Get involved
Not as helpers to an adult-run charity — the actual work. The phone calls, the lifting, the piano in the day room. If you want something on a college application you can talk about for ten minutes, this is it.
You spend years being taught something. This is where you find out it is worth something to somebody else.
Around twenty minutes of material, at a residence near you, a few times over a term. Any instrument. No audition — if you have had a year of lessons, you are ready.
Watching listings, writing to strangers, and the unglamorous business of getting a piano down a flight of front steps. You don't need to play anything.
Run something
Not a title on a page. If you take one, it is yours — and if you drop it, everybody notices. That is the point.
The whole thing, and whatever nobody else has picked up.
That leading mostly means noticing what is not happening.
Finding instruments.
How to tell a bargain from a liability, and how to ask a stranger for something.
Getting things moved.
That the plan is easy and the van is hard.
Mini Maestros.
How to run something other people are relying on.
Relationships.
That most doors open on the second knock.
Hours and paperwork.
That the boring job is the one that makes everyone else's work count.
Everything runs online, on your own time. We meet twice a year: once in September to hand out the posts, and once in January to admit what did not work. Between those, you are trusted to get on with it.
Play it forward.
Instruments where they’re needed.
Music where it’s missed.