Max Delgado: ‘Create Your Own Music’ - 2026 Commencement Remarks

Seniors, it's my honor today to speak to you on behalf of the faculty who have had the joy of teaching you — and of being taught by you — over these past four years. Every community you've entered, you've made better.

Schools are communities, but they're also neighborhoods. Athletics, humanities, math, science — these are streets you've traversed. One of the great joys of being a principal is that, like you, I get to walk these neighborhoods with you. When students realize I carry the same passport they do, it prompts a near-universal question.

Who's your favorite?

Which department? Which office? Which corner of the Upper School? I always answer the same: I love every neighborhood equally. But earlier this year, one of my advisees pushed a little harder: "Mr. Delgado, this is your last year. Just tell us – which is your favorite?"

Well, since this is my last year, and my last speech, and since Dr. Davis has paid me through the end of the month, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity … to evade the question one last time.

But there is a more transparent truth I can offer. If you'd asked the question differently, I would have answered differently. The question might be: “What parts of your job – even if you don’t get to do them often – remind you of why you got into education in the first place?”

Now that's a better question. The answer might surprise you.

It's observing music classes.

Now, I’m a trained English teacher, and I've spent almost as much of my career in academic planning as student life. But it isn't when I'm teaching my favorite book, or sitting in a budget meeting, that I remember why I love schools. It's watching you play music.

There's a backstory here.

When I was in high school, I was a terrible musician. I was the kind of kid whose heart would stop at a beautiful line in a poem — but music never dazzled me the way words did. But that didn't matter to my mom. She forced me to join band in high school because she thought it would keep me out of trouble.

Music didn't come easy to me. 

Luckily, there were two things that came very easily to me — and that's why I survived four years of band: memorization and public performance. I never learned to read sheet music. But I could memorize a thing. And I could stand in front of people and make that thing sound fancy.

This ability has served me my entire life. As a kid, it opened a lot of doors, and it got me out of a lot of trouble I totally deserved.

But there was one place I couldn't hide.

Sight-reading.

Sight-reading is when a musician is handed an unfamiliar piece and has to decode and perform it in real time. No preview. No rehearsal. No memorization. The gap between my polished performance and my sight-reading was so profoundly awful that my music teacher, Mr. McClure, thought I was being insubordinate the first time he handed me a sheet to play.

After realizing my failed attempt was sincere, Mr. McClure pulled me aside. "Max,” he said. “I can teach you how to do this. And if you want to become a versatile musician, I can even teach you one of the most ambitious skills a musician can develop: improvisation."

I should have taken a beat. But I was a kid. And I was embarrassed. So I looked him in the face and said: "Mr. McClure – I have no interest in spending my life as a musician."

But Mr. McClure was an excellent teacher. He eyed me calmly and said, “That’s too bad, because all of life is improvisation."

Earlier this year, I was processing my childhood band trauma with Dr. Padworski – and because he is an excellent teacher, he picked up where Mr. McClure left off. He walked me through the difference between sight-reading and improvisation, and I realized, as an adult, what I had completely missed as a kid.

The point of sight-reading is not necessarily to play the music correctly. The point is responsiveness — the ability to encounter something unfamiliar and stay oriented long enough to make meaning from it.

The discomfort is the instruction.

And then there's improvisation – which is often misunderstood as unlimited possibility. It is actually built on something quite narrow: the study of constraint. Students always learn to improvise within a tight structure: the teacher will mandate a key center, a time signature, a harmonic progression, a mode.

The training never begins with freedom. It begins with limitation.

Great improvisers aren't valued because they pluck from infinite options. They're valued because they make compelling choices within limited conditions and tight boxes. And people are always wowed when big things come out of little boxes.

Miles Davis understood the gift of constraint. In many of his solos, he would limit himself to a single note – extending it, shortening it, letting it breathe – manipulating it in a way that made it both familiar and profoundly rare. He could tolerate silence. He listened to it. He didn’t play every note in front of him.

 

The box is what makes the bigness possible.

Constraint.

Your faculty have been teaching you these lessons for four years. The academic program at CA is just as much about constraint as expansion. In science, we reduce scope to isolate truth. In history, the sources we discard matter as much as the ones we keep. In painting, negative space shapes the work. Your writing is stronger when you write less.

Limitation is what forces thinking in a new way.

Graduation is a season of expanse and possibility – of open fields and discovering what’s out there in all that tall grass. All of that is true and valuable. But your faculty want to offer you a quieter gift today: limitation. When the discipline of constraint becomes genuinely internal — when it lives in you rather than being imposed on you — you'll find ways to move flexibly inside it that will – ironically – make your life more expansive.

There are other corollaries.

I met a coach in Nashville who would rotate trash cans through the middle of the soccer field and tell his players, 'Play around it.' He believed athletes learn best by adapting to changing conditions. If you practice in a tight space, an open field against your fiercest competitor suddenly becomes liberating.

What defines you isn't what you do – it's how you respond when the thing you wanted to do is no longer an option. And that changes everything about how you play – an instrument, a game, a life. You don't play to execute. You play to keep options alive because you understand the short game is always in service of the long game. And when the moment comes to act, you will execute in ways that feel both familiar and profoundly rare.

It took me a couple dozen years, but I think I finally understand what Mr. McClure was trying to teach me. He knew that if I grew up to be a guy who could just memorize well, or stand up in front of people and give a fancy speech, that wouldn’t amount to much of a life for me. My most authentic life would come from learning how to perceive clearly when the room changes shape; from staying emotionally regulated while adapting to conditions I didn't choose.

Class of 2026, your future will include many conditions you don’t choose.

You are so well-equipped for this.

When I was your age, I didn't understand any of this — this speech would have sounded like moon talk to me. My teens and early twenties were much louder than they needed to be. I couldn’t tolerate silence. I played every note in front of me. But I was lucky to have a grandmother who saw me clearly.

She used to tell me the more urgent it feels, the more likely it is that it can wait. 

The practice of waiting became a form of constraint for me. It bought me just enough seconds to come up with a better idea. For a kid like me, waiting, as long as it didn't come from fear or avoidance, was how I learned to hear my quieter voice. My grandmother believed that my authentic life wouldn't be the result of the things I did or held onto. It would be the result of things I stopped doing or let go. Of constraints. This idea became the compass of my life, especially when I didn't know what to do. 

There will be times, seniors, when you don't know what to do.

Your faculty want you to know that there is a voice inside you worth hearing. It isn't afraid. It is unmoved by outside noise or doing what's convenient. It will be thoroughly unimpressed by your well-laid plans. It doesn't offer you infinite options – it offers you the right one. Most importantly, it never feels urgency – it is frustratingly calm – it does not ambush, which is how we usually expect big messages to reach us.

Your voice will speak in the quiet moments. It will rarely be louder than a whisper, except at rare intervals in your life, or if you ignore it too long. Learn to hear it. Protect it. Trust it. Because in the moments that matter most, it will be the thread that pulls your life into its proper shape — not by expanding your possibilities, but by narrowing them to what is true.

What I've been circling around, I suppose, is this: if we've tried to teach you anything over these last four years at CA, it's discernment. How to know what to do when you don't know what to do. The academic program, the social-emotional program, the athletics and arts — all of them are a proxy for a kind of decision-making that holds discovery and planning in balance, that understands structure as the thing that makes freedom possible. This is the temperament of adulthood. Not the pursuit of answers. But what posture we take when facing the unknown.

A couple of weeks ago, I had my last round of class observations here at CA.

I wanted to close my time by observing Rock Ensemble with Phil Jones. It was the best part of my week. While it's always a joy to watch a master teacher work, what I loved most was watching his students in flow. They were in a mental space, between skill and intuition, between focus and relaxation, that I was never able to achieve as a kid.

There is a special joy in watching kids do something you can't do.

Your parents understand this. Your teachers understand this. This is what it means to teach a kid, to raise a kid, to love a kid. It reminds you of something ancient and irreducible — big things always start as small things. Tiny, defiant, joyful acts of potentiality that unfurl according to their own logic. You create your own music. 

A new song. And that's what you are, Class of 2026. Every one of you is a new song. You came here smaller than you are today, found your own tempo, and composed yourself in front of us. Teaching, like parenting, offers you this strange and humbling gift: The chance to play some part in a small thing becoming a big thing.

It has been one of the great joys of my professional life to travel these neighborhoods with you and to hear your songs. So go on. Go do your thing. Your faculty will be watching, listening, holding their breath, and wowed when big things come out of little boxes.