Elijah Croyle practices a short while on an electric guitar before joining the bassoon section and the rest of the band Wednesday last week at Valley View Middle School in Snohomish. (Dan Bates / The Herald)

Elijah Croyle practices a short while on an electric guitar before joining the bassoon section and the rest of the band Wednesday last week at Valley View Middle School in Snohomish. (Dan Bates / The Herald)

Snohomish composer, 14, finds inspiration all around him

SNOHOMISH — As a toddler, he’d strum his knuckles on the edge of a table, a cast iron radiator or whatever else he could find, searching for a rhythm or beat.

Sometimes, his fingers would chafe and bleed, but he kept feeling his way to a pleasing sound.

He would hear musical instruments in consonants and vowels or the hum of traffic. He was playing on hand-me-down drums by the age of 3.

Shortly after his seventh birthday, Elijah Croyle was at the dinner table when his dad’s fork struck a salad bowl and made a clink.

“That’s a C sharp,” the boy announced.

Steve and Andrea Croyle looked across the table at one another. Both were music majors in college, but their son hadn’t shown any sustained interest in sitting down with his mom for piano lessons.

“In hindsight, I realized it was boring to him because he knew everything that we were telling him,” said Andrea Croyle, an elementary school music teacher at Central Primary in Snohomish.

Steve Croyle touched his fork to other objects and Elijah identified different pitches, although the boy didn’t have the vocabulary to describe all of them.

In the weeks, months and years ahead, it would become increasingly obvious to his parents just how wired Elijah’s brain was for music. He’d soon become a young composer.

The challenge became finding a balance in providing their precocious son a musical education that was at his level and letting him be a regular kid growing up with children his age.

By fourth grade in the small Pennsylvania town where he lived at the time, Elijah would head over to the high school for a music theory class before returning to elementary school to be with his peers for lessons in multiplication and fractions.

He composed classical music, both electronically and on paper, and found inspiration all around him.

Elijah now attends Valley View Middle School where he is in the eighth grade. Music classes are the book ends to his school day with jazz band in the early morning and concert band in the afternoon.

Earlier this year, he asked his band teacher, Mike Mines, if it would be alright for him to compose a work for the 29-member jazz band. In 31 years at the school, Mines never had a student make such a proposal, to write and arrange a work for the entire group.

Elijah came back with a breezy Brazilian-style jazz samba. He calls it “Baja, California,” a place he has never been.

“I was pleased, but I was not surprised,” Mines said. “…I know Elijah.”

Mines brought the song — as well as Elijah and his dad — to a rehearsal of the Jazz Police in January. Mines is a member of the large and popular Seattle band, which features many accomplished musicians, including several music teachers. Elijah was a little nervous and remembers he might have even trembled a bit.

The band studied, played and recorded the song, giving Elijah a few suggestions, which were less about the music and more about notations and ways to make it easier to read.

“When they played it and heard it they were surprised by how sophisticated it was,” Mines said.

Mines helped Elijah polish the composition, which the Jazz Police performed at Tula’s Restaurant and Jazz Club in Seattle in March. Elijah was there to listen and explain his work. The night was one big adrenaline rush for the polite and soft spoken 14-year-old.

Baja CA World Premiere – Jazz Police from Steve Croyle.

Yet it was his middle school jazz band he had in mind when he wrote the piece. He wanted to compose something that everyone — flutes, trumpets, trombones, saxophones, drums, clarinets, electric guitar, bass, congas, shaker and who knows what else — could all do together.

“My goal was to keep it simple,” Elijah said. “I just hoped they’d have it playing in their heads over and over again, that it’s catchy.”

His classmates have always been encouraging, he said.

“I don’t think his peers are surprised by anything he does,” Mines said. “Because of his humble nature, they just support him. They know he is talented. They know he is gifted. He is not always the one with the solo. He is not always featured. He wants others to be featured.”

Steve Croyle, a worship pastor at Mountain View Community Church, said his son really isn’t a competitive musician.

“He just loves sharing it with people, and to us that’s pretty neat,” he said.

Huntingdon County Fair Talent Show (August 2010)

Elijah plays piano, synthesizer, electric guitar, bass, bassoon, mandolin, ukulele, drums and harmonica. In the past, he has played the cello, violin and trombone, and he’s apt to dabble with just about anything else he can get his hands on.

For his middle school band director, rewards come in many forms.

Mines gets to work with many motivated student musicians during the course of a day. He sees that dedication as the teens file into the music room for jazz band, a zero-period class that begins with the 6:30 a.m. bell.

Elijah, he said, is an exceptional music student.

But it is more than that, the band director said. It’s his eagerness to learn and his joy in being part of something larger than himself.

And it’s the sincerity in his gratitude that he’s not shy about sharing with his teacher.

“He thanks me every single day,” Mines said.

Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; stevick@heraldnet.com.

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