchange, a food bank collection, a youth drama group. On the wall to the right, inongruous but deliberately placed before the meeting, four acoustic guitars on stands brought from the room upstairs where they were normally stored.
27 of the 32 chairs were occupied by 7:00. council officers in the front rows, parents and community members in the middle. In the back row, slightly to the right, one man who had arrived before everyone else and was sitting with a notebook on his knee, reading glasses on his nose, coat still on.
The man had come because he had been asked. A quiet email three weeks earlier from the program director, professional, not presuming, explaining the situation and asking whether he might consider attending a meeting. He had replied the same day. He had not told anyone he was coming and had asked specifically that no announcement be made.
He was 74 years old. He had long silver white hair and a dark coat and the large weathered hands of a man who had spent 60 years pressing strings. And nobody in the room had looked at him twice since he had sat down. This channel exists for what happens in ordinary rooms when the wrong decision is about to be made and the right person is already there.
Subscribe and turn on notifications before we go any further. The Bethnyl Green Youth Guitar Program had been running for eight years. It offered free weekly sessions to young people between the ages of 10 and 17. Instruments provided, no prior experience required. 41 young people were currently enrolled. Their ages ranged from 10 to 16.
Their backgrounds covered approximately 14 nationalities and six London burrows. Their reasons for attending ranged from genuine passion to the vague sense that playing guitar might be a thing they would like to do to the simple availability of a free activity on a Thursday evening. What they had in common was Maya Chin.
Maya was 38 years old and had been running the program since it opened. She had a music degree, 12 years of teaching experience, and the specific gift of being able to explain the same thing in exactly as many different ways as the person in front of her needed. She was not famous. She had not recorded anything.
She had not toured. She had taken 41 young people who did not know how to play a guitar and was in the process of changing that which was the thing she had decided at the age of 22 that she wanted to do with her music. She sat at the table at the front with two folders of documentation and the expression of someone who has prepared thoroughly and knows that thorough preparation is not always enough.
Councelor David Graham was 53 years old trim with the specific efficiency of a man who processes budgets and has developed a relationship with the number column that has become over the years more comfortable than his relationship with most other things. He wore a gray suit and had brought slides. He was not a malicious man.
He was a man who had a deficit to address and a list of programs to assess and he was applying the same framework to all of them. He liked music in the way that people who do not play an instrument like music as something that happens in the background at appropriate moments. He clicked to the first slide.
Program overview. Funding £18,500 perom beneficiaries 41 young people. Duration 8 years. Thank you for coming this evening. He said I want to be straightforward with you all. The council is facing a 17% reduction in discretionary program funding and we have to make difficult choices. He clicked to the next slide.
Cost per beneficiary. At £450 per participant per year, the youth guitar program is one of the higher cost items in the community arts budget. Maya’s hands were flat on the table. I understand the value of music education in principle, Graham continued. I’m not dismissing that. But we have to be honest about outcomes.
Guitar is a recreational skill. The data shows that the vast majority of participants in programs like this will not pursue music professionally. We are investing in a hobby. He looked at the room with the expression of someone presenting a self-evident case. These kids will almost certainly never be real musicians.
Given the fiscal reality, we need to ask whether this is the most effective use of community funds. In the back row, the man with silver white hair wrote something in his notebook. Maya spoke. She spoke for 11 minutes carefully with data and with specific examples. Marcus, 14, whose social anxiety had reduced so significantly that his school had written to say so.
Priya 12 who had started to compose her own music and whose teacher had contacted Maya about it. Seven participants who had moved into music GCSEs. Two who were currently pursuing music at a level. She spoke about self-regulation, about confidence, about what showing up and practicing something difficult week after week does to a young person’s relationship with effort.
She was precise and she was persuasive and she was making the case that the case she was making should not have to be made. Graham listened with the attentiveness of a man who has already concluded something and is listening for the courtesy of due process. Thank you Maya. He said those are compelling individual stories but the structural question remains.
We cannot fund every program that produces some positive outcomes. We have to make comparative judgments. He looked at the room. Does anyone else want to speak to this before we move to the recommendation? Does it feel familiar watching someone defend something real against a framework that has no space for it? Tell me in the comments. I read everyone.
In the back row, the man with the notebook set it down. He raised his hand. Graham looked at him. An older man in a dark coat, silver hair. Please go ahead. The man stood. He was tall, slightly stooped, but tall. He took his reading glasses off and held them loosely. I started playing guitar when I was 12 years old, he said.
I was not from a musical family. There was no particular reason to think it would lead anywhere. He said this at a conversational pace, as if nodding something factually. What it did was give me somewhere to put everything that had no other place to go. At 12, 13, 14 years old, there is a great deal of that things that have no other place to go.
He paused and looked at the guitars on the stands along the wall. You asked whether these young people will become real musicians. I would like to ask what that means. My definition of a real musician is someone for whom music is real, not someone who earns money from it or appears on a stage.
someone for whom the thing is genuinely present and matters. He looked at Graham. Every young person in this program who has learned to play a chord, who has practiced something until they could do it, who has sat in this building on a Thursday evening and given their attention to something difficult, that is real.
Whether they record an album or not. He walked toward the wall where the guitars were standing. He picked up the nearest one, a steel string acoustic, the kind that gets used in teaching programs, decent but not precious, with the two-handed care of someone who has been picking up guitars for 60 years. “May I?” he said, looking at Maya.
Maya had known who he was since she sent the email. She had not told Graham or the council officers or the parents. She had asked him to come as an ordinary member of the public and he had agreed to that condition. She nodded. He found a chord. He adjusted slightly. Then he played. He played the opening of Bronn Wyor Stomp, the acoustic piece from Led Zeppelin I II recorded in a Welsh cottage in 1970 with two guitars and no electricity and a sense of something being discovered rather than performed. in a community center meeting room in Bethnyl Green on a teaching guitar with slightly buzzy action on the B string. It sounded the way it always had, like someone who had found the specific thing their hands were made for, doing it without any distance between the doing and the being. The sound filled the room
differently from the projector hum and the shuffle of chairs. It occupied the space as if it belonged there, which it did because any room where a guitar is played well belongs to the guitar for the duration. He played for perhaps 90 seconds. Then he stopped and put the guitar back carefully on its stand. I was 12, he said to the room.
Someone let me hold a guitar. I am here tonight because of what happened in the room where that occurred. A woman in the third row said something quietly to the person beside her. A man near the window looked at his phone and then at the man by the wall and said the name aloud. Not loudly, loud enough. Graham heard it.
He looked at the man, the silver hair, the large hands resting at his sides, the dark coat. He looked at the guitars on the wall. He looked at the slide still projected behind him. Cost per beneficiary. Something shifted in his relationship with that number in a way he could not have explained using any framework he currently had available.
He looked at Maya. I would like to schedule a follow-up conversation before we make a final recommendation. After the meeting, as the chairs were being stacked and the projector packed away, the man came to Maya’s table. He set a guitar pick on top of her folders, dark, worn to an asymmetric thinness on one side. He looked at her. 41, he said.
That is 41. Maya looked at the pick. She had prepared for this meeting for 3 weeks. She had not prepared for this. Thank you for coming, she said. He put his coat on. Keep the data, he said. It matters, but so does what you told them about Marcus and Priya. He paused. Those stories are data too, a different kind.
He walked through the door of meeting room B and down the corridor and out into the November Bethl green evening. A few parents were still outside. One man spotted him and stood very still. The man with the silver hair nodded and kept walking and was gone before the evening had decided quite what to do with him.
The Bethnel Green Youth Guitar Program received its full funding allocation for the following year and the year after that. The review was reframed. The cost per beneficiary calculation was supplemented with outcomes data that Maya had been tracking since the program began.
It was counselor Graham’s office that requested the supplementary data 3 days after the meeting, which was something Maya noted and thought about. 41 became 47 by the following September. Marcus passed his music GCSC. Priya was accepted into a junior conservatire program and brought her own guitar, a secondhand classical she had found with her mother.
Two from that cohort are currently studying music at degree level. They did not know, most of them, what had happened in meeting room B, Maya has not told them. Some things work better as foundation than as story. On the wall of meeting room B, beside the community notice board, there is now a framed photograph.
23 young people in two rows, guitars on their knees, taken at the end of year recital in 2018. Beside it, in a small frame, is the pick on a piece of card in Maya’s handwriting, a reminder of what real means. If this story found something in you, subscribe and turn on notifications. This channel exists for what happens in ordinary rooms when someone who understands what is at stake decides to stand up.
What gave you a place to put the things that had no other place to go when you were young? Tell me below. I read every single comment. Jimmy Paige once said, “I was very much into music as a teenager. It was almost like a lifeline. Almost like a lifeline for 41 young people in Bethnyl Green on Thursday evenings.
It was exactly that, not almost. And the difference between almost and exactly is sometimes made in a room with plastic stacking chairs and a taped down extension lead by one person who decides to stand up. See you in the next one.
