Artistically speaking: Daniela Bodoh

At the Texas Music Educators Association region competition, junior Daniela Bodoh competed in both violin and piano. In violin, Bodoh placed 15th chair; in piano, she won first chair. For her efforts and achievements being in the top 24, she was able to advance and auditioned for State on Saturday, Oct. 27. In piano, only the top two finishers advanced. Bodoh and the second chair winner earned an All-State audition.

Bodoh has been playing both instruments for many years; violin for six, and piano for nine. She started playing the piano young because her parents noticed that she had a natural interest and talent for music.

“I started because my parents saw that I was starting to get into music, and they asked me if I was interested in taking piano lessons, and I said yeah, and so I did it and I still take piano lessons and same for violin,” Bodoh said.

Soon though, just the piano wasn’t enough to satisfy her love for music. She started to become interested in violin as well, and begged her parents to let her study two musical instruments.

“I was always kind of just drawn to [piano and violin]… I really wanted to play violin, but I didn’t want to quit piano so I convinced my parents that I had time to do two instruments. They saw that I was dedicated.”

After she began to play the violin, she had to learn how to balance both of these instruments, not wanting either of them to be second fiddle.

“It’s not easy, but I basically just need to practice as much as I can,” Bodoh said. “Sometimes there will be one that is more important than the other, like there’s an event coming up for that instrument, so I’ll practice more for that one. I practice pretty much every day, it ranges from about one to two hours a day for each instrument. It depends on how much I really want to do and what’s coming up though.”

Her dedication to practice at home, lessons outside of school and her school practices, combined with her natural ability, has made Bodoh an accomplished artist. Prior to this year’s region competition, she has auditioned for region three times on violin and once on piano- but this time she has beaten all of her prior scores.

“It was really nerve-wracking, because you know it’s an audition, and I didn’t think that I would actually get to advance to audition for state but I was really surprised when I found out,” Bodoh said.

She thinks that her experience auditioning before and her practice regiment helped her realize this year’s success.
“I practice a lot more than I used to, and since I’ve auditioned before I’ve already got that experience of auditioning and I’ve learned some lessons along the way that are useful in knowing how to be successful.”