Electives | portfolio

In orchestra, the students are placed in seating order according to ability, with the best player at the front, and the worst at the back. We had to audition for this seating by recording ourselves playing pieces.

For this piece, I had to record myself playing from fifty-one to the end. This part is played quickly, so I had to practice it, starting slowly, and increasing speeds each time I went through it so I played it right. I practiced for a while, and I got a 100 for this portion of the seating audition. This taught me the importance of patience and perserverence. I had to spend a lot of time playing the same piece over and over, with very little change in the way it sounded.

Master Class Orchestra

Concert Festival

For Concert Festival, the orchestra went to play music for judges, who rated the performance according to level and playing ability. In one of the pieces we played I had a solo, where if I messed up, we could quite possibly get a lower score than otherwise.

I needed to prepare for this concert more than anyone else in the orchestra. I spent a lot of time practicing in order to make the music sound as beautiful as possible. The part of the piece that I had as a solo was not very technically challenging, but it was a part where it was very obvious if I messed up. I had a responisibilty to the orchestra and to myself to not mess up. With practice, I prepared as much as I could, and I played my solo without mishap, and the orchestra received a superior rating, the highest rating we could be given.

Engineering

Button Press Project

In engineering we had a project where we needed to take blueprints for a button press machine, and replicate the parts in an engineering computer program.

I learned a lot in this project. In some of the previous projects we had in this class, we were given each step that we had to take. In this project, however, we needed to figure out how to make the parts ourselves, sometimes choosing from multiple options of how to complete a task. This helped a lot overall, because although I struggled sometimes to figure out how to make parts or assemble them, when I figured it out, I was able to remember it much more than if I had just been given the answer. In finding out how to do something, I was able to become very proficeint at some things I was previously lacking in.