Before they were professors, authors or conductors, Jessica Vaughan-Marra and Christopher Marra were just kids carrying instrument cases down crowded high school hallways.

Jessica carried an oboe. Chris carried a trombone.

At Mt. Lebanon High School, the music wing became Jessica’s second home. She remembers it less as a set of classes and more as a daily refuge: band rehearsals, school musicals, visual art electives, afternoons that blurred into evenings. “It wasn’t just performing,” she said. “It was the range of opportunities. You could try things. You could figure out who you were.”

Chris built his own universe around band at Burrell High School. Trombone quickly expanded into euphonium, percussion and drum corps. Music swallowed his free time until it shaped nearly every part of his identity. By high school, he wasn’t simply playing in band. Band was his life.

“Eventually, it became my identity. It was all-consuming,” he said. “I couldn’t really imagine doing anything else.”

The turning point came at an honor band festival, one of those whirlwind weekends where teenagers from different schools are thrown together and somehow learn to sound like a single ensemble. Watching the conductor pull something beautiful out of a roomful of strangers, Chris felt the path click into place. He didn’t just want to play. He wanted to lead.

“I wanted to give students that feeling,” he said.

Two decades later, the Marras are still chasing that same feeling, just at a different scale.

Now, associate professors at Duquesne University, the couple trains future music teachers from both sides of the classroom. Jessica mentors students in elementary and general music methods and supervises them in local schools, while Chris teaches conducting, directs ensembles and prepares aspiring band and orchestra directors to lead their own programs.

This year, they added another role: co-authors of a book, Foundations in Music Education, designed to prepare students not only for conducting and lesson plans but for something less visible and, they argue, more urgent: Staying in the profession despite the odds they might encounter.

Their partnership, personal and professional, stretches back to their undergraduate days at Duquesne University, where they met while studying music education. They first really talked while organizing a Valentine’s Day fundraiser. Jessica won the raffle prize. Chris teased that she should take him to dinner. She didn’t, but he met her parents that night anyway. The joke was the beginning. They have been together ever since.

The seeds for their book were planted years before they ever imagined writing one.

After graduation, life sped up. Chris accepted a band directing job in San Jose, and Jessica followed a year later. A decade passed in California classrooms, split between teaching during the school year and chasing graduate degrees each summer. Eventually, both enrolled in doctoral programs at the University of Michigan.

From the outside, the job looked joyful. Inside, it was relentless.

They taught multiple grade levels, ran concerts, handled travel logistics, fundraisers, equipment inventories and parent communication. Nights disappeared into rehearsals. Weekends belonged to performances. Teaching music, they learned, rarely stops at the final bell.

“When the thing you love becomes your job, it’s hard to separate,” Chris said. “You don’t really clock out. Your self-worth gets tied to how things are going.”

Jessica remembers those early years as disorienting. Newly certified to teach everything from kindergarten general music to high school ensembles, she often felt underprepared and alone, juggling multiple schools and expectations at once. The emotional load surprised her.

“There’s a lot of stress and a lot of isolation,” she said.

That disorientation eventually became the subject of her doctoral research. She focused on the first five years of a teacher’s career, when burnout peaks and many quietly exit the profession.

“If they don’t get support, they leave,” she said. “And we lose really good teachers.”

In 2017, a rare alignment brought them home. Seton Hill University had two openings that matched their specialties almost perfectly. They applied together and were hired together, before moving to Duquesne University earlier this year as assistant professors.

Back in western Pennsylvania, Chris began teaching an introductory course called Foundations of Music Education and quickly noticed the textbook felt outdated.

The authors had passed away. The examples didn’t reflect the realities his students would face. Topics like burnout, advocacy, and mentorship barely appeared. He reached out to the publisher about revising it and never heard back.

A colleague tossed out a half-joke: write your own.

“So we did,” Chris said.

Over three years, mostly at night after their children went to bed, they built the book from scratch. They recorded lectures, expanded notes, and invited contributors from other universities to write about areas like modern band and equity in music classrooms.

Unlike most methods texts, theirs talks directly about the parts of teaching that often push people out. The emotional load. The need for mentors. The politics of defending arts programs. The importance of boundaries.

“We didn’t want to pretend it’s just concerts and applause,” Jessica said. “We wanted students to understand the full picture.”

Chris focused on the broader case for music education, why it belongs in schools and how teachers articulate its value to administrators and families. Jessica concentrated on psychology and motivation, and what happens after graduation, when new teachers are suddenly on their own.

“If teachers burn out,” Chris said, “none of the rest matters.”

These days, their professional and personal lives are almost indistinguishable. They share a department, conduct different ensembles and debrief rehearsals on the drive home. Their 13-year-old, Everett, recently played violin in Jessica’s orchestra and trombone in Chris’s band in the same concert.

“We joke that our department meetings happen in the car,” Chris said.

For families in Mt. Lebanon and neighboring districts, where band concerts, orchestras and school musicals can feel inevitable, it is easy to forget how unusual that level of access actually is. “Mt. Lebanon is extraordinary in that respect. In fact, Western Pennsylvania is special,” Jessica said. “Not every place has consistent music education from elementary through high school.”

Music, the Marras argue, is not just about performances. It teaches collaboration, persistence and responsibility to a group. Skills that carry well beyond the stage.

“It’s one of those activities where you can say yes,” Jessica said. “And you know your kid is gaining something meaningful.”

“It teaches you to listen with everything you have,” Chris said. “To be responsible to something bigger than yourself.”