“I know for a fact I’ll be playing music for the rest of my life.”

Claire Van Der Bosch, senior bass clarinetist, performed this weekend at the All-State ILMEA Music Festival.

Van Der Bosch plays bass clarinet, which is an instrument that plays an octave below the clarinet. Bass clarinet is normally played in orchestras and wind ensembles. Van Der Bosch tried out for ILMEA in October of 2014 and was selected for the All-State Competition this past weekend.

“I was absolutely elated,” Van Der Bosch said. “I was worried I wouldn’t make State, so when I heard I did, it was a wave of relief.”

Though Van Der Bosch did not feel confident that she would make it to State, she did have many years of experience playing similar instruments to the bass clarinet.

“I originally played clarinet,” Van Der Bosch said. “My freshman year I was kind of tired of it and wanted to try something else. I wanted to do baritone sax at first, but then Mr. [Josh] Thompson [band director] told me to try out bass clarinet. I wasn’t too thrilled about it, but after I started to play, I was instantly in love with it.”

Van Der Bosch has been preparing for ILMEA since the beginning of her senior year. All the students are given music etudes and scales to practice. On the day of the audition the students are given a new piece of music to play for the judges called sight reading.

“I took the pieces I had to audition with pretty slow at first to get the muscle memory down,” Van Der Bosch said. “Then I gradually got them up to speed with few mistakes. I also didn’t over practice, since I already knew the pieces as we auditioned with them for district [95].”

Van Der Bosch was up against the top 14 bass clarinet players in the state of Illinois and she took second chair. The first chair placeholder was a girl from a different district.

Van Der Bosch has people that she looked up to when she was a freshmen and wanted to be like them.

“I looked up to the senior in wind ensemble before me, Krystyna Keena, a lot when I was a freshmen.” Van Der Bosch said. “I also look up to J. Lawrie Bloom, who’s the solo bass clarinetist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra [CSO].”

Van Der Bosch says that in a dream world she would try out for CSO, but she doesn’t really want to. She does wish to continue playing bass clarinet when she is in college.

“I won’t be playing for a career,” Van Der Bosch said, “but maybe as a hobby, either in a community symphony or just on my own.”

One of the reasons that Van Der Bosch loves being in band is that she really enjoys the people she gets to hang out with.

“We really are a big family,” Van Der Bosch said. “I got incredibly close with the other kids who made State this year. They really made the trip that much better.”