The music man
Laura Secord music teacher Dave Sisler retires after 31 years behind the baton
The coffee cups pile up, one by one in the shape of a developing pyramid on Dave Sisler’s desk in the music room at Laura Secord Secondary School.
It’s shortly past 2:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, and a cacophony of instrument noises fills the room as students warm up before the weekly rehearsal of the school’s senior concert band. They are preparing for a year-end concert. This is the final practice for Sisler, who is retiring after 31 years as a teacher — 29 as head of the arts department at Secord.
He surveys the classroom and remarks that there are an unusual number of empty seats.
The beginning of a smile appears, as he speculates on a probable conspiracy. “I hear whispering, too,” he notes under his breath.
And then, as if on cue, a procession of students files through the door, each placing a small Tim Hortons coffee, black, neatly on his desk while muttering a suspiciously similar apology: “Sorry I’m late.”
Sisler, 54, smiles, delighted in his accurate prediction of antics.
“Don’t let it happen again,” he tells them collectively, tapping his watch face with a finger.
A while back, he may have suggested to students, mostly in jest but sometimes it’s hard to tell: “If you’re going to be late at least buy me a coffee.”
And then it stuck. “I said it once, but then it became a thing,” he says, later.
In a few minutes, the room has mostly filled. The coffee cups have accumulated to 23. And the rehearsal begins as Sisler raises his baton and in one upward motion conveys a universally understood message: it’s time to get down to business.
It’s not long before he stops the group. He’s not happy with the trumpets and he requests to hear a chord in isolation, which leads to the discovery that one trumpeter has forgotten his mute, a device that wedges into the bell of the instrument to lower the volume and change its tonal quality.
Said trumpeter retreats to Sisler’s office, locates a mute then stops at an upright piano near the front of the room for the requisite removal of one shoe, which he places on the floor. It’s another Sisler thing.
A single shoe donation is usually reserved for the occasion when a student has forgotten a pencil and needs to borrow one from a box Sisler keeps in his class, for the purpose of making music notations.
In his words: “You can make a mistake once. But then you get out the pencil and don’t make it a second time.”
The shoe rule is simple: borrow a pencil (or mute or whatever), and donate a shoe. The item gets returned, because Sisler logic dictates: “You won’t walk out of the room with one shoe,” he says.
One morning, sitting in his office filled with years of memories, a cow costume at his feet (the school’s mascot), and wearing a T-shirt bearing a head of broccoli graphic (turns out it’s a long story with the moral: don’t forget who you are), he reflects on his teaching philosophy. A sort of juxtaposition of demanding an unwavering excellence, respect and pursuit of personal achievement while also partaking in lighthearted fun and frivolity.
“You’re a teacher but you’re also a guy who dances around in the junk band,” he says.
“When you’re holding a baton, you’re more like a judge holding a gavel. And when the baton goes down, that’s it.”
“What’s nice is that we all get each other,” he says, then after a pause, adds: “Sometimes it takes a few years.”
Case in point: When he tells a student “Don’t be a weenie” everyone understands the underlying message.
“He’s challenging you to step up and be better,” says Troy Holowchuk, a Grade 12 percussionist.
One night in the middle of June, at the end of the school’s end-of-year concert, music students, some alumni, teachers and probably a few parents in the audience, gathered to sing Sisler’s favourite song, “The Parting Glass,” an Irish folk song of farewell and hope.
In more than three decades of teaching, Sisler, himself a graduate of Secord, has waved his baton in front of jazz and concert bands, choirs, pit orchestras and the school’s dancing drumline. He created and led the junk band, drawing even non-musical students into a procession of banging garbage can lids, water jugs and playing a keyboard made from car horns, in the Niagara Grape and Wine Festival parade.
His students have performed gigs alongside professional musicians from Classic Albums Live and Kenny Rogers at Massey Hall to a New
Year’s Eve concert in Niagara Falls with electropop star Lights. They’ve been a part of bigger projects, including World Vision’s Sing Across the World and, most recently, Songs of the City, a collaboration of musicians and people who received services from the United Way in a shared storytelling experience.
And yet, it’s the everyday classroom experiences that he will miss most.
“How many times do I have 100 kids in front of me, to bounce crazy ideas off ?” he says.
Sisler hated practising piano as a kid. Then someone kindly suggested: “Maybe David should choose an instrument that doesn’t require the use of his fingers,” he says.
The trombone found him.
“It appealed to me mostly because it could make funny noises,” he says.
Instruments in general have a way of drawing in certain personality types, he says. A trombone is bold. Jazzy. “It can be playful and ruckus and on the street. Then it can turn around and be noble.”
He enjoyed the community of being in a band, a passion which has led to playing trombone with Niagara Symphony Orchestra since 1983.
“His main ideology is to perform whenever and wherever you can,” says former-student-turned-musicteacher, Katryna Sacco.
Sisler has organized several student excursions to Europe during the March break. One year, during a stop in Paris, France, his students posed for a group photo in front of the Louvre, the world’s largest art museum, remembers Sacco.
It was also the perfect place for an impromptu song.
That, however, was not an opinion shared by the four security guards who quickly surrounded him, ordering, in no uncertain terms, the group to stop singing.
Alas, the guards were not aware of Sisler’s other mantra: Finish the song.
It’s an unspoken understanding between him and his students: Sing and play until the conductor tells you to stop. “Even if the conductor drops dead, finish the tune,” he’s told them, to emphasize the point with memorable absurdity. And they have. A percussionist drops a drumstick. A crucial microphone cuts out. A speaker ejects blaring feedback. They keep playing.
So, when their fearless leader was visibly in trouble with the authorities, there was no second guessing. “We just kept singing,” says Sacco.
Until it got a bit more serious (Sisler will only smile at the memory), and he motioned for them to stop.
“We tried,” he says. “We tried.”
Back in the Secord music room, concert band rehearsal ends with a standard Sisler-ism: “Go home and practise.”
Then a question: “Now what am I to do with all these coffees?”
The class response is in unison: “Drink them.”
And then, in unison, each student stands up, lifting their arms so that their fingers touch just above their heads.
A Standing O.
They stand, silent, ending the final rehearsal of Sisler’s high school teaching career.
A silent, collective standing ovation that speaks volumes.