I’ve just sent the following letter to the Port Townsend School Board and Superintendent Linda Rosenbury. I encourage others who want to maintain music education in our schools to write sboard@ptschools.org and lrosenbury@ptschools.org:

What do I remember most about my public school education? Singing in glee club and loving music. It was our high school music teacher, Sally Tobin Dietrich, who asked one day, “Who wants to get tickets to see Joan Sutherland’s debut at The Met in ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’?” My hand shot higher than the American flag above the White House. Hence the peak experience of my adolescence, sitting breathless in the fifth balcony of the Met as Joan Sutherland went mad and we went berserk.

Fifty-nine or so years later, here I am, a music critic for major publications, an audio reviewer for Stereophile, a former teacher of classical vocal music at Peninsula College, and at the tail end of a career as a professional whistler that saw me whistling Puccini as “The Voice of Woodstock” in an Emmy-nominated Peanuts cartoon that’s just come to Apple TV. And it was music that connected me with my music major husband who sang professionally for awhile, most recently as the tenor in St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church in Oakland.

Were the music programs I enjoyed since elementary school solely responsible for the arc of my life? No. My parents were music lovers. I was weaned on “Peter and the Wolf,” Enrico Caruso, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, “Annie Get your Gun,” “South Pacific,” and “Finian’s Rainbow.” (Elvis and all the rest came later.) I already knew about Joan Sutherland because my father had brought home her debut operatic LP on London Records. But did high school education cement my understanding that in great music I could find validation and reinforcement for my joys and sorrows, and then it could help lead me back home to my heart? Yes.

Education is about the whole person, not just about skills. Music feeds the soul and enriches the spirit; it transcends verbiage to express all that is true and divine about human existence.
Please strengthen and increase music education in our schools.

Jason Victor Serinus
PORT TOWNSEND