It begins in chaos. The rustling of sheet music. The endless plucking of violin strings. The lingering conversations. Bows hum across cellos and bounce off the basses.

A singular note breaks through this sea of sounds, starting a chain reaction that ends in unison. Steven L. Reed steps onto a square platform and raises a baton like he’s done so many times before.

A simple gesture cues the musicians to launch into Jean Sibelius’ Andante Festivo, a rich single movement composed in 1922 that offers flowing melodic phrases.

Close your eyes, and it’s easy to imagine that these are the sounds of a professional company or, at the very least, a reputable university orchestra, performing in some magnificent concert hall. But this isn’t a concert hall. It’s a cinder-block room in a back corner of Upton Middle School. And this isn’t a university orchestra. It’s the St. Joseph High School Orchestra.

“OK, OK, not bad,” Reed says during a Wednesday night rehearsal as the strings still reverberate on the concluding note. “It’s been a while since we played that. I feel like some of you are getting it, and some of you aren’t. Watch for the tempo changes. The big crescendos need to start much, much softer and the fortes, well, we’re just screaming forte, so we need to warm up our sound. When we take the stage, we want it to be beautiful and not grrrrrr, right? OK, let’s take it from the beginning.”

Reed’s perfectionism underscores why this doesn’t sound like a high school orchestra. And his enthusiasm with the baton only hints at his passion for music. This is his 35th year teaching instrumental music to students – the past 33 of those in St. Joseph Public Schools – and his 28th year as the high school’s orchestra conductor. It’s also his last.

Reed is retiring at the end of the school year, and while the district is scheduling interviews in search of his successor, he is preparing for a farewell tour that will see his final group of students perform Wednesday at Lake Michigan College’s Mendel Center Mainstage Theatre before embarking on an East Coast trip to play at the Schlesinger Center at Northern Virginia College in Alexandria, Va., the National Presbyterian Church in downtown Washington, D.C., and both the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York City.

“I don’t know if it’s a fluke or if we got lucky,” Reed says of the Carnegie Hall booking, “but we’re the only group playing there on a Friday night in New York City.”

Inherited passion for music

Reed, who grew up in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, developed a passion for music from his father, Paul Reed, a piano player who studied at the University of Michigan.

“He used to pay me to take piano lessons from him,” Steven Reed says. “I’d get a quarter.”

Despite the incentive, the piano lessons didn’t take, something Reed says he still regrets, but the trumpet did. He began playing the horn in the fifth grade and continued his study of the instrument while earning his bachelor’s degree in music education from Western Michigan University.

In 1975, Reed landed his first teaching job in the small farming town of Marcellus, Mich., a place he describes as having “a post office, a store, a school, no stoplights and two bars.” After two years in Marcellus, Reed heard about a position as assistant band director at St. Joseph High School. He already had an in. Bill Ritchie, his college roommate, was teaching the school’s fledgling orchestra. Reed got the job, and Ritchie got a roommate.

A floundering program

While the band program was flourishing at St. Joseph High, the string program wasn’t. Despite Ritchie’s efforts, students weren’t exactly flocking to the orchestra. So after five years, he left teaching altogether for Nebraska, where he remains assistant principal bass for the Omaha Symphony.

After Ritchie left, the three band directors between the middle and high schools – Reed, Bob Brown and Vito Tenerelli – felt an obligation to keep the string program alive. While it was just another task for Brown and Tenerelli, Reed’s interest was piqued.

“I found out that I kind of liked it,” Reed says. “I had been acquainted with strings, thanks to Bill Ritchie, and here was a program that needed to be built. I looked at it as a potential job and started learning more about it. So I took some lessons, attended workshops and married a cellist.”

Reed, who is married to Susan Dietrich-Reed, a professional cellist and the coordinator of music for The Citadel Dance & Music Center in Benton Harbor, combined his musical background with his well-known tenacity to officially take over the string program in 1982.

“I had to learn a lot,” Reed says. “Sue was teaching me in essence what I had to teach my kids. I was only one page ahead of them, but I thought as long as I could stay one page ahead of them, I would be fine. … It was kind of a leap of faith. You had to make some good decisions on repertoire to make them sound good. That was the first goal, to make them sound good. And, you know, for them to get up on stage and perform took a lot of guts. But as the kids started to sound better, the program began to grow on its own.”

Reed says the real turning point came in 1994. The orchestra had been slowly building its reputation playing venues throughout Michigan when it received an unlikely invitation – to perform at the International Youth and Music Festival in Vienna, Austria.

“That was a big deal,” Reed says. “The orchestra had never done anything like this before. Being a trumpet player, I had the idea that I could use some of the band kids as well. So we went out with a full orchestra of strings, brass and percussion.”

That unlikely invitation got the orchestra noticed.

“You do something like that, and your appeal in the school system goes up 300 percent,” Reed says. “People suddenly thought what we were doing was important. We weren’t even all that good, but we were good enough.”

Musical progress

The Vienna trip had such an impact on his students that Reed has sought out similar trips every four years. The St. Joseph orchestra has toured Canada, performing in Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City in 1998 and 2002. And in the summer of 2006, the orchestra traveled to Italy and Austria on a concert tour celebrating Mozart’s 250th anniversary.

“Things are good right now,” Reed says. “And I just think it’s going to continue to grow. I know there’s 20 seniors in the orchestra now and there are 60 students from the middle school program that will be up here next year.”

Such success has also caught the attention of Reed’s peers. He was named Michigan Orchestra Teacher of the Year in 1997 by the Michigan School Band and Orchestra Association. The Michigan American String Teachers Association named him teacher of the year in 2004, and just last year he received the National String Educator’s Award from the American String Teachers Association. While grateful, Reed shrugs off such achievements. Instead he points to the 50 cellos and 20 basses the school and parents’ association purchased so students who had to lug their own instruments in each day wouldn’t be tempted to leave them at the school.

“I know most of the kids who leave here aren’t going to go on to have professional music careers,” Reed says. “But I want them all to walk out of this with their instrument. What makes me happier than anything else is finding out a former student might be a pre-med major but they’re also playing in a non-music major ensemble. That’s when I know they’re going to be OK.”

Gambling on Carnegie

When planning his final orchestra trip, Reed realized going back to Europe would be too expensive to sell. So in 2008 he began looking for something closer to home.

“I knew I didn’t want us to go to Disney World,” Reed says. “Everyone goes to Disney World. So I looked at New York City because it is the epitome of culture. Then I realized Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., were also pretty close. Once we made that decision and started looking for venues, I thought Carnegie Hall. I knew 99 percent of the musicians who play there are professionals, but why not give it a try?”

Reed’s gamble paid off. Not only will the 140-member orchestra, which includes a 20-member chamber ensemble, be performing at the famed music venue on June 11, but the itinerary also includes a master class performance at Lincoln Center and performances on June 15 at the Schlesinger Center at Northern Virginia College in Alexandria, Va., and June 17 at the National Presbyterian Church in downtown Washington, D.C.

The repertoire for these concerts, and Wednesday’s warm-up at the Mendel, not only includes Andante Festivo, but Sinfonia for String Orchestra from Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110; Ottorino Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances Suite III; Johann Baptist Vanhal’s Concerto for String Bass and Orchestra; Pietro Mascagni’s Intermezzo Sinfonico from “Cavalleria Rusticana”; and selections from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.”

A challenging program for any orchestra

‘He brings out the music in all of us’

“I remember preparing for that trip to Vienna,” says Nicole Gibby Munguia, a 1994 St. Joseph High School graduate who studied violin under Reed. “I remember how hard we worked. How hard we pushed ourselves. I remember feeling responsible for representing the music program at St. Joe and how much that meant to us. I also remember listening to the CD recording of the performance and thinking that we sounded like a professional orchestra. That wasn’t us. That was something he pulled out of us.”

Munguia is one of a wealth of students who have praised the impact Reed has had on the music program and their lives since news of his retirement has spread.

Celia Zhang, a 2009 grad and pianist who is now at Harvard University, says Reed opened up the possibilities of music for her.

“I had no idea how much appreciation I would have for music and how it would only grow,” she says. “He brings out the music in all of us. Being a part of that was one of the best experiences in my life.”

Dave Carlock, a 1988 grad, who has found his own musical success as a producer, songwriter and vocalist, says it was Reed’s confidence that he found infectious.

“He was just the epitome of cool,” Carlock says. “He’s that unflappable, laid-back musician everyone wants to be. Just that persona was inspiring. The guy is a rock star. ”

A musician’s musician

While Reed might scoff at his “rock star persona,” he is indeed a musician’s musician. He’s played the trumpet in the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra as long as he’s taught at St. Joseph. He’s also been the conductor of the Lake Michigan Youth Orchestra nearly as long. And while he’s leaving the high school, in part to pursue the guest playing and conducting gigs he’s always had to turn down, he will continue in both of those capacities.

Also on his agenda is spending more time in the audience, watching his two sons play their music. Jonathan, 24, is studying bass at Rice University in Houston. Alex, 22, who played cello through high school, is the lead guitarist in the Tallahassee, Fla., band Go Radio.

Reed says he hasn’t allowed himself to think of what it will feel like to walk away. He’s been too busy doing the job he’s done so well for so long. But when asked what he hopes those students who sit in that cinder-block room in a back corner of Upton Middle School will take away from his tenure, he knows exactly what to say.

“I always try to point out to them after a concert that there was a woman in the second row with tears in her eyes,” Reed says. “Or just the joy on the faces of people as they are leaving. I tell them, ‘That was because of you.’ I want them to know the power of music and the effect it can have. I want them to take away a love for music, then I consider that a success.”

jbonfiglio@TheH-P.com