Louis Amador
Professor Carpenter
ENGL 1301
23 September 2013
The Quartertones Someday I want to have three kids and I want to have a girl, a girl, and a boy (in that specific order). The first will be named Melody because the melody is always main arrangement of notes in a song that creates the tune, then the second girl, Harmony, because the harmony in a piece compliments and enriches the main tune, and the third, my little Chord, because there are three notes that make up a chord. It is precisely my love of music that drives me to tackle on each day with consistency and strength. I took choir in seventh grade with an overly enthusiastic teacher that could sing notes from his own ears just to listen to anything at all, Mr. Moses. Oh, and he was quite the performer, where even as a simple choir teacher he would dance and conduct music in the air as if he could control every sound and rhythm in every piece and make everyone laugh. I fell in love with his passion for the art of sound because of him, and my engrossment of music began its own crescendo poco a poco. Sometimes I would go into his classroom during lunchtime to hear him play the piano and sing, just for fun. There was something about that man, his energy radiated though every inch of the room and his fascination rang through the air like a million bells. It made me happy, however I was only able to take that class for a year because my Pre-AP reading class interfered with my schedule in eighth grade and I simply decided to stop taking music classes because my parents always told me that core subjects were always above the arts. I had always felt disconnected from my other classmates at school. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was a huge math and science nerd with quite a bit of a stuttering and word jumbling problem that just made me an awkward communicator, or if it was because of my lack of experience talking to people in general. I didn’t really have many friends throughout middle school and high school, and when I found a victim to be my friend I would start the most awkward conversations about math and science with them that practically made it seem as if I had a “Weirdo, Stay Away!” sign tattooed on my forehead. At least in high school I managed to be a bit more social and mostly get rid of my speech impediments. At home I wasn’t really allowed to hang out with friends or watch television or play video games, so my pastimes (being a teenager) were narrowed down to writing, painting, and my favorite, listening to music. My parents even got me a keyboard to mess around with on Christmas after months of begging. So I sat in my room and tried to recall everything I knew about music from seventh grade, I listened to music and tried to imitate each note on the piano, understanding the sounds. In my head music was simply a time versus frequency graph (and that’s really all it actually is) so it made sense to me. It wasn’t too difficult to learn, as a math nerd I found strikingly repetitive mathematical relationships to every note and rhythm in every song. I was entranced by the music.
I engulfed myself in the Melody.
I became inspired by each Harmony.
And it all tied together through every Chord.
It was beautiful.
I graduated from High School and went into Collin County Community College to take basic core classes for my Electrical Engineering degree before transferring to the University of Texas in Dallas. And life was just as monotonous as it was in high school, living with my parents and not really having too much of a social life. I decided to look into any extracurricular activities I could try. I sucked at sports so I didn’t even consider looking into it. I looked the school’s website to find a music category. “Chamber Singers” it said “-an acapella group that covers many pop and alternative songs”. Ooh, that sounds fun! They get to sing songs using