User:Duke history

My Musical Outlook
To me, music is a universal language that can be understood by anyone who is listening, regardless of his or her native language. For example, when you listen an Italian love song, you don’t have to speak Italian to understand that the man on the recording is singing about a woman that has broken his heart. Instead, the music does this work for the artist. Certain aspects of the music like the meter, dynamic, and instrumentation are capable of immediately giving the listener a sense of what the artist is trying to convey in the piece. Music is my way of speaking when I cannot find the right words to fathom my emotions. For example, after a long stressful day I may turn on my Ipod and put on an upbeat Rock and Roll tune to lift my spirits. Or in another instance, when I am feeling a sense of love and dreaminess I may listen to a very sweet Jazz Waltz. Or perhaps it is a Friday night and I am hanging out with my buddies and we just want something pleasant with a nice beat to listen to in the background, so we may put on some laid back Hip-hop music.

My Musical Background
As a child, I grew up raised by a mother who loved music. She would always have a variety of classic R&B and Soul music playing throughout our home. Her most common choices of artists in these genres were Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, the Temptations, Diana Ross & The Supremes, Jackson 5, and Smokey Robinson. I heard the music even more frequently and perhaps even louder whenever she was doing domestic chores around the house like vacuuming, cleaning out the garage, and washing dishes. She even listened to music in her everyday exercise routine, which I recall is when I heard the majority of her Michael Jackson playing. I believe she seemed to enjoy working out to the upbeat tempo featured in a large amount of his music.

A couple years later, my brother decided he wanted to learn to play the guitar. Being a very musical individual, my mother supported his decision to the best of her abilities. My brother was often around lots of other musicians at our church just a few miles from home and it was there where he found a majority of his guidance and teachers to further enhance his thirst for knowledge on the instrument. Seeing my brother enthused with his guitar all the time eventually began to make me curious about playing an instrument. However, I did not want to be like my brother and play the guitar. I wanted to be different. A lot of the musicians who I admired from our church were bass players so at age 12 I began playing the electric bass. For the first several months I played only by ear, listening to Rock and Roll bands that I liked whom I had usually heard on the radio. However, months later, largely due to my brother’s musical influence on me, I began listening to more contemporary jazz and fusion bass player like Victor Wooten, Marcus Miller, Stanley Clarke, and the late Jaco Pastorius. After about a year of listening to these artists admiring what they did and desiring to sound like them, I still didn’t understand how to make sense of their music enough to do it my self. As a result, my freshman year of high school I bought some basic music theory books and consulted a great local bass teacher. The combination of these two aspects really helped me as a player and I gradually began to become more musically literate. Another year later, during my sophomore and junior years of high school, I took two levels of music theory. The first was a class for understanding basic music theory. The second level was even more basic music theory plus beginner level Tonal Harmony. It was under the study of my high school music theory teacher why I made the decision to attend a music school and pursue a formal music education to enhance myself as a musician. I often remember in middle school knowing I wanted to just be a big rock star and play the bass all the time. However, as I matured and became more exposed to the realities of the world, it became more and more evident to me that I needed a formal music education. I explained to my teacher that I wanted to be a world-class performer and that I didn’t know where to go or what to do. Being a Boston man, my teacher suggested Berklee College of Music to me. From my in class performances and conversations about music with my teacher he knew that being a technically proficient player was one of my strong points as a musician. However knowing that I wasn’t involved in a music program at any of my schools since elementary school he was a aware of my lack of formal music training. Eventually, I auditioned for Berklee College of Music and was accepted to start in the May 2009 Summer Semester. Upon arriving here in Boston I have learned so much as a person and as a musician. As a result, a large portion of what I know musically has been gained through my studying at this institution.