COEUR d'ALENE - Lake City High School music teacher Tim Sandford is known on the school's campus for his easy, goofy banter with music students.

Sandford is also well known for demanding perfection from those same 150 band, orchestra and stomp kids.

LCHS choir programs, directed by Terry DeGroot, include about 150 more LCHS students, and are equally demanding. Many band, orchestra and choir students arrive on campus at 6:30 a.m. for "zero hour" practice.

This year as part of the LCHS Christmas concert performance, Sandford's students purposefully illustrated for the audience what an orchestra sounds like if it executes a musical score with complete accuracy, which is their standard. Then they played the same piece at 95 and 85 percent proficiency - each student making just a couple of mistakes.

Music played at 85 percent proficiency - a strong "B" grade in other subjects - is, in Sandford's words, "epic failure" when applied to musical performance.

The audience agreed. Music is a freakishly demanding mistress.

Shad Frazier, a University of Idaho music education student performing his in-service teaching under Sandford this semester, says Lake City band and orchestra students have been practicing some of the more complex pieces performed at the Christmas concert since school started in August.

Most of the Christmas tunes, which Frazier notes "are not as complex as the Bachanale the orchestra played," were mastered in four to six weeks of daily practice.

In addition to expanding their musical repertoire, mastering their craft, learning to read music as a second language and wowing audiences with the result, the dedication required to achieve perfection imparts additional lessons, Frazier said.

"Music students learn a lot of life skills," he said. "They learn responsibility, discipline, cooperation and leadership. They learn to express themselves through music, but also how to explain that process to others. Keeping to a strict practice schedule also ties back into the lessons of responsibility and discipline."

Students of orchestra, band, stomp and choir learn a lot about the individual's responsibility to their community. Frazier was particularly struck by the impact of that lesson:

"We talked a lot about how do you get students invested in your program and how do you get them to work hard," he said. "This culture continues to build on itself because your freshmen come in and see that the upper classmen do everything that is required, and more."

Donna Emert is with University of Idaho Communications.