The elements of music are the same to those in life.
By: Riley Dorau
When I was a kid, my mother used to sit on the edge of my bed, humming me to sleep. Without looking up at her, I knew she was singing directly at me. I didn’t know it then, but her hums were instilling in me a harmony (the combination of simultaneously sounded musical notes to produce chords and chord progressions having a pleasing effect) for life, this sound would be the basis for all the high and low notes to come.
I was 10 years old when I got an acting part in the winter school musical. My part was named Gloria. She was an up-beat character. It was the first time I ever stood up in front of an audience, let alone acted and sung. When I got on stage, I grabbed the microphone, masked my hands trembling with sweat, my mind black with nothing but rehearsed lyrics and dialogue. As hard as it was, this was the start of my confidence. The hard part of life isn’t memorizing the lyrics or playing the part. It’s listening to the song and figuring out how to march to your own drum. Before I played Gloria, I only wanted to sing in the choir (an organized group of singers), but after that, I started to find my voice.
I had just turned 15 years old in 2017. That same year, I got my first camera. I would walk around photographing everything: leaves blowing in the wind, lopsided flowers damaged and bent, rustic abandoned farms. It was like I was a newborn baby who had just seen the world for the first time. That same year, during snowy February, my 10-year-old brother, Aidan, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Photography was my timbre (the character or sound of a musical instrument separate from its pitch or intensity.), it was the background noise I needed to continue singing as a photographer.
At 15, I was not equipped with the resources or knowledge of the form (structure or composition) my life was taking. To try to understand my new reality, I started listening to a different musical genre (a category of artistic composition characterized by similarities in form, style or subject matter). The genre had an old-folk, indie vibe. The songs’ lyrics gave me the advice I needed. Although I didn’t know how to receive it at that time in my life, the dynamic (the variation in loudness between notes or phrases) of my song choices helped to amplify the good days and stabilize the bad ones.
It was a scorching hot day on August 22, 2020, at North Dakota State University. I looked out the backseat window to lines of cars, strangers and luggage. The duration (the length of time a pitch, or note, is sounded) of this day felt immediate, forever and permanent. Like most freshman college kids my heart’s pulse (a series of uniformly spaced beats, either audible or implied, that is the scaffolding for the rhythm) was racing with nerves and a lot of unknowns but with enough excitement to start the next chapter.
The structure (the arrangement and order of the parts or sections) of our life is not supposed to be in order, nor perfect. Some of the best music comes from artists who write their songs from brokenness, and those words turn into a sense of unity for crowds, generations and voices. The key (the major or minor scale around which a piece of music revolves) to life, I now know, is not how to fit into the choir but to be heard as a soloist.
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