Music

If you know me, you know how addicted I am to music, whether it be listening, performing, learning about its history, analyzing or composing it, I’m all into it. So when I got the chance to choose whatever lesson I wanted, I took it and went all out on music. 

I quickly realized that the Branson students are behind on science but far ahead on music skills. Not only are they better on their instruments than the average student in KEN, but also their knowledge about theory, so chord progressions, scales, intervals and so forth is better than ours. Also I feel like, although we learn more about the history of classical music, they concentrate much more on modern styles like Hip-Hop or Rock. 

I’m in a “History of Hip-Hop” class and they really interpret songs and music videos, look at technical changes in time, try to understand the idea of sampling and other things that we only briefly cross in our music lessons. I don’t want to state that the music education in Switzerland is bad, but here so many students can play an instrument really good and play in a band or ensemble. Of course I as a musician would like to have more friends who can play an instrument in Switzerland which is quite rare sadly. Also what I think is missing in Zurich are street musicians. Walking through a city and hearing some background music gives it so much more character and atmosphere. I always love seeing artists performing when visiting other cities. (SB)