Personal Narrative: My Musical Identity

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People and music are inseparable as Macdonald (2008, 39) argues that ‘We are all musical. Every human being has a biological, social and cultural guarantee of musicianship.’ It is hardly possible to live without hearing music in daily life, and people has been building musical identity since they are born by negotiating through it. Thus, music is a significant matter in personal identity and analysis of one’s life can reveal one’s musical identity. This essay will demonstrate the analysis of my musical identity based on my life. In order to make it clear, my life is divided into four parts: from kindergarten to elementary school, junior high school, and high school. Then analysis will be given after each block.
I was born in Kyoto, Japan.
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Even before I start liking or playing music, music was always around me and this made my positive attitude towards music in later life. This situation is called a family script. According to Byng-Hall (1995), children learn behaviours and family norms from observing parents, and thus demonstrations of favouring music by parents can act as a script that children follow. The script writing can be both obvious and obscure. The situation that my mother forced my sister to learn the piano would be a typical obvious script writing as Borthwick and Davidson (2002) states that parents who had music education in childhood tend to make children receive the same no matter if they had positive or negative experiences. Though, this raises a question to discuss: why only my sister was taken to the piano lesson, and why as written above, there was no desire of involving in music in myself before start playing the recorder at school. Firstly, it is because of the parents who wrote script with gender bias, or my socially constructed identity as a male. It can be analysed that not playing the piano might have been a part of negotiation of self-identity through music, expressing that I am a boy. The rationale for this analysis comes from the study by O’Neil (1997) which demonstrates that there is a gender bias on musical instruments and a piano …show more content…
My uncle had owned two clarinets and said that he could give me one of them, so I decided to play the clarinet. The first piece I played in the band was “Can’t take my eyes off from you”, a song sang by Franky Valli. I still can recall the excitement when I first joined rehearsal. I was so impressed and got a tingle. I felt that I finally found what I can be enthusiastic about, and playing in the band became my priority. Although I liked playing in the band, there were struggles as well. There was an intense conflict between senior students and juniors. Moreover, some of my friends quitted because practice was too demanding for them. Nonetheless, these struggles were also the factor which made member’s bond stronger because we supported each other to overcome these sufferings. Therefore, members were also very important presences who induced me to like

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