How to write a winning scholarship essay - Gen Tanabe, Kelly Tanabe 2018

Artistic talents
30 winning scholarship essays

andrew Koehler, fulbright grant winner

Andrew has been a serious student of music since he was 5 years old, when he first began to play the violin. Originally from Oreland, Pennsylvania, he has performed as a violinist with the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, the Yale Symphony Orchestra and numerous festival orchestras. While at Yale, from which he graduated with honors as a double German Studies and Music major, he began to conduct seriously and is now pursuing a career in conducting. After spending a summer as a conducting student at the Aspen Music Festival and School, he is continuing his studies at the University for Music and Art in Vienna on a Fulbright Grant.

Turningpoint

My parents both spent the first part of their childhood overseas. As Ukrainian immigrants in America, they faced both the immediate difficulty of learning a new language and the eventual difficulty of acting as translators for their families, who never were able to learn English adequately. Though I, too, was raised speaking Ukrainian, my parents ultimately wanted to give me a means of communication that would transcend all others, a language of international recognition; this, they decided, was to be music.

The choice they gave me, for whatever reason, consisted of only two instruments: violin and piano. Such was the decision I was to make at the age of 5, when I might otherwise have been happier to continue playing uninterruptedly with my action figures. I arbitrarily chose violin, blissfully unaware of the impending consequences. I cannot pretend that something in my soul stirred the first time I held the instrument. I played dutifully enough, though I, like any other child, did not really enjoy practicing. I went through a long series of mediocre teachers who failed to generate any real excitement in me. They gave me enough encouragement, however, to realize that I had at least some talent, and with this ray of hope, my parents continued to push me.

Much later, during the first rehearsal of a youth orchestra I had recently joined, something astonishing occurred. Sitting in the back of the section, I was intimidated in part by the music on the stand in front of me but mostly by the conductor on the podium, an extraordinarily temperamental man who could be blisteringly honest in passing judgment on one’s abilities as a musician. We began the rehearsal by sight-reading the first piece in our program. We muddled through admirably enough, but he was clearly un-satisfied. He leapt from his stool and spat, “You play like you’re older than I am,” with each strong syllable of his phrase strengthened by ferocious ba-ton swats on his stand. He paused and composed himself. “Do you know what this music is about?” No one dared breathe a word. He then spoke of love and death and of the profound tragedy that links the two with an eloquence unbefitting his audience. He stopped suddenly and disgustedly offered, “but you don’t understand; you’re too young,” and then looked up at us questioningly, as if to ask whether or not he was right. He might well have been, but we desperately wanted to understand for that man.

And so we played again, and this time, I began to hear music in an utterly different way, as did many, I suspect. His passion for this art was simply infectious. Where I had never previously known music to be more than just pleasant, I began to understand what defined greatness, both in interpretation and in composition. Poor performances could make me cringe, but the most sublime moments in great performances made my hair stand on end.

I began to approach music with a penetrating enthusiasm which, save for the charisma of a great teacher, might never have been.

Years later, and as my focus shifts from violin to conducting, this enthusiasm continues only to strengthen. Knowing the difficulties of a life in music, I have tried seriously to pursue other interests, but no matter how engaging I find them, none generate the same passion in me that music does. I am resigned to my fate; I wish to be a musician. It is a perilous fate that neither my parents nor certainly I could have imagined when this endeavor began, but it is a fate nevertheless tinged with joy, for I may count myself among the few who have found something they sincerely love.