My name is Ezra, and I’m 14 years old and play the trumpet. When I was little, I played the piano, and even wrote a few of my own melodies. I also loved the HONK! Festival; I would go to the parade every year and march alongside the bands, attempting to play a harmonica (with varying degrees of success) to whatever the band was playing. I started playing trumpet in school band when I was 10, and have loved trumpet ever since. Since then, I have started formally composing music, and now compose more than ever. For a few years, I played trumpet in the pickup band at the HONK! Festival. I also participated in various attempts at creating a HONK! kids band, all of which died because of a shortage of young musicians that could come to practice with any degree of regularity.
School of HONK started just after the 2014 HONK! Festival and I quickly joined. Unlike the kids bands, SoH is still alive after over a year! I instantly loved SoH because of the way songs are taught. In school, music is taught by forcing kids to play the most boring and monotonous songs that teachers can find over and over until every single person gets it exactly right, and then we move on to the next boring and monotonous song. (You wouldn’t think music could be monotonous, but somehow the schools manage it.) This is why SoH is so great. The idea that someone still learning how to play an instrument can play good music and have fun at the same time seemed too good to be true after playing in school band, but School of HONK has it figured out. Not to mention that we have three times more members than school band and still manage to learn harder music twice as fast.
After regularly coming to practice for about 8 months I was invited to become a mentor, an invitation which I readily accepted, mainly because I thought that I could help the other members learn new songs, and I had a personal desire to learn the intricacies of our songs and other parts besides the trumpet parts. (Also, being a mentor gives you more opportunities to play music, and who doesn’t want to play more?) I have enjoyed being a part of organizing SoH practices and figuring out ways to make the practices more enjoyable. I also enjoy listening to recordings of songs and trying to find the notes by ear. SoH also helps me compose music and has taught me how to improvise. Thank you for reading this, and I hope you will join School of HONK!