When I was a young musician, the only option available to pursue secondary education in music was to attend a classical conservatory.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I grew up studying music. I went to conservatory.
I went to the Conservatory of Music in school in Rome.
I ended up turning down a full scholarship of music at the conservatory to pay to go to cooking school.
I don't know whether schooling would have helped me get farther along in music at this time. I doubt it would have.
I was born out of classical music.
I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.
I was 16 when I got a scholarship to study classical composition at a conservatory. By that time I had already listened to Scottish folksong with my mother, sung in church choirs, and had sung solo with Benjamin Britten conducting.
There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I didn't grow up with classical music. My father was a folk music singer.
In a way, I'm lucky that I was never classically trained and never went to a music college. I'm just from a normal working class family and happened to get obsessed with music as a teenager.