Linsell has high hopes for music department

“It’s the people… willing to work through frustration that are successful,” said Grant Linsell, MHCC’s new symphonic and jazz band conductor, who relishes his role.

While facing the challenge of adjusting to a new college environment, Linsell said he enjoys the actual teaching aspect of his job.

“The real stuff is good – the teaching is good, the classes are good,” he said. “The music at MHCC has historically been very, very strong.”

There’s no mistaking his enthusiasm.

Linsell decided that he wanted to be a musician while a freshman in high school. He was a mediocre band student, playing the clarinet. When he got a difficult piece to play, it frustrated him, “but the process of learning that, and then performing that successfully, blew my 14-year-old mind,” he said. “Plus, I got to do it in a room with all of my friends, and I thought that was so cool.”

It was then that he recognized his desire to be a musician, he said: “I didn’t know that I could be, but I knew that I wanted to be.”

Linsell said any great musician must be willing to work hard and not just rely on talent. “I have worked with a lot of talented students in my career, but I would trade all of them for students that work hard, no question,” he said. “Being curious and skeptical, and a hard worker, beats talent any day.”

He said he’s happy now to be a part of a college that is very accessible to lots of people. “There’s something about a school like Mt. Hood, that offers a pretty darn inexpensive education to people, that I can really get behind,” he said.

A Midwesterner who grew up in Detroit, Linsell was familiar with the face of poverty. “The only way out of pretty horrible poverty was through some kind of post-secondary (education) experience,” he said.

“I’ve seen the transformative power of higher ed. The kids that didn’t finish high school, or that finished high school and didn’t do anything else, had a really rough life after that.”

Linsell began student teaching in downtown Detroit while working on his undergraduate degree. He chose to teach because he’d had good relationships with his own teachers and wondered what it was like.

In doing so, he was able to blend his two passions. “If there was a way for me to make both, teaching and music happen, it seemed like a really good plan,” he said.

His instructors at the University of Michigan emphasized that “you have to be a great musician if you want to teach music,” he said. “Being a good teacher is not enough. I really took that to heart.”

Now, said Linsell, “I’m in a position where I get to do the two things that I wanna do, and that’s very uncommon, and I feel very lucky.”

One thing that hasn’t met his expectation is the low number of MHCC students participating in the music program.

His arrival as full-time band leader for MHCC follows the departure of longtime instructor Susie Jones, and then stints by part-time instructors.

“In a college this size, we should probably have two symphonic bands, and two or three jazz bands,” said Linsell. Currently, Mt. Hood has only one of each.

“We want to have as many people in the college community participate as possible. I’m sure that we could find a place for most people who want to be involved in music,” he said.

He is confident that with new outreach and effort, he can help grow the program.

“There are a lot of interested people around; we just have to find good ways to connect with them,” he said.