Comfort in Comparison

            Tonight marked my last Holiday Concert.  Since the fifth grade, I have proudly performed in the school band every December.  Dressing up in nice clothes, playing winter-themed music, conversing with others on the grand stage—these types of activities surfaced year after year.  To ensure I never forgot my childhood, my mother made sure to meticulously scrapbook pictures of the annual affair.  Before the performance, I glanced through the images and felt a strangeness coalesce in the pit of my stomach.  I felt anxious—an emotion I rarely, if ever, felt before the show.  I had realized that every year during the Winter Concert, I had always had the fear of messing up and embarrassing myself, but I never had let it bother me.  I knew I would have the next year to do better or to fix my mistakes.  However, now no “next year” exists.  Somehow, I have already put in my eight years as a concert alto saxophonist.   I shudder to think that this time next year I will have already embarked on a new chapter of my life.  With these facts in mind, when I ascended the stage for the Concert, I can only describe myself as disoriented.  All of the previous Concerts had led up to this point--my final hoorah.  Playing the final note of the closing song, I closed my eyes and remembered a young boy who jumped up and down when his mother purchased him his own instrument.  His face radiated excitement.  At that moment, visualizing the boy’s blatant happiness, my appreciation for the world of music grew exponentially.  Music had shaped me.  It allowed me to express myself as an artist, but in a greater sense, express myself as a person.  In tribute to the ending of weekly blog assignments, and my concluding relationship with music, I reflect on some similarities.  Music has sculpted my perspective of writing. I consider them both as art forms.  When one crafts a piece of writing, selectively choosing words and their placement and purpose, he reflects the process of composing arranged notes in music.  A statement by the poet Oscar Wild, whom my father frequently quotes, comes to mind: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”   Creating that perfect, concise work of art requires considerable effort.  Yet, writing, like music, also does not have a formal rule book.   They both have many forms and genres.  With the framework of an introduction, body and conclusion, writing has structure, but at the same time has infinite possibilities.  Further, one song may have its own arrangement of notes and dynamics, but the reader has limitless options for interpretation.  Dynamics, tempo, timbre, and articulation can all receive alteration in order to imbue an emotion or theme into music.  The characteristics of location, meaning, and individuality manifest in writing.  And so, it only seems fitting that after a day with musicality, I end the night with its twin, writing.