missing academics with BM

imagep
Sun, 27 Feb 2011 15:29:30 +0000

SimpleLife is correct. It is most likely too early to worry a lot.

But at the same time, you are fortunate to have even the slightest clue about what your student may want to study in college or do for a living. Thats one of the advantages about having a musical child. When I was a high school freshman, or even a college freshman, I had no clue at all.

One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t pick up on my sons interest in music until he was in the 10th grade, and even then I didn’t take it that serously. Now he is a high school senior and trying to make up for years of preparation that he didn’t get because I wasn’t more aware that he might consider it as a profession. For some reason I always assumed that he would be more interested in a field involving engineering.

When he was in the 10th grade, before he got his drivers license I would take him to school in the mornings, and that was about our only opportunity to discuss things like “what do you want to be when you grow up”. One day I jokingly said “you seem to like music, maybe you should consider that”. I really expected him to reject that idea the same way he rejected every other thing I suggested. He didn’t, and I was shocked. He said “ya, I was thinking about that”. I felt like I had hit a home run in our early morning discussion sessions - for the first time ever.

I really should have saw it coming, years earlier. Once when he was very young he was playing on my mother in laws piano, she screamed at him to “get off the piano”, he has disliked her ever since for it. Then later, when he entered the 6th grade, he decided on his own that he was going to take string orchistra in school and chose the violin. I just thought “whatever”. I really didn’t expect him to take it seriously. When he got his first (rented) violin, I was amazed to watch the care and respect for the instrument when he took it out of the case for the first time. It was like he just automatically understood that a musical instrument couldn’t be treated like a “toy”. He sat first chair for his first year in string orchistra, and did a solo and a trio at his first school concert. All but one of those students who played a solo or in a special small ensemble at that concert are still highly envolved with music. I just didn’t understand the significance of it.

His next two years in the middle school orchistra he seemed to completly loose interest in it due to a VERY bad instructor. He had talked about dropping out of orchistra class, so I assumed that his interest in music had wained. Then he comes home one day and announces that he needs a pile of money to go on a band trip. I was like “what, you don’t play a band instrument”, he explained that they needed someone to hold up one end of the banner at a competition in orlando that the 8th grade band goes to every year. When he got back from the band trip, he was all about band. They had won the jr. high band competition where they competed against jr high bands from all over the country. He immediately requested to start taking trumpet lessons, I got in touch with the band director (who was very discouraging - he really didn’t want a student in marching band who couldn’t already play a marching band instrument). He practiced all summer but ended up being a “rotator” in the marching band because of his lack of trumpet experiance. By the time that region band auditions came up, his band director told me that he thought that my son had a chance of making region band, again, I was kind of shocked. He had less than 6 months of trumpet experiance and would be competing against people with as much as 4 years of experiance. He ended up not making region band that year, so I assumed that his band director was just blowing smoke up my you-know-what. Later that same year his band director told me that he had caught up to the best 9th grade band students and had surpassed many of them. Again, I really didn’t think anything about it.

It was the next year that I suggested that he consider music as a career. That year he did make region band, the next year he made Senior region band and was invited to audition for allstate band (didn’t make it), then this year he did make allstate band. During his 11th grade year he decided that he would audition for a top level drum corps, I mentioned this to his band director, his band director said “I guess you are wanting me to talk him out of it”, he then further said “don’t worry, he want make it, it’s mostly college music majors in that drum corps”. But somehow he did end up “making it”, although he was only an alternate.

Anyhow, sorry for the long tale, but I now regret that I didn’t encourage him more when he was younger and that I never got him into any type of summer music program and wasn’t more encouraging when he was younger.

Now we are faced with him having to compete for very few college music slots, when he has only a fraction of the formal music training that many of the people that he is competing with have. It was half way though his first college audition that reality really set in with me - when I found out that the college would only be accepting 4 trumpet students. I was a business major in college and there were hundreds if not thousands of business majors at my college. I never really understood just how competitive or intense that music was at the college entrance level.