Oscar Ortiz, a sophomore at The Dalles High School, still remembers how he felt as a young child hearing the music in videos his dad brought from Mexico.
“I was just kind of awestruck. I don’t know how to explain it. It just amazed me, the way everything sounded,” he said. “Ever since, I’ve loved music.”
Today, at the ripe old age of 16, Ortiz has amassed a variety of instruments as he pursues his wide-ranging love of music.
The Dalles High School band teacher Paul Viemeister is in his 38th year of teaching. In his entire career, he said, a music teacher is “very lucky to have maybe one or two students who are exceptional musicians, and Oscar is one of them.”
In fact, Viemeister heard about Ortiz when he was still in eighth grade. In ninth grade, Ortiz decided to take up trombone. “He picked it up and learned it and he’s my top trombone player.”
Ortiz said, “If it’s music, it comes to me pretty fast.”
Viemeister said, “Oscar’s just heads above the other kids in terms of music. I believe there are people who are wired for math, people who are wired for science, for history. Oscar is wired for music.”
A strong student, Ortiz’s favorite subject is science, and he’s considering both science and music as career fields.
Ortiz, the son of Alejandro Ortiz and Carmen Leon, has multiple outlets for his music. He’s in the high school’s concert band and jazz band, he’s taking a guitar class at school, and he also plays music at St. Peter Catholic Church.
His grandpa also provided a key spark for his musical appetite, teaching him the Mexican Wedding March on the piano when he was five or six.
His first instrument was an alto saxophone, which he got on semi-permanent loan from his cousin when he started sixth grade and joined the middle school band. Since then, he’s added two guitars, a keyboard and three trombones.
He has a bass trombone, a tenor trombone with an F attachment, and a tenor trombone. Two are shiny and new, and one is a beat up thing he got for $20 at a garage sale.
He’s paid for some of his instruments himself, with money he earns in summer working in the orchards. Another was a gift from his dad.
He’s got on loan a saxophone and baritone sax.
He doesn’t pigeonhole himself to any style of music, either. “I love all of it” from classical to metal, he said.
He can read music, he said, but it’s a laborious process compared to his ability to simply hear a tune and repeat it with minimal effort.
But Viemeister would disagree. “He’s being modest. He can read music. If there’s anybody who will play the music correctly, it’s Oscar — the first time.”
In the high school band, where Ortiz plays tenor trombone, he likes to add his own little riffs to the music the band is playing. “Sometimes I play extra things just to make it interesting. I do that a lot. I just kind of hear it in my head and I play it.”
With such a facility for music, it begs the question of whether he gets frustrated with other students who might not take it so seriously. “Sometimes,” he admits. “But then again, sometimes I’m one of those people that people want to yell at.”
He feels “a little” challenged by jazz band, the more demanding of the two bands.
From the middle school band until now, he’s played a succession of deeper and deeper toned instruments. He thinks he’ll stick with the tenor trombone for the rest of high school.
In addition to being in two bands at school, he practices on his own one to two hours a day. “I think I’d practice more if I knew how to play notes,” he said in reference to his current favorite, the piano.
Ortiz first learned music the American way, with notes designated as A, B, C, D, etc. But he later learned “the Mexican way,” which uses the solfége system of “do, re, mi, fa, sol,”
Making that transition is time-consuming, he said.
As for career choices, he’s torn between his two loves of science and music. He’s got his eye on the Berkeley College of Music in Boston, but he also is fascinated by astronomy.
“I kind of want to go into science, but then I want to do music, so that confuses me,” he said. “So many options.”
— Neita Cecil
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