Little drummer boy?

So we are moving Jamie to a new school next year. This has been the subject of much hand-wringing over the past couple of years but we are really settled and comfortable. The school is right in the neighborhood and is great. The only issue is that it has a special music curriculum. We like this of course, but Jamie "doesn't care about that stuff." Really he couldn't be less interested in music, even Johnny Cash these days. I thought we might have had a little breakthrough recently, and maybe it will prove to be so. The boys and I were at home playing in the living room and listening to the Master and Commander soundtrack. There are are a number of pieces featuring big booming drums and Jamie perked up immediately and asked "Is this war music? I like those drums." I told it was indeed war music and now he officially likes it.

So later that day I told Sarah about this and we thought, aha! here's our chance to break the news to him about not going back to his current school, and to maybe get him enthused about the new place. So we told him he was going there and could perhaps learn to play the drums like that. He paused and said, "So I'm not going back to my school?!" "No?" we said hopefully. He immediately burst into very genuine tears and sobbed for about 5 minutes.

Of course at this point we both wanted to just say OK, never mind you can go back, but we managed to stifle the impulse and interestingly, he got over it fairly quickly and hasn't said a whole lot else about it since, except for the occasional negative comments about not liking music. We haven't even yet been able to tell him that his best buddy won't be there either so I think it may get easier in time. We've also been trying to play the "you'll get recess now" card, which is making some headway I think.