Everyone has at least one thing that they are super passionate about, whether that is a subject in school, sports, or video games. Music happened to be the one thing that I am super interested in. I played sports for a lot of my life, and what initially drew me to sports was the competitive nature of them and the idea of constant improvement, this is the same reason why I love music so much. I have become less focused on the competitive side of music and more obsessed with continuous improvement and discovering how much I can push myself to be the best I can be. My 7th grade year in middle school Covid hit and everyone was sent into lockdown. I missed a lot of my friends and it was depressing seeing everyone trapped in their own house. Something beneficial that came out of Covid lockdown was how I had plenty of time to play the trombone. It was like a distraction from everything else that was going on. When I got to high school I had already developed a strong love for music, but high school brought me friends to share this love of music with and that just made me more interested and want to pursue it even more.

I started music in 3rd grade when my father brought home a plastic trombone. I participated in multiple “blast off” events, which helped beginner musicians get a better understanding of their instruments and helped them play. I took two years of band in elementary school and took only one semester of band in middle school before COVID-19 happened. High school band has impacted my life. Being in the MVHS marching band for all four years of high school has given me so many unique experiences. I have made countless close relationships with many people, and the opportunity to perform something I love has brought me immense joy. Outside of the marching band, MVHS had a jazz band and I was able to play a genre that at the time was super new to me and it was a struggle to adjust my playing style at first but I am slowly becoming more and more familiar with it every day. MUSD has presented me with so many opportunities to play my instrument and I plan to continue playing it as I have been accepted into the trombone studio at the University of Arizona. 

Music has taught me skills that I use everyday. Patience, it can take years to decades to master a musical instrument. I have been playing close to a decade and still have years ahead of me to increase my playing level. This recital was a humongous test of my patience. Each piece took about 2-3 months to get up to the level that I performed. Discipline, practice is completely useless without discipline. Practicing is important but what you practice and how you practice it is just as important. Mindlessly playing the easy part in a piece will not get you better at any of the difficult passages in the piece. It takes discipline to practice the hard or boring pieces in songs. Being in football has assisted me with discipline. All the morning workouts and exhausting practices we had to do because we knew doing the easy would be fun but would not get us to be as good as we wanted to be.  acceptance, Determination, there have been countless times where I have gotten frustrated playing and it can get easy to forget how far I have come just to get to where I am skill wise. But being able to push through those mentally tough moments has reassured me that I am able to do so much if I just do not quit and stay persistent. The last skill I have learned is acceptance. There have been many times when auditions or quizzes  did not go my way or how I thought they would go, sometimes silly things like my favorite sports team losing when I thought they would win. Music has helped me accept failure and losses and turn them into learning experiences and now I do my best not to think of not succeeding as failing but more as a lesson that can be learned from and something to look back on and improve from.

I wish I had taken the time to learn more instruments. I spent most of my time playing the trombone with a little amount of practice dedicated to other brass instruments like the baritone and trumpet, but  I never chose to learn any woodwinds like the saxophone and clarinet or the piano. I had easier access to instruments with my dad being a band director at a middle school. When I was younger he would constantly bring home instruments for me to try. I learned a song on the piano for a sixth-grade project but nothing more than that. I think learning more instruments could have revealed completely new knowledge that I lack for now because I chose to focus on one instrument.

I have played the trombone for almost a decade of my life. At the beginning of my musical career because of my experience with my instrument, I was limited to just a very few concert band pieces. However over the years, most recently in high school, I have explored a vast amount of genres that have expanded my experiences in music. In my sophomore year, I was introduced to jazz. I had known of it before I took the class at MVHS and have listened to plenty of jazz songs on the radio but before that time I never had the pleasure of performing it. From my freshman year to the end of my senior year I have been a part of a local youth orchestra, Tucson Philharmonia Youth Orchestra. In this orchestra, we would play many famous pieces of classical literature from famous composers of different centuries ranging from soft melodies written by Tchaikovsky to harsh dissonant chords from Stravinsky to famous movie scores from John Williams. If I had the chance to do this project again I would try to fit some other works that I have been exposed to during my musical career.