"How did your education prepare you for the future?"

My music school graduation convocation speaker contest has the prompt "how did your education prepare you for the future?" My friend wanted to know what I would write, and was encouraging me to do so for the actual contest... so she whipped out a camera and asked me to just talk about it.

It's basically just me talking about my experience in school, and what I learned from it.

I’ve never been able to see the future, but I can hear the sounds

 *note: This poem received a regional music therapy scholarship!

Ten years ago I did not know that music and therapy could be joined at the hip to help tip the scales in favor of an individual that may stand residual;

Those that the bare bombardment of previous attempts at care had left behind.

I did not know that the beat beat beat of a metronomic clock or tick or bang or blip entrain the brain and train a man to walk again or teach a kid to say her name or

help an old couple of sixty five years step and sway with a grin as they waltz the first time since dementia set in.

5 years ago I entered university to study music theory and composition, not knowing of the existence of a fourth floor entity that would eventually house me in a profession yet unbeknownst to the then unknown me. My trials and tribulations were the ACME rocket skates and catapults flying my body after the imperceptible future self,

road running down the train tunnel of my

sort of mental, sentimental, illegitimate entitlement. I am not a cartoon. I stopped the shenanigans, setting in plans and locomotion to force open the clock face, stick my hand in and replace the smallest hand embracing that I control how fast,

that I’m not yet late, but I need to paddle harder if I don’t want to be in last.

1 year ago ago I still didn’t know what to do with my life.

6 months ago I found myself solving complications directed through filters of goals and objectives. I’ve gone from believing anything

to  “What are your sources?”

From ‘music is magic’

to “neural structures enact and react, dynamic not static, idiosyncratic periodicity a rainbow through the prism of cortical restructuring and neural Darwinism.”

3 months ago I knew enough to help my family.

Now: My internship is lined up, my textbooks almost back on my shelf, the process of college finally high fiving me with a step to the next adventure.

I walk dorian through the door/ again, to my left, lit in Lydian fluorescence, my past debacles crackle under the weight of what I learned from their existence, mixed in a mixolydian fixation on reexamination of my options. MT BC 2B simply gives me a vessel to practice my passions of people and using the music to make endless ends meet. Not just making music in order to be at the aid of another, not just creating music to restitch the fabric of an individual, but making music through making lives better, pitches and rhythms emanating from the mere mending of the textile. I have before me the opportunity to spend my life using music to help others, and helping others to make music. How could I possibly turn that down?

Major, minor, flat nine, sharp eleven…

I’ve never been able to see my future, but I can hear the sounds.

I’ve never been able to see the future, but I can hear the sounds

Music Therapy Scholarship Submission