When I was 12 I decided to do the only thing a cool girl would do at 12: Play the tuba. I would quickly learn that there are no cool solos for tuba players. After hauling a chunk of brass twice my size back and forth to school every day, I felt like the least I deserved was a solo. So I did the only thing I could think of: I wrote my own solo. That Christmas, for the first time in history, the band concert featured a tuba solo written by a first-time composer: Rachel Ankeney.

 

I learned very young that there is no problem I couldn’t solve with a little bit of creativity, no fear, and a captive audience.

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