My Musical Culture

 

Hello! My name is Aimee Boudreau and I am a sophomore violist with a major in music education. I grew up for the most part in Upstate New York, but spent my high school years in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where I live now while not at school. I've had experiences growing up in both school choirs and orchestra, while I don't really sing as much anymore, and I have played a few other kinds of instruments as well.

A piece of music that has meant something to me for a while is the song "Yellow" by Coldplay. While it's not tied to a specific event, I first heard this song in middle school when I was looking for new songs to learn on my first guitar. I found that I really loved this song and with it, many other Coldplay songs and it kind of acted as a bridge into more styles of music for me. It quickly became one of my favorite songs to play! Over the years I found that I kept going back to it, especially if I'm going through a rough patch because it feels very nostalgic to me and in a way, it feels very uplifting to me. Somehow, I always feel a little bit better after listening to it.

An example of music that helped me get through the pandemic was Hozier's album " Wasteland, Baby." While I've always enjoyed his music since as early as his first album, I kind of had the time to "rediscover " his music as I had gotten away from his music for a bit and missed some of his more recent releases. I really enjoy how he describes what his ideas are that he is singing in his lyrics; his lyrics are very poetic and heavily linked to nature. While he does have some more "rock" sounding songs, I tend to favor the ones that are more acoustic sounding as they sound very comforting, warm, and light.

An example of music I don't actually like is country music. While I truly do like most genres of music and music from all around the world, I've always had a hard time trying to get myself to like country music. Most of my family play it all the time around the house, on the radio when we are in the car together, and go to country music concerts (pre-covid), but I've never seemed to be able to jump on the bandwagon with them! There are a few songs here and there that I do enjoy, but for the majority it just isn't for me.