Case Study: Mobilizing a Community to Win Yamaha Instruments

Teasley is a Title I school with 53 percent of its 1,400 students on free and reduced lunch. Many students and families in the band program rely on borrowing school-owned horns.

“I tell them, ‘Anybody can be involved in band; it doesn’t matter the financial state of your family, it doesn’t matter whether you can find an instrument or not. I will find an instrument to put in your hands,'” Furilla says.

Because of Furilla’s mission to include everyone regardless of financial constraints, students sometimes need to take turns playing instruments in class with some just blowing through their mouthpiece and mimicking the fingerings.

The new Yamaha horns — two tubas, two bass clarinets and one French horn — have made a big difference in giving more playing opportunities for the students. “Now I’ve got a sixth grade class with eight tuba players, and each one of them is able to have a tuba in their hands,” Furilla says. “If it wasn’t for Yamaha and those two tubas that I got, I would have two students that would be playing on their mouthpieces and not have an instrument to play on.”

Playing a new instrument right out of the packaging has led to increased dedication from some of the benefitting students. “By creating a situation where we have new instruments in the hands of students that care deeply about music, it gave them a bigger sense of pride,” Furilla says. “It was great to see the students opening the cases, seeing their faces as they’re unwrapping the instruments from the cases. That whole process gave them more of a connection and a sense of pride not only to the instruments but also to our music program.”

Eventually Furilla hopes to have enough instruments, so that students in different class periods won’t have to share, and each student could take an instrument home to practice. The school needs to purchase at least 30 instruments.

“I’m still in the process of trying to create the funds to buy more instruments because I don’t have enough funds to have each tuba player have a tuba at home,” Furilla says. “We’re still working toward that.”

Teasley won the instruments in May 2014 through a Yamaha online contest, “The Quest for Music Education.”

Furilla had extensive experience performing with Yamaha instruments as a member of The Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps staff based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He first heard about the contest from a fellow instructor at the Yamaha-sponsored drum corps.

“I can think of no better company for consistent high-quality instruments than the Yamaha Corporation,” Furilla says.

For the competition, bands recruited adults in their communities to complete online quests on a variety of topics, including Yamaha Artists, Yamaha internships and music advocacy. “Because the Quest was educationally charged, they got information on backgrounds of musical instruments, different families of musical instruments, composers,” Furilla says. “The Quest was more than just [an online voting contest].”

At Teasley, Furilla convinced the school to devote faculty meetings to participating. But beyond the staff, teachers and booster parents (both at the middle school and local high school), he also used his ties to small business owners in downtown Canton, where his wife runs a company.

“Every opportunity that I was at a microphone, I was mentioning the Quest and the difference it could make in getting instruments into the hands of our students,” Furilla says.

Under Furilla’s direction, the band students spread the word to families and neighbors across the small town. “The most important thing for me was to get as much of the community involved in it as possible,” Furilla says.

“What I went after were instruments that we were in great need of,” Furilla says. “Both of the tubas that we had were from the ’80s, and they were put together with duct tape.”

Winning the Quest has helped with some of the more difficult instruments to find. “I really went after the instruments that were more expensive and harder for people to donate,” Furilla says. “It’s easier for me to get clarinets, trumpets, saxophones and flutes … but much harder to get some of those unique instruments.”

For his prize, Furilla selected two YBB-105WC tubas, two YCL-221II bass clarinets and one YHR-567 French horn.

This article originally appeared in the 2016 Spring issue of Yamaha SupportED. To see more back issues, find out about Yamaha resources for music educators, or sign up to be notified when the next issue is available, click here.