The Music Man

After I wrote about The Music Man last month, I was thinking about Marian Paroo and Harold Hill again and realized that (excepting the fact that Hill is actually a fake) there are a number of contrasts between them as music teachers and that these differences may contribute to their initial antagonism.

As a piano teacher, Marian Paroo interacts with students individually (as is shown with Amaryllis), but Hill, as a band leader, deals with multiple musicians simultaneously.  Paroo's piano is definitely a stationary instrument, but Hill's band is mobile.  The piano is also fully polyphonic, but most (if not all) of the instruments in a marching band are monophonic.

Paroo and Hill are so different that even with respect to this one similarity (their positions as music teachers), they have very little in common.