In my opinion, this is the best project that we could have done to start our American rhetorical journey this year. This I Believe is an NPR broadcast where people write a short essay on what they believe and why they believe it. Through this project, we learned about what makes a good This I Believe essay, read and critiqued ones already on NPR, and wrote our own essays. Below are both my essay and my reflection of the project.
Note to self: Play more music
Tony Williams
"Music is the shorthand of emotion" - Leo Tolstoy
I believe in a universal language that resonates within rebellious teenagers, toddlers, and wise professors alike. I believe in melody. Melodies flood my mind every day, every hour, from the annoying kid singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the subway to the sultry big band swinging at the jazz club at night. Why do we listen to music? I believe that we love melodies because they are a direct gateway to the innermost desires of both the artist and ourselves.
It's astonishing how many unique melodies can be produced with only 12 notes. To me, this is a testament of the personality of music and the presence of the artist in every nuance, every fluctuation of tonality. The complicated web of melody becomes more tangled once the artist plays a melody for others. Everybody interprets a melody differently, mixing their desires and emotions with those of the artist to form an incomprehensible chaos.
These ideas began for me last summer at a jazz camp in Westcliffe, Colorado. I spent a week in a tiny mountain town with 30 students and 5 instructors, playing and practicing 8 hours a day. Each night, the instructors would impart their words of wisdom onto us. One thing that the pianist said really resonated with me: "You can never be better than you are in the moment. Revel in who you are and relish the fact that you are always improving."
Every night at the camp, after the workshops and rehearsals, I would get together with a few other musicians and jam at Westcliffe High School. Blasting out solo after solo in a deserted school in the middle of a serene mountain town was incredibly surreal, but it was in those moments that I really found out what I believe. The music entered me like electricity, filling my mind and body with understanding, unveiling the glorious power of the universal language.
Now, every time I practice, I feel different. When my finger hits a key on the piano, I can feel whether it's right or wrong, if it's the emotional outpouring of myself or just another note. The liberation of hearing myself in song is incomparable. In that brief moment of creation, I discover new crevasses in the vast, deserted landscape of who I am and will become. My melody joins those of every musician in history, slotting seamlessly into the wondrous cacophony of masterpieces and abecedarian mumblings.
Of course, I am not a master of crafting melodies, but I can take satisfaction in knowing that every note I write is a piece of me. Through music, I have learned to embrace my current imperfections and work toward constantly improving myself. Melodies teach me wisdom and peace, humility and silence. For me, music is much more than a hobby. It's my pathway toward discovering myself, expressing myself, being myself in the purest form. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, "Without music, life would be a mistake."
I believe in a universal language that resonates within rebellious teenagers, toddlers, and wise professors alike. I believe in melody. Melodies flood my mind every day, every hour, from the annoying kid singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the subway to the sultry big band swinging at the jazz club at night. Why do we listen to music? I believe that we love melodies because they are a direct gateway to the innermost desires of both the artist and ourselves.
It's astonishing how many unique melodies can be produced with only 12 notes. To me, this is a testament of the personality of music and the presence of the artist in every nuance, every fluctuation of tonality. The complicated web of melody becomes more tangled once the artist plays a melody for others. Everybody interprets a melody differently, mixing their desires and emotions with those of the artist to form an incomprehensible chaos.
These ideas began for me last summer at a jazz camp in Westcliffe, Colorado. I spent a week in a tiny mountain town with 30 students and 5 instructors, playing and practicing 8 hours a day. Each night, the instructors would impart their words of wisdom onto us. One thing that the pianist said really resonated with me: "You can never be better than you are in the moment. Revel in who you are and relish the fact that you are always improving."
Every night at the camp, after the workshops and rehearsals, I would get together with a few other musicians and jam at Westcliffe High School. Blasting out solo after solo in a deserted school in the middle of a serene mountain town was incredibly surreal, but it was in those moments that I really found out what I believe. The music entered me like electricity, filling my mind and body with understanding, unveiling the glorious power of the universal language.
Now, every time I practice, I feel different. When my finger hits a key on the piano, I can feel whether it's right or wrong, if it's the emotional outpouring of myself or just another note. The liberation of hearing myself in song is incomparable. In that brief moment of creation, I discover new crevasses in the vast, deserted landscape of who I am and will become. My melody joins those of every musician in history, slotting seamlessly into the wondrous cacophony of masterpieces and abecedarian mumblings.
Of course, I am not a master of crafting melodies, but I can take satisfaction in knowing that every note I write is a piece of me. Through music, I have learned to embrace my current imperfections and work toward constantly improving myself. Melodies teach me wisdom and peace, humility and silence. For me, music is much more than a hobby. It's my pathway toward discovering myself, expressing myself, being myself in the purest form. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, "Without music, life would be a mistake."
This I Believe: project reflection
In this assignment, we were tasked to write a "This I Believe" essay fitting the requirements of the original National Public Radio invitation from the 1950s. The assignment was to write a brief personal belief essay no longer than 500 words and no shorter than 350 words. To do this, we read and analyzed what the best This I Believe essays were and did various assignments to find what we believed in. The best essays had stories in them and were abstract beliefs grounded in concrete events and stories. They also had communal relevance, narrative coherence, and an authentic voice. Communal relevance means that the belief is relevant and applies to everybody, not just the person writing it. Narrative coherence means that the story makes sense and flows logically, backing up the ideas and giving them concrete meaning. Authentic voice means that the author sounds like himself, writing like he would speak about his beliefs.
The last step before writing the rough draft was to write a credo, a 200 word summarization of the concepts behind our beliefs. After doing this and reading countless essays from NPR, we were given about a week to draft and finalize our essays.
For me, this process was difficult because I am not yet entirely sure what I believe in. I considered writing about God and my Catholic faith, but I didn't feel like I was yet ready to write deeply and personally about such a controversial and difficult topic. During my brainstorm, I thought of writing about several things, but music was the one that I believed in most deeply. I don't usually think deeply about what I believe, so finding out how I really feel about music was difficult and confusing at times for me. Eventually, I figured out that music is an incredibly deep and personal experience for me, even if I didn't realize it before this project. In my essay, I write that "The music entered me like electricity, filling my mind and body with understanding, unveiling the glorious power of the universal language." I think that these lines summarize perfectly how I feel about music. Whenever I play well and write music, I get that wonderful feeling and, because of this project, am able to actually know how I feel and what I believe. Just by articulating my beliefs in words, my understanding of why I play music has increased tremendously.
In this essay, I am most proud of the flow and the language I used. Throughout each paragraph, my language flows and I say what I need to say in as few words as possible. For example, in my second to last paragraph, I say: "My melody joins those of every musician in history, slotting seamlessly into the wondrous cacophony of masterpieces and abecedarian mumblings." This sentence highlights my complex vocabulary and says exactly what I need to say. Naturally, there were places where I wasn't able to find the correct words, but this sentence has exactly what I wanted it to have. Combined with my spider web metaphor earlier in the essay, this sentence paints a vivid picture of my melody being woven into a massive tangle of music, from professional works to amateur works. This is a common theme throughout my essay. I think that what I did well in my belief statement was to make it eloquent and well-worded, articulating myself very well in this piece of writing.
I plan on sending this piece to NPR, so I need to refine it more. Currently, I think that my essay is pretty well-worded and gets its point across well. However, some paragraphs still need work. This sentence in particular could be revised: "Ever night at the camp, after the workshops and rehearsals, I would get together with a few other musicians and jam at Westcliffe High School." This sentence is functional, but not brilliant. Jessica told me in a conference with her to look for these kinds of sentences. I am not sure how I could make it better, but the word 'jam' seems out of place to me. This sentence is simply a placeholder; to make my writing the best that it can be I need to get rid of placeholders and replace them with more eloquent phrasing. Another two sentences that are only placeholders in my essay are: "These ideas began for me last summer at a jazz camp in Westcliffe, Colorado. I spent a week in a tiny mountain town with 30 students and 5 instructors, playing and practicing 8 hours a day." Again, these two sentences are perfectly sufficient as transitions into my next big ideas, but I would like them to be part of the essay. They should not stop the essay, but continue it in the deepest and best way possible. I am confident that, with another week or so to work on this, that I can turn my placeholders into the deep, eloquent sentences that my belief essay deserves.
The last step before writing the rough draft was to write a credo, a 200 word summarization of the concepts behind our beliefs. After doing this and reading countless essays from NPR, we were given about a week to draft and finalize our essays.
For me, this process was difficult because I am not yet entirely sure what I believe in. I considered writing about God and my Catholic faith, but I didn't feel like I was yet ready to write deeply and personally about such a controversial and difficult topic. During my brainstorm, I thought of writing about several things, but music was the one that I believed in most deeply. I don't usually think deeply about what I believe, so finding out how I really feel about music was difficult and confusing at times for me. Eventually, I figured out that music is an incredibly deep and personal experience for me, even if I didn't realize it before this project. In my essay, I write that "The music entered me like electricity, filling my mind and body with understanding, unveiling the glorious power of the universal language." I think that these lines summarize perfectly how I feel about music. Whenever I play well and write music, I get that wonderful feeling and, because of this project, am able to actually know how I feel and what I believe. Just by articulating my beliefs in words, my understanding of why I play music has increased tremendously.
In this essay, I am most proud of the flow and the language I used. Throughout each paragraph, my language flows and I say what I need to say in as few words as possible. For example, in my second to last paragraph, I say: "My melody joins those of every musician in history, slotting seamlessly into the wondrous cacophony of masterpieces and abecedarian mumblings." This sentence highlights my complex vocabulary and says exactly what I need to say. Naturally, there were places where I wasn't able to find the correct words, but this sentence has exactly what I wanted it to have. Combined with my spider web metaphor earlier in the essay, this sentence paints a vivid picture of my melody being woven into a massive tangle of music, from professional works to amateur works. This is a common theme throughout my essay. I think that what I did well in my belief statement was to make it eloquent and well-worded, articulating myself very well in this piece of writing.
I plan on sending this piece to NPR, so I need to refine it more. Currently, I think that my essay is pretty well-worded and gets its point across well. However, some paragraphs still need work. This sentence in particular could be revised: "Ever night at the camp, after the workshops and rehearsals, I would get together with a few other musicians and jam at Westcliffe High School." This sentence is functional, but not brilliant. Jessica told me in a conference with her to look for these kinds of sentences. I am not sure how I could make it better, but the word 'jam' seems out of place to me. This sentence is simply a placeholder; to make my writing the best that it can be I need to get rid of placeholders and replace them with more eloquent phrasing. Another two sentences that are only placeholders in my essay are: "These ideas began for me last summer at a jazz camp in Westcliffe, Colorado. I spent a week in a tiny mountain town with 30 students and 5 instructors, playing and practicing 8 hours a day." Again, these two sentences are perfectly sufficient as transitions into my next big ideas, but I would like them to be part of the essay. They should not stop the essay, but continue it in the deepest and best way possible. I am confident that, with another week or so to work on this, that I can turn my placeholders into the deep, eloquent sentences that my belief essay deserves.