Freshman Angely Lopez has played the violin since 2015. Lopez’s mother encouraged her to join her school’s violin program and see if she likes it. At first, Lopez was hesitant to join because she had never been interested in playing an instrument. 

“I remember walking in the music classroom for the first lesson and being nervous because [I didn’t know] most of the people or they were in higher grades than me,” Lopez said. 

After Lopez’s first year in the program, she grew to love playing violin. Something about it seemed fascinating to her and she wanted to continue playing and getting better at it. Before her fifth grade year, Lopez changed schools to Waterman Elementary School. It was hard for Lopez to go from being with people she had known since she was little, to new people she had never met before. 

“I had known my classmates from Spotswood [Elementary School] for a while, so we were close but [at] Waterman, I only knew one person. She was also playing the violin at the time, so I talked to her,” Lopez said. 

When Lopez moved on to attend middle school in sixth grade, she still took violin lessons after school. She stayed after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In seventh grade, they took the program away from the middle school and Lopez had to take the class as one of her extracurriculars. 

“[In] sixth grade, it was after school because they still had the program in middle school, but in seventh grade, they took it out of middle school so I had to take it as one of my classes,” Lopez said. 

Before she could finish her seventh grade year, the pandemic began. To Lopez it brought hard times for her. There were times when she didn’t feel like doing anything and it went like that for a while. But Lopez found comfort in playing her violin. 

“To me during those times the violin was calming. I’ve always thought the sound was calming, but back then with all the chaos in the world, the sound was more relaxing,” Lopez said.