Is AP English Literature hard?

This passage was written for this course. It is from a short story set in Tucson, Arizona, in 2019. The narrator, a retired high school band director, has conducted a volunteer community band for eleven years.

Let me say first that I am not a man who needs to be needed. Thirty-seven years in a high school band room cure you of that. Every September a new crop of fourteen-year-olds arrives who cannot tell a quarter note from a parking ticket, and by May they play well enough to make a grandmother cry, and in June they walk out the door without a backward look, which is exactly as it should be. So when the board of the Saguaro Community Winds asked me last spring whether I might like "to take a season to rest," I understood it for what it was: a kindness. Arlene Voss, our president, has a sister who had a stroke at seventy-one. People project.

I told Arlene I was touched, and that I was not tired. She said, "Nobody said tired, Gordon." I said that was good, then, because I wasn't. We both laughed. Arlene has a nervous laugh, a flute player's laugh, mostly air.

Over the summer Denise Ochoa began running the sectionals. Denise teaches music at one of the middle schools and plays a capable second trumpet, and I suggested her for the job myself, or at least I did not object when her name came up, which in a volunteer organization amounts to the same thing. Sectionals are drudgery. You sit with the clarinets for an hour and fix the same eight bars. Someone has to, and I was glad to let her. When I came in on Tuesdays the players would be laughing at something she had said, and they would stop and turn toward me, still smiling, the way a room turns toward a door that has blown open in a draft.

I conduct with a baton my first marching band gave me in 1984. The cork handle has gone dark and taken the shape of my grip, so that no one else can hold it comfortably, which is the only real test of a tool. Denise conducts with a pencil. I have nothing against pencils.

In September the board sent an email about the new season. Rehearsals would move from Tuesday to Thursday evenings "to accommodate members' schedules," and the fall concert would be "shared among several conductors to give our players varied musical experiences." I read it twice. It was plainly a draft; Arlene writes everything by committee, and committees leave fingerprints on every sentence. I wrote back that Tuesdays had suited the band for eleven years and that I would see everyone at seven, as usual. No one replied, which is how volunteers agree.

So on Tuesday I came at six-thirty to set the chairs. I have always set the chairs myself. A conductor who lets the players arrange their own chairs will find the tubas drifting toward the exit by October. The custodian, a young man named Luis who wears his earbuds even while he is speaking to you, let me in and said something about Thursday. I told him I knew all about Thursday.

I set forty-one chairs in four arcs. I set the stands. I laid out the folders, though I noticed that someone had already removed the Holst from them and put in a piece called "Pulse of the Desert," which I did not program and which, as I looked it over, gives the low brass a great many measures of rest. At seven I stepped onto the podium. At seven-ten I began, because a band that waits for its stragglers teaches its stragglers to straggle.

I gave the downbeat to the empty chairs. I am not a sentimental man, and I will not pretend I heard anything. But I know the Holst so well that I could feel where the clarinets would come in and where the second trumpets always rush, and I brought them in and I held them back, and when I lowered my arms at the end of the first movement, Luis had stopped mopping in the doorway. He had taken out one of his earbuds. He was, I am fairly sure, listening.