Week 2

I grew up in Singapore for the first 10 years of my life and am of chinese descent. However, moving to the United States when I was 10 years old and assimilating myself to the American culture imbedded a different musical culture in me. I listened to a lot of alternative rock and punk music during my teenage years and even formed several bands in which I played guitar and created "western" music. Last summer, my family travelled to China and Japan. We went to a Peking Opera show. The experience was not entirely familiar to me and was actually quite foreign. I had been familiar with this type of musical performance vaguely through the course of my life via television. I was an insider and an outsider. I am Chinese and this is my culture, but living in America and choosing to listen to mainly "western" music drew my knowledge of Peking Opera away from it.
There are many aspects in my life which accentuate the different parts of my identity, and music has played a large role in each part. I am a Christian, and on sundays when i go to church, I am immense in the worship songs the church band plays and sing those songs. I am also a member of the UCLA bruin marching band, and when I participate on saturdays during the football games and basketball games in the winter, I am participating and expressing my school pride by playing the school song and several other fight songs. I was also a violinist in my earlier years, and that aspect of me, musically, was expressed through years and years of practice and playing classical music.
I was in the pit orchestra my senior year for our musical production of "How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying". Playing the trombone in the pit orchestra was only one of several working parts in order for the whole musical to be a success. There were the actors, the dancers, the stage crew, those who built the sets, and the directors that oversaw all the aspects of the musical and made sure that it ran smoothly. All these parts working together presented a visual and aural spectacle for all of the audience to marvel at.