FALL 2008 / Volume 8 - Issue 1
Essay Wins Scholarship for Pianist From Ecuador
Nineteen-year-old David Jaramillo from Quito, Ecuador, won the Hugo A. Glauser School of Music’s first-ever talent-based scholarship, a full-tuition award renewable for his entire Kent State career, funded by none other than rock superstar and former Kent State student Joe Walsh.
Jaramillo is the sone of a mechanical engineer father, a mother who studied political science and has devoted her adult life to raising her children, and two sisters (one engineer, another studying ecotourism).
He initially became interested in Kent State after coming here for a piano camp last year. “I fell in love with everything, so my goal was to study at Kent State,” he says in his e-mail.
“The scholarship helps me in the best way. I would not be able to attend Kent State without it. The scholarship means to me that everything can be achieved with effort. My dream was to study music with a scholarship because Ecuador’s economy is different and I wouldn’t be able to afford the total tuition. The scholarship helps me to achieve my goal, my dream.”
His goal is to one day attain a doctoral degree. “Then my goal is to focus in my country,” he says. “To teach what I will learn and to give my people the opportunity that I am living.”
Jaramillo’s winning essay appears below.
State your educational and professional goals addressing why you want to study your art form and what being a performing artist means to you.
Everybody has a dream to pursue. Dreams are idealizations of how we would like our lives to unfold. Continually we are trying to achieve those dreams. As ideals they are never quite realizable; nonetheless one can always endeavor to approach metaphysical perfection. Dreams are something that is in our soul and when is achieved is going to shine.
Life with out goals is not life.
Since I was a child my only goal has been to become a pianist, a complete musician who is able to do great art, who can transmit feelings with music. A pianist can open people’s hearts and allow sound to travel in. My goal has been to be a “global musician” who can understand and help others develop their own art.
My dream has been to be a recognized pianist who plays classic Latin-American music, especially Ecuadorian and make it known to the entire world. My second dream is to establish the first music college in my country of Ecuador so young musicians can continue their road and can achieve their dream. It is a big dream that will need more dreamers to achieve it. I will need all the help possible and I will fight with determination to achieve this goal. I want young musicians to have the opportunity to achieve their dreams in Ecuador, to increase Ecuador’s music level and to articulate and establish our own school of music.
Art is the essence of life. It is the essence of the human being. Art is emotions. Art represents our essence, our passion. The human being has passion for sentimental feelings: seeing the rain fall in a landscape or feeling love for a bird’s birth. For artists, art is truth in the sense that it needs no justification. And that is why we are continuously searching, because everyday we understand a little of truth. Maybe our lifetime is not sufficient, but we love to search for the truth in music. We love to search the sound. Musicians love to feel, love to transmit, love to listen. We listen to every sound. We love to discover the essence of the bird song, or the momentary cricket sound before it finishes. We musicians have been chosen to generate these feelings with an instrument. That is the most satisfying thing in life.
To be a pianist, to be a musician, to be an artist is incredible. We have the responsibility to represent correctly our truth, because the music is it. We have to represent a valuable treasure, the treasure that is the essence of the humans’ feelings. To be a pianist signifies to be the feelings’ curator, to be the mediator between heaven and earth.
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