Musical Autobiography

Music has been a key player in my life since before I knew what it really was; the rattle of corn in a bucket and the scores in my Mom’s Lord of the Rings movies echo through my mind. One of my earliest memories is jumping round the kitchen, singing to Taylor Swift with my older sister as she washed dishes and I played with the baby. Out of all the languages I know, none were more pleasant to learn, nor more wonderful to know than Music. I struggle with many components of spoken languages, but math and the patterns within it have always come naturally to me, I believe this might be why Music was in all an easy learn for me, I just learned rhythms in sound instead of patterns on paper. When I was eight, my big brother, Robert, taught me

Once a year,my family’s homeschooling group would hold a Show and Tell, which was a chance for rather secluded children to perform for an audience of anywhere from twenty to forty people. My first time I gave a duet with my oboe playing older sister, who refused to perform a solo on an oboe. It was a new and difficult experience for me, coordinating myself to another within an equal duet. I was nervous wreck, practicing the same two lines over and over, ignoring my more pressing commitments. But when my sister stood beside me that day, I stood tall, breathed and played like Mr. Bollech taught me. Down the road, for my last “show and tell” I played a song I had memorized two years before, I had no nerves this time. I knew my song by heart this time around. I had played solos for large crowds, for judges, and for my family, the people I wished to be proud of me more than anyone else. When I pick up a flute, following the rhythms feels natural, taking it high and low is instinctual. I haven’t just learned music, I have learned from

Bettering myself in all music instead of keeping focus only on instrumental, I had noticed that most students who did both band and choir seemed more adept at music in both fields and wanted to improve my literacy in music as much as possible. In choir we worked in One Minute Theory booklets to better our technical reading of sheet music, these taught me how to read all sheet music, not just the parts written for flute and other C, Treble Clef instruments. I had an excellent start, but fell behind when we moved into the advanced. To fix my grades I tried going to the band and choir directors for extra help, but the former didn’t know what I was asking to learn as he didn’t use the booklets and kept teaching me what I already knew, while the latter gave group lessons and couldn’t work one on one. So I began applying the knowledge I did have to what I knew best, my flute, and later started working on the parts I didn’t fully grasp on a variety of pieces while working as the Band Music Librarian. It took time, but I began scoring better on the few work sheets pasted around in Band. Later I even earned top scores on the last two Choir tests of the