Instrumental performance personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I chose the clarinet at nine because it was the instrument left in the box when the school scheme ran out of violins, and I have spent the nine years since finding out how much there is inside it. What keeps me practising is the problem-solving: working out why a passage in the Weber Concertino sounds thin, discovering it is my air rather than my fingers, then rebuilding it slowly with a metronome until the line carries. I want a degree in instrumental performance because that process, done properly and daily, is what I want my working life to consist of.

Performing has also changed how I think about music. Playing second clarinet in a wind band taught me to listen downwards and sideways rather than only at my own part, and to accept that a good inner line is often an invisible one. In chamber rehearsals I have learned that most disagreements about interpretation are really questions about balance and breathing together, and that they are settled by playing rather than talking. I am keen to study in an environment where I have regular one-to-one teaching, where I am pushed into repertoire I would not choose for myself, and where I am playing alongside people who are better than me.

I am drawn to the breadth of the clarinet's repertoire, from the Brahms sonatas to Poulenc, and I am increasingly curious about music written in the last fifty years, having been given a copy of a study on extended techniques by my teacher and spent a frustrating, absorbing month learning to produce a reliable multiphonic. I would also like to keep developing as a teacher. I am realistic that a performing life is usually made of several strands, and I want a degree that prepares me for the playing, the teaching and the self-management all at once.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels are Music, English Literature and History. Music has been the most directly useful: the performance and composition work has given my practice structure, and the analysis units have made me a more curious player. Studying the Mozart Clarinet Concerto in harmonic detail changed how I phrase the slow movement, because I could finally hear where the tension actually sits rather than guessing from the shape of the printed line. I have also enjoyed the historical listening, particularly tracing how orchestration for wind instruments developed once the instruments themselves became more reliable.

English Literature has trained me to argue about interpretation with evidence, which is not so different from defending a choice of tempo. Writing on unseen poetry has made me pay attention to pacing and to where a phrase naturally wants to breathe. History has given me the discipline of reading around a subject and weighing sources against each other; I wrote coursework on wartime entertainment and popular music, which involved reading contemporary newspaper accounts and noticing how differently the same performances were described.

Alongside school I have taken Grade 8 clarinet with distinction and worked through Grade 5 Theory, and I have started learning the bass clarinet through my wind band, which has taught me a good deal about reed choice and embouchure adjustment. For the past year I have kept a practice diary, which began as a requirement from my teacher and has become genuinely useful: recording myself once a week and writing down what I hear has stopped me practising mistakes at speed. I plan to continue that habit at university, because it is the only method I have found that reliably tells me the truth about my playing.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

At school I ran a project arranging three short pieces for the Year 8 beginner ensemble, because the published arrangements we had were either too easy or unplayably fast. I spoke to the head of music about the ranges the pupils could actually manage, wrote parts that kept everyone busy without exposing anyone, and sat in on two rehearsals to fix what did not work. The clarinets needed fewer notes above the break and the percussion needed more to do. Hearing thirty eleven-year-olds play something I had written for their particular limitations was more satisfying than I expected, and it made me want to keep arranging.

Outside school I play in a county wind band and a community orchestra, which between them have taken me through a mixed diet of transcriptions, film music and standard repertoire, and have given me regular experience of sight-reading under pressure. Last spring I was asked to play the exposed solo in the slow movement of a Holst suite at a concert in a church with a long acoustic; I practised deliberately in the stairwell at home to get used to the delay, and the performance held together. I also teach two beginner clarinettists, children of neighbours, for half an hour a week each. Explaining tonguing to a nine-year-old has forced me to understand it properly myself.

I work Saturdays and Sundays in a garden centre café, taking orders, clearing tables and handling the till at the lunchtime rush. It has made me quick, polite under pressure and reliable with early starts, and it pays for reeds and lessons. Managing weekend shifts, two rehearsals a week and A-level deadlines has taught me to plan practice in short, purposeful blocks rather than waiting for a free afternoon that never arrives. I expect that habit to matter more, not less, as a student.

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