I got the amazing opportunity to interview one of my fellow musicians this evening, and he had a very similar thought to my own. I won’t go into full detail of everything he said, (you’ll have to wait for the video essay to hear it all) but I’ll try to cover some of the main points.
A little bit of background first; Samuel is one of my good friends who I met through music, and we have spent a lot of time together over the past few years. I’ve gotten to know him very well, and decided he would be a good person to interview first to collect real human opinions and experiences rather than just reading through data and numbers and studies.
He had a lot of interesting things to say.
To start with, I asked him to share a little bit about how his musical journey began. “Music has been a part of my life for a very long time. I joined [band] when I was a 5th grader, because I saw the high school band performing and it was amazing to me.” He goes on to say, “When I first started out, I thought the clarinet was amazing. Like, it was very diverse, it stood out of all the instruments. And it looked very hard to do, so I… I started out and I had this competitor. I was second chair, and [she] was first chair, and we always competed, and I got really good doing that. I had this teacher, her name was Mrs. Menendez, and she really guided me to push myself to be better. She’s the reason I’m here today.
When asked about what things were like before he added music to his life, he responded with, “Its hard to remember, but I was bored a lot at home, didn’t really know what to do, and I always listened to tons of music in my free time. That’s really what guided me to be a musical person.”
I’d say that even thus far, his experiences are very similar to those of millions of us that are involved in music. I may not have been frequently bored as he says he was, but I found myself drifting from hobby to hobby, trying to find something, anything I had a passion for, and they were all coming up naught.
Next, I asked him if he noticed any changes from before he started music to afterward. His response is as follows: “Yes. So, after I joined music, or band, it really gave me a lot more … it gave me a thing to do, and it gave me skills that shouldn’t be easy to get.”
“So, my freshman year, I joined marching band. And I used to be kind of a lazy guy often, but yeah, marching band really made me a dedicated person and work hard. And it gave me some leadership skills, confidence- especially confidence. I was really shy in middle school.
“Would you say that being in band and being involved in music as a whole has improved your social skills and given you a better social health?”
“Absolutely. It has improved tons of things in my life. It’s helped me mentally when I might be down or something, because it really distracts me from the things that might be going bad in my life and makes me happier.”
This has only really scratched the surface of the first half of the interview. I’d love for you to hear more of it, for which you’ll have to watch the final video when it releases.
The Golden Thread 
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