When his father, a U.S. State Department diplomat, was appointed Consul General to Amsterdam in 1967, Hal Howland (‘69) found himself walking through the doors of American School of The Hague. He would graduate just two years later, in 1969—but those two years proved deeply meaningful.

 

Already a passionate musician since 1963, he quickly became part of ASH’s vibrant student culture, performing in the school’s Hootenannies—student-led gatherings celebrating folk and pop music. In his senior year, he led the school’s rock group, The Trans-Hades Vertical Subway.

 

While ASH at the time had no official band or orchestra, the creative freedom of these student-run performances gave him a platform to explore both music and writing. More than the music, though, it was the diversity of the ASH community that left a lasting mark. “I learned to recognize my cosmopolitan peers as individuals, not as members of cliques,” he recalls. “And I developed a broader worldview than I would have had in the States.” That sense of global awareness—first sparked during his father’s posting in Israel years earlier—deepened in the international halls of ASH.

 

He remembers his teachers vividly: English teacher Ed Weihe, who inspired his love of literature; French teacher Gale Bartholf, whose passion for language was contagious; pianist and chorus teacher Alice Mayberry, who he accompanied in performances of The Fantasticks; drama coach Richard Freedberg, who directed the show; and history teacher Paul Sand, who opened his political eyes and introduced him to liberal ideals through a model United Nations program. “I’ve written about many of them in both fiction and memoir,” he says.

 

After earning degrees in music and musicology, he built a rich career as both a musician and writer, performing jazz, pop, and classical music across the mid-Atlantic while publishing numerous works of fiction and memoir. Today, semi-retired in Key West, Florida, he continues to play and write—his most recent books tracing the intersections of art, memory, and personal history. A photo taken during an ASH rehearsal in 1968 is even the cover of his memoir The Human Drummer—a reminder that the rhythm of his life began long ago, in the echoing ASH gymnasium at 51 Paulus Buijsstraat.