Angelique Chatman
July 4, 2013
English 111
My Journey Through The World of Music
As a young girl, I became a cheerleader for my elementary school. Because of this, I got the chance to participate in all of the local festivities. Football games, homecoming parades, Christmas parades, etc. That’s when I seen and heard a marching band for the first time. I didn’t really quite know and understand what it was or what a marching band was all about. I wasn’t even fully sure of what an instrument was, I just knew that I loved the sound that was coming out of it.
Because of my curiosity for marching bands, I enrolled in the band class in middle school when I was in seventh grade. That’s when I began to learn the basics of music. Tone, intonation, different foreign terms such as crescendo, decrescendo, forte, piano, mezzo forte, etc. I learned
the difference between a whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, and the value of each. The more I learned about music, the more I fell in love with it.
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Eighth grade is when I was first introduced to the flute. I learned everything about the instrument, inside and out. The names of the different parts, the “keys”, how to assemble it and take it apart. Then I learned the different “fingerings” for the different notes to produce sound. I sounded a bit rusty at first, as every beginner does, but all it took was hard work, dedication, and practice for me to become a great player.
After middle school came high school, where I joined the Petersburg High School Marching Crimson Wave. Things were a little bit different when I joined this band. The song arrangements were a little more difficult than what I was used to, and I learned how to play the piccolo. The piccolo is similar to the flute, only smaller in size and higher in pitch which requires you to tighten your embrochure to play. I had to attend band camp, something I had never heard of before. During band camp, you arrived at the crack...