Armond Walter: Music as Community, Conducting as Care
I wish Armond Walter, Meadville’s Middle and High School band and orchestra conductor, had led my high school band. Our conductor, back in Michigan in the 1970s, took a sort of Benito Mussolini approach to musical leadership. The trains definitely ran on time, but the fascism, the fear of his wrath, never lifted. Armond, on the other hand, is cool. Demanding, yes, even old school, having been shaped by the old school ways of his Meadville mentors. But his priorities start elsewhere. Musically, he’s driven by the students’ sense of success. And for him, finally, music itself is his “vehicle for connecting with kids,” he says, “and helping them be the best people possible they can be.”
Music has been a trusty vehicle in Armond’s own life. Born and raised in Meadville, he has, at the age of 38, made his way to the very heart of music education in this town. This is saying something—both because the journey wasn’t easy and the destination is powerful. Music builds community. Knowing Armond teaches you that.
Before he became a conductor Armond was (and is) a gifted alto saxophonist. But before that he was, of course, just a kid who didn’t know what he’d do or be. In fourth grade at West End elementary school, when students could choose a school instrument to play, his mother chose sax for him, and Irene Kipp, beloved teacher and mentor to generations of young local musicians, handed him a tenor sax. He liked it enough that his mother bought him his own. “Except we didn’t know there were different kinds of saxophones,” he says, laughing. “Turns out my mom bought an alto.” He kept at it, humbly. In middle school he was sure he’d never be half as good as the sax stars in high school—“Jordan Morgan, Mark Litzinger, Chris Smith on bari sax.” The names come easily to him as we sit and talk in the empty high school band room, and he points to the exact chairs these guys sat in, 20 years ago.
Soon enough, though, Armond became the guy to remember, anchoring the woodwind section in the high school concert and marching band and routinely standing up in jazz band performances to do, beautifully, the thing that intimidates high school musicians all over: the improv solo.
By graduation he was more than good enough to audition his way into Edinboro University’s excellent music education program. But the road onward held turns and bumps. He got his degree, a teaching certification in music education, and a first job teaching music in Meadville’s elementary schools—the job Irene Kipp had just retired from. Then, at the end of that very first year, the school board cut two music positions in the district, and Armond, as the most recent hire, was furloughed. His response to this blow is revealing. “I hung around for a year, did some subbing, hoping something would come back. I still worked with the marching band, stayed involved.” In other words, he kept the faith—in himself, in music, and in the people who knew him.
“Musically, he is driven by the students’ sense of success”
The next year he landed a job in the Harmony Area School District, in rural Westover, PA, toward the middle of the state. The district served so few students that they all fit in one K-12 school. And the music department? That was now our young Armond Walter. This meant conducting band, orchestra, and chorus, which he’d never done, AND directing the annual school musical. There was scrambling, but he had his music family back home to fall back on. Molly Moyer, Meadville’s choir director, and Jill Manning, its director of band and orchestra, sent Armond material, guidance, and reassurance. The year ended up being fulfilling, even indispensable. “I learned a lot about myself, about the kind of teacher I wanted to be.” And one year later, he was back in Meadville for good. Jill Manning had retired and Armond’s furloughed status meant he was the first applicant considered for the opening. Considered and hired.
At first, being back in the old band room, standing on the podium where his mentors stood, “definitely felt weird.” Band rooms are their own little worlds, places of indelible continuity. For three or four years teenage musicians spend hundreds of hours there, with many of the same people, and, as with a family, they absorb a kind of band room genealogy, knowing who came before and who’s coming up. The way Armond pointed to specific seats when discussing past musicians reminded me of this. And yet, during the six years after high school, when he was elsewhere, the “atmosphere” of Meadville’s band room had shifted from his student days. That’s how he put it. Scott Cressley, Armond’s conductor through all of middle and high school, built one kind of atmosphere. Jill Manning, Scott’s successor, of course built another. So that first year back Armond was hit, at once, with deep sameness and difference. Weird.
But he got his bearings, blending the best features of Scott’s and Jill’s leadership. And now, 12 years in, it’s the Armond Walter era.
Post-COVID, the ensembles are starting to grow again, especially marching band. He hasn’t built student interest and commitment through catering and compromises, though. None of the ensembles play a ton of pop music. Fun happens, yes, but always within structure. And the emphasis on focus and discipline hasn’t wavered.
Being established has brought to Armond a longer view of the role music plays in his students’ lives. He remembers teaching a boy in middle school band, a very modestly talented clarinetist. And then the family moved away. His time in band, though, gave the boy something he needed, structure and attention, the care of an intimate setting, and the model of good peer behavior. Armond could tell. He had long learned to read the signs. Three years later, Armond was with the marching band at an away game, and there was the boy, calling to him, “Hey, do you remember me?” His face lit up when Armond said yes. Of course yes. The young man was a senior now, headed to military service after graduation. He wanted Mr. Walter to know.
Nearing 40, Armond is now in the middle of much. He and his wife Sarah have a darling toddler, Amelia, and just last week, Sarah gave birth to twins, Avery and Oliver. Meanwhile, Armond’s musical leadership continues to expand. For example, he also conducts the Concert Band of Northwest PA. Under his baton the ensemble has grown to about 70 musicians, ranging in age from 16 to 80-something. They play in towns in the area, including in Meadville’s town green, Diamond Park, with its fountain, white gazebo, and stately shade trees. It’s the very spot Armond first felt the public role of music. In 5th grade, with the gazebo festooned in red, white, and blue, he and other elementary school musicians played alongside the high school band during Memorial Day ceremonies, a collaboration Irene Kipp engineered. He’s never forgotten that feeling.
As for the future, there’s a big family decision to make. “What do you hope your kids play?” “We’re thinking wind instruments. Nothing against strings. We just want our woodwind quintet.”
