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 Room for Improvement By JOHN MCMURTERY
It's 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and you have an important performance at 5. You have just finished class and all you need is some time in a practice room to warm up and maybe run through a couple difficult passages. Up and down the halls of the fourth floor you roam, frantically searching for an unoccupied practice room. Your blood begins to boil as you pass rooms that contain music, instruments, and jackets, but no students. Some rooms do not even have IDs in the container on the door. Finally, you spy an unoccupied room. You open the door, only to find one page of music on the piano rack, waiting for its owner to return. Meanwhile, 20 minutes have elapsed, your performance draws ever closer, and you still have no place to warm up.
Most music students who use the fourth-floor practice rooms are familiar with this scenario. Our security guards are also aware of the problem, which is why they regularly walk through the halls, making sure everyone has the proper ID. But we cannot expect them to patrol the fourth floor at all times. While it is wishful thinking to suggest one should be able to find an open practice room at the busiest time of the day, everyone should use common courtesy to ensure the rooms are being used to full capacity.
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Your blood begins to boil as you pass practice rooms that contain music, instruments, and jackets, but no students.
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If you must leave a room, please do so for only a few minutes at a time. It's okay to grab a snack from the cafeteria, but if you want to sit down and eat a full meal there, please remove your stuff from the practice room beforehand. If you are afraid it may be difficult to find a room when you return, plan your meal breaks to correspond with times that are less busy. If you are searching for a room, when you notice that after 15 minutes a room containing the belongings of someone else is still unoccupied, it should be acceptable for you to take the room. Please be courteous of the other students' property when you do this.
We also must express to the administration that we need new guidelines for students entering and leaving practice rooms. In the past, the unofficial rule was that one could usurp an empty room when the motion-sensitive lights switched off. But many of the motion sensors have ceased to function, so some lights stay on indefinitely while others shut off in five minutes. A rule with a more specific time frame needs to be established.
As the availability of practice rooms becomes scarcer, I invite the administration to examine the policies concerning practice rooms and revise them accordingly. Many schools have a system of signing out individual practice rooms, much like the process at Juilliard of obtaining a room for chamber music rehearsals. The system allows students to sign out a room in advance for a specified length of time. While such a process presents some inconveniences for both students and administrators, it may alleviate some of the uncertainties and frustrations concerning use of rooms.
Meanwhile, we need to exercise more courtesy when dealing with the practice room issue. Please remember, when you leave a room with your belongings in it to go out for dinner, you may be making things tremendously difficult for a student who urgently needs that room.
John McMurtery is a doctoral student in flute.
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