A year ago my mother Brooke Ann Brothers Bascom passed away. My mother was so influential to my life and my musical career. She used to sit with me on the bench and practice with me. As I got older she would make me a list of things I needed to practice. She always drove me to and from lessons.
When she was getting older, she started to suffer from dementia, but she did her best to hide it, and was successful in doing so. She didn’t want to leave her home. She started to have falls, and wasn’t telling us she was falling. After the fall that ended up leading to her death a hospital bill came in the mail for a previous fall she had been treated for. My sister took her to brain specialists and they were finding that her brain was shrinking, and had some white spots on it.
As I get older, I am thinking more about what my fate will be, and what my legacy will be. I think about all the work I put into studying and earning my masters and doctorate degrees and all of the things that I learned. These things can be taken from me at any time. The only way I have to pass these things on is by teaching the students I teach or by writing them down. Because of this I would like to write on my blog more. Often times in the musical world people get overprotective of their acquisition of knowledge and treat it as proprietary and are reluctant to share it. When in reality, there are only so many students a teacher can teach, and there are usually plenty of students to go around. It’s been my dream to form some online
