My Musical Autobiography

I grew up in a military family. I was born in Michigan and then we moved to Germany for three years. However, my father was then stationed in south Georgia, and yes, I mean the state, not the country. So growing up in Georgia you wouldn't think there would be a lot of cultural diversity in the music. The interesting thing about Columbus, GA is that many military families retire there, and almost everyone I went to school with had lived in another country at some point in their life.

 

One of my first boyfriends had recently moved from Germany and turned me onto German heavy metal and techno. Two of my best friends had recently moved from Korea and played me many of their favorite tunes. I also had a friend from Nigeria who taught me a lot about African music. My fathers' favorite music has always been jazz, so I heard jazz music on every car ride we took: When it takes 10 hours in a car just to visit your grandparents, that's a lot of jazz music.

 

I have also grown up as a dancer my entire life. Starting at a young age all of the music we danced to was typical: Celine Dion for lyrical, classical for ballet, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Britney Spears for Jazz, and a lot of disco and swing for tap. Once I got to college, my dance career expanded immensely. I learned African dancing to beats, we did a lot of modern to strange string music and weird beats. Some dancing was in silence, which taught us the beauty of silence. I even got to perform a ballet to Chinese music.

 

Speaking of the Chinese, a couple of years ago a Chinese dance troupe came to Converse to perform for us. It was 2 hours of Chinese dance, singing, and musical instruments. Very interesting stuff, and they even came and took a dance class with us! They didn't want to join in at first when we were working out until we starting shaking our butts.

 

My favorite type of music that I learned of growing up was when I had to write my final music paper for my IB diploma. I researched Chinese Opera and singing styles and compared it to Italian Opera. I learned quite a bit about the subject: the costuming, the characters, the differences in technique. One of the biggest things I learned from this project was tolerance of different styles. Chinese singing is very piercing, and does tend to give me a headache.

 

But most importantly, I took a music history course as a high school senior where we listened to music from all over the globe. We studied South American, Asian, Russian, African, and Australian music.