For my senior year of high school, I went to the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, an arts boarding school, where I was able to take music theory and literature classes and have weekly lessons with an excellent piano teacher. After Interlochen, I started college at Lawrence University in Appleton. You’ve probably driven past Björklunden on Highway 57 outside of Bailey’s Harbor – that’s Lawrence’s Door County campus, where weekend retreats and seminars are occasionally held. At Lawrence, I initially majored in piano performance, but at the end of my sophomore year, I decided to add a French major as well. Although piano continues to be my main focus, I’ve always enjoyed reading and learning about how the world works – not to mention that I’ve always wanted to learn a second language.
I started in the very lowest introductory French class at Lawrence during my sophomore year, but over time, I got better and better at the language. Right now, in my third year of studying French, I’m certainly not fluent, but I can hold a decent conversation with a native speaker, and I am continuing to learn new vocabulary all the time. One of the reasons that I chose to learn French specifically is that it is one of the most important languages for classical music (German and Italian are also important, and I hope to start learning them in the future as time allows). Something I’ve realized since I started college is that to really understand a piece of music, one must understand its context.
