This is a photo of me auditioning for American Idol in the summer of 2009. Over the years I had developed this love for music and performance. I had always grabbed my little stool, set it up in the middle of the kitchen and sing songs for my family at the end of dinner but I didn’t fully begin my musical journey until September of 1996, I was four years old and my parents began bringing me to piano lessons.
At first I always had to be pushed to practice and was very lazy about the entire piano experience. Whenever there came a time that I began to struggle I would want to give up but my parents just continued to push me to learn more. Finally around the age of eight or nine I was really starting to enjoy the piano. I could learn songs much more easily and enjoyed performing them. I couldn’t wait to learn a new one so that I could be recorded playing it. Because I could play the piano, whenever we had guests it was standard practice that I play at least a little something. For every birthday I knew that I had to play Happy Birthday via telephone to distant relatives and more than once for the immediate family in the home.
Then people expected me to know things such as composers or other pieces from classical to popular songs. I assumed that they were right so I began to learn more and I also figured that I must learn to love performing. Soon I began singing and growing more into the type of musician I believed I was supposed to be. I learned about all of the different genres and musical time periods. I was playing the piano and singing at the same time by the time middle school came around. I even began participating musicals in the seventh grade. And then in high school to fully cultivate the performance aspect I tried out for the dance team and made it, never took a dance class in my life, but as a performer I figured people expected this skill from me and I learned it and performed it well. Suddenly I had all of the music and performance bases covered. I was a musician, an actress and a dancer. Something as simple as playing an instrument constructed me into someone I thought a musician should be and what he or she should know. Don’t get me wrong I was in no way forced into the activities I took on, I love them all dearly and am very passionate about my music but I know that I partially took part in them because of the prototype that existed in my mind of what a musical performer should be able to do.
I find this very interesting because there is also somewhat of a social construction behind piano playing. It is generally thought that being able to play the piano is a sign of high education and/or being high class. People had at one time even thought that their kids listening to famous musicians such as mozart would actually make there children smarter (although this has not actually been shown in research). Piano playing signifies education and therefore causes many parents to put there kids in piano lessons at a young age.
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