Graduate Student Stories Transcripts: Ross McCool

Link to all Student Stories videos.

Transcript of Ross McCool's video

I don't know exactly what got me into music, but I've been messing around with music since I was about five and its been so interesting to me since then that unsurprisingly, since I was 10 and started the trumpet, I've just been encapsulated. For as large of a student body as it is, it's, you s-, you see familiar faces when you're walking around every day.

And the campus is just beautiful. My teachers just, he's cutting edge in the field, like r- really highly revered in the field. He's a great guy, and we got a long really well, which when you're, when you're spending that much time somebody, it's good to, to get along with them well.

I teach, there's an opera company in d- in Washington DC, that I've been fortunate to work with a few times and an orchestral company, based in the mid-Atlantic. The coordinator at, at the school of music is actually really helpful in, advertising those, those openings and so, you know, she was contacted with, with a performance opportunity.

She would then just send out an email blast to anyone available. And then, you know, al- also my own trumpet teacher would be contacted and then, you know, he would maybe a little more quietly disseminate some of those opportunities to, to just his students.

On campus, I play in, played in an orchestra, a wind orchestra, brass quintet. The school of music does a, a Bach cantata, like the third Thursday of every month and, I got to, to play in a few of those. Sometimes groups will do a random popup performance in stamp.

They do at least one opera every year and I, I mean just between the s-, the set design, getting the onstage cast together, just there, there's so much that goes into that. The one that I was involved in most recently, was a dialogue of the Carmelites, which involves s- some, some of the troubles involved in the French Revolution.

I peeked my head out from, from the pit a few times and there was, there was barely a seat in the house. The top level orchestra has three concerts every semester, which compared to some other schools that I've been at and other programs I've been in, three a semester is, that's a lot of music to get through and a lot of those programs are really, really high quality and it's, I mean, it's like exhilarating to, to be a part of something like that.