Last semester, I completed some original short composition pieces, as well as learning to combine two or more songs together. Another thing I was able to further my ability for is learning to play a song on ukulele just by listening to it. Although I have still not perfected it, of course, I am able to improve little by little as I practice it more and more.
At the beginning of the year, I set two SMART goals for myself, and unfortunately, I was unable to achieve them to the extent I hoped. One of them was to plan out meals and after the planning stage was over, to cook one meal a week. I was almost able to accomplish this goal, but at times I got too wrapped up in homework assignments or distractions that I missed a week. However, I cooked for my family once a week for eight out of ten intended meals - sometimes it was breakfast, sometimes it was dinner. Although I cooked two less meals than I originally wanted to, I still feel like it helped me learn a new skill that will help me later on in my life. Of course, I had cooked before I decided to use this as my SMART goal, but through planning out meals beforehand and creating an actual strategic plan, it not only taught me how to make more meals but also how to plan them out and make grocery lists within a reasonable budget. One aspect of the overarching focus of this semester was to find out more about myself as an artist, and I feel like I learned some things about myself. Through completing a variety of different types of music assignments, I was able to learn what type of things I do enjoy, and which categories of things I don’t enjoy. Something I don’t particularly favor, for example, is composition. For me personally, music is more of a hobby than a career path I am considering, and composing music is not a strength of mine, nor something that I feel will benefit me in the long run. However, I do believe it is necessary to try new things. If I hadn’t tried different assignments with different purposes, I wouldn’t have learned what I do and don’t prefer. Although composition specifically may not necessarily be beneficial for me in the future, it is a skill that I have learned how to improve on. On a more optimistic note, there are some areas that I have grown to appreciate more and even enjoy. For example, one benefit is being able to discover new music. I am able to listen to it, play it, and sometimes even edit songs together. This widens my willingness to listen to new artists or genres that I typically wouldn't choose to listen to, as well as my appreciation for music. In addition to this, the academy has also increased the connections I am able to make with people and has taught me to ask for help when I need it. In addition to this, the academy has also increased the connections I am able to make with people and has taught me to ask for help when I need it - which I believe are equally important and meaningful skills. One thing I would like to be better at this semester is handing every assignment in on time. I am typically able to accomplish this, but there are always a few exceptions that I hope to be able to eliminate this semester. To be able to successfully accomplish this, I will create a schedule with all my assignments and their deadlines so I can keep track of what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can prioritize my assignments based on this schedule to ensure they are all done within the given timeline. It will need to be consistently updated based on when I get new assignments and complete old ones. This goal is attainable because the deadlines we are given are within reason, so I will be able to accomplish this goal as long as I successfully manage my time effectively. There were both positive and negative aspects of last semester, but in my opinion, all of it contributed to one major learning experience. I learned some things about myself, some of my likes and dislikes, as well as some of my strengths and weaknesses. Everything I accomplished contributed to finding myself, and learning what I can do to improve for this upcoming semester.
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It's the beginning of a new school year, which means it's time to make new goals for myself. I have put a lot of thought over the past couple of days into picking goals that are very meaningful for me, goals that I will care about and be motivated to accomplish. This year, I along with my band, A5, have decided to welcome and introduce a new member to our band, Aurora Knight. Together, we have all been planning what we want to accomplish as a band over the year and I have decided to make this my own first SMART goal. We all, along with our abilities and love for music, are passionate about photography. I especially wanted to figure out a way to incorporate photography into my project this year as I did not have the choice to be in a photography option class this year. This is why as a band we'd like to introduce our project for the year, and as an individual I'd like to introduce my goal for the semester. What we have decided is to pick three songs that we all would like to play, learn to play them, record it, and create music videos for each of the three songs we have learned.
Now, so far I have mostly explained what my band is planning on doing as a whole. But then, how does this relate to me as an individual? My own personal SMART goal is to make sure I have learned all of the songs by the deadline we choose and be ready to record and create our videos. If I choose to use my time wisely and spend 20 minutes a day for 5 days a week, for the entire semester, practicing, I will have no problem being prepared for our videos. I will be playing ukulele some of the time, and flute some of the time depending on the song and which part is more necessary. For the ukulele at least, practicing the song itself instead of spending an excessive amount of time on chords seems like it would be a more useful way to spend my time, because I have spent a lot of time working on chords in the past. However, if there is a new chord in one of our songs that I have rarely played before, I will spend time working on transitioning to that new chord until it becomes a simple movement. Every time I practice my flute, I will make sure to work on scales and transitions for at least 5 minutes before proceeding to practice the song. I feel as though this will help me be able to more quickly pick up the difficult parts and keep up with learning and remembering how to play our music. This goal is something that is meaningful to me because I try my best to make sure all assignments are turned in on time and to the best of my ability, and also so that I can fulfill my commitments to my band members. If I have not spent enough time practicing, I might not be able to play the song as well and could delay our recording and creating process which would be unfair. So, every day when I come home from school I always have at least 15 minutes I can spend practicing my songs, and I can also use my class time to practice with Abby, Arwen, Aurora, and Alice. This goal is both attainable and reasonable because I will always have 15 spare minutes I can spend practicing, so it is not unrealistic. The second goal I want to make for myself is less academic and more of a personal goal. I have been thinking a lot about my future recently, and how I am going to prepare for my life after I am done school. There are a lot of useful skills that I would like to learn and practice in order to properly prepare for this, as it could be in the near future. One skill I feel is particularly important is cooking, along with nutrition. I want to learn to cook more meals so I can prepare food for myself, and possibly even for a family at some point. A reasonable place to begin this project would be to research recipes that I enjoy and begin creating a menu and shopping list. I will spend an hour each week researching and planning for the first two weeks. I will plan for ten different meals that I want to learn how to make. Once I am finished that, I will create a menu for which meals to make on which days, and begin shopping for the needed ingredients. By the fourth week of my project, I will begin to actually cook my planned meals. I will cook one meal a week for 10 weeks. To make sure I also learn how to maintain nutrition, I am going to ensure that the meals I choose are healthy and have a healthy choice to go along with them, such as a salad. This can also help teach me about substitutions, as I can attempt to replace certain ingredients with healthier ones to maintain balance and nutrition. When ten weeks have passed, I will then take two weeks to evaluate what worked well about it and what didn't, and what I could do differently if I was to experiment with it again. I can decide which recipes to keep and what to make again, and which ones I might not want to make again. This goal will be very measurable for me because there will be time to do it every week, and my family will be able to provide feedback for how well I am doing. Another benefit to this is that it provides a sense of responsibility and accountability, creating more motivation for me to successfully accomplish this goal. Cooking is something I enjoy doing, yet I rarely do it because I typically feel as though I do not have enough time in a week to do it. However, by making it into a goal I can include it in my weekly schedule so there is time for me to do it so I can begin practicing it. I think that it is very relevant to me because it is a useful skill that I have been meaning to work on for a while now, but haven't got around to. It is a goal that will be extremely helpful to me in the near future when I need to cook for myself, and I will be very glad I did this project in order to have gained this skill. Over the past couple weeks, I have been working on creating an album cover for the music I have been writing. It was a difficult process and it took a significant amount of time to be able to produce something I was happy with, but after a lot of experimenting, I have. We started by researching and looking at album covers we found online, to learn what we did and didn't want for our own work. I found many examples where the creator had used an abstract concept to create a simple image, which was an idea I liked. Another thing I discovered through my research is that I liked a cool colour theme - blue, purple, and green. This was my foundation for my original plan; I knew that I wanted to use a blue and purple abstract shape in the centre of my album art. However, although I tried many times, it just wouldn't work. So, I decided to redirect my idea and try to use one of my own original pictures that I took to put on an album cover. After I had decided on a picture of mine that I liked and began to experiment with different ideas, it was announced that we needed to incorporate an original picture of ours into our album art. This didn't influence my work since my idea had already changed to align with this anyway. My final product had changed from my original plan, since it was not working out the way I had hoped it would. It has a dark colour theme, and is still very simple, but instead of using abstract, I used photography to incorporate into my album cover.
I feel that I have come a long way this semester as a musician. I have taught myself more on how to play the ukulele, improved my tone on my flute, and even learned how to compose and score my own songs. My band and I created a Disney medley composed of 3 of our favorite Disney songs. All of the members of A5 found parts online for Where you are from Moana, Be our Guest from Beauty and the Beast, and When will my life Begin from Tangled, transposed them to be in the same key as each other, and wrote transitions for in between the songs. However, because I was playing the ukulele, I could not find the parts for these songs. So I figured out the chords I needed to play based off of listening to the other parts that were found. This is something I would not have been able to do on my own before this semester, but now it is quite simple to me. I also don't think I would have been motivated enough to learn how to do this if I wasn't in the Music Academy and in a situation where I needed to figure it out, but I think it is a useful skill that I am grateful to have learned.
Something that I have learned about myself is that it can sometimes be hard for me to willingly accept challenges if it is something I don't care that much about. But, I have always ended up accepting them because I know that it will teach me a new skill I will be happy to have learned and be proud for having done it. Also, I know that I am a perfectionist and once I start something< i have to finish it and I have to do it right. So, even if there is an assignment I don't want to do, I do it anyway because I know that it will help me grow as a person and teach me something new. Often, getting started on something is what I find is hard for me, but once I am started, it ends up not being as difficult and daunting as I thought. Last year, I memorized the circle of fifths because I thought it would prove itself useful to me for the theory we had to do. When I did, it made theory and learning songs easier because I could always figure out the key signatures. However, over the summer I forgot to recall it often to make sure I still remembered it and by the time we had more theory to work on this year, I had forgotten it. I want to make a goal for this upcoming semester to memorize it again. I think it will be a useful skill to know for any theory, learning, and transposing songs and is something I have been meaning to do for a while. Overall it has been a good semester, and I have high hopes for next semester too. I have learned so much about myself and music, and I hope to be able to learn more next semester as well. This past Thursday, our school hosted an Exhibition of Learning, where we could showcase what we've done so far this year. Each individual or group in band had to learn and play 3 songs to perform at the Exhibition. My band, A5 - (Abby Sensabaugh - flute, Alice Sinani - piano, Arwen Kope - drums, and me, on flute) - prepared "Holly Jolly Christmas", "The Last Voyage of Queen Anne's Revenge", and "Pachelbel's Christmas". "Holly Jolly Christmas" is a song that was written in 1965 by Johnny Marks, a songwriter who also composed "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". It was originally performed by Burl Ives, but has been arranged and covered by many artists since then. The second song we planned to play, "The Last Voyage of Queen Anne's Revenge", is about the final ship sailed by the pirate Blackbeard. "Pachelbel's Christmas" is a combination of Canon in D and many other Christmas songs. It was composed by Johann Pachelbel, who it is named after.
Although we had planned introductions, practiced all our songs, planned uniforms, and planned a time and place to play, we were unfortunately not able to make it to the Exhibition of Learning that night. One of the members of our band is on the Junior girls basketball team and ended up having to be away at a tournament, which none of us knew about until the day before. Because she was not able to attend, we could not perform that night because she has a very important part. So, instead we performed on Friday at Arwen's house. We all wore blue shirts, black pants, and black shoes, used our introductions we had planned, and played all the songs we had planned to play. In the future, I hope we will all be able to be fully prepared and able to attend school performances. It is hard for all of the members in my group to play in front of people, but I know that it is also important for us to because it will make us stronger. I believe that preparedness is the most important aspect of performance, because even if we are nervous, we do well as long as we are properly prepared. In English last week, we were learning about procrastination, and how to better manage our time. I learned that I, along with many of my friends and classmates, tend to procrastinate on many of my assignments and projects. So, in an attempt to change that and form better habits, we all created Google calendars. They have helped me to organize everything I need to get done, include keeping track of deadlines and due dates. Putting in due dates for assignments is an extremely effective method of organization, and really helps me to be able to prioritize. As I have tried to make a habit of entering the due dates for every assignment and sorting out what assignments are most important, I find I am less stressed overall. Just yesterday we were assigned a project to research five different musical artists and answer some questions based on their official websites. In order to get this done by next Friday when it is due, I am going to create a S.M.A.R.T. goal to pick just one artist to complete the questions for each band class. If I plan to complete one each class and effectively manage my time by working efficiently, I should be able to achieve this goal and hand in the assignment on time. I am going to continue to use these methods to prevent myself from procrastinating, so I can always hand in my best work, and because I believe it is important for success.
About one week ago, my classmates and I went over to the Rocky View Education Centre to learn more about the Academy we joined. A common theme for this trip was why we joined the Academy that we chose to apply for. Well, as we were asked about this frequently, it made me begin to sincerely think about it, and wonder why I truly did want to join the Cavalier Music Academy. As I thought about it, I thought about my love for music, and realized that was my motivation for joining the Academy. To help us achieve what we want to achieve, we made goals based on our interests and the Academy we chose to join for this year. One of the goals was specifically directed toward the Academy, and one goal was for our personal desires. The goals that I thought would mean something to me and help me improve as a musician are as follows.
My academy goal is to be able to compose one song for the ukulele. I want to have this done by Christmas and I can achieve it by setting aside the time to work on the song one day a week - Fridays, until it is finished. I will spend 10 minutes each Friday working on the song, using chords I already know and some I have yet to learn. This is realistic because I always have at least 10 minutes to work on it on Fridays either right after school, or right before I go to bed at night. My personal goal is to learn and memorize two songs on the acoustic guitar. This will also help me increase the number of chords that I have already memorized, and I will work on quickly switching between them. I can look up the chords and music, and tutorials on YouTube to figure out how to play better. I will practice for 15 minutes each Monday and Thursday, and will spend extra time on the weekends when I have the opportunity to. This is realistic because I will have time to just spend 15 minutes in a day for at least 2 days a week. |
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