Saratoga News

Cathy O'Shaughnessy

Lynbrook student embarks on international music tour

By John Pancharian

Cathy O'Shaughnessy says her favorite instrument to play is the trombone. Why? "Because it's loud."

And she knows wherof she speaks. The Lynbrook High School sophomore also plays the clarinet, saxophone, piano and harp, but she will embark on her first international tour as a trombone player. O'Shaughnessy is one of about 90 students from across the nation chosen to play in the American Musical Ambassadors concert band.

This group of students will tour Europe in July, playing concerts--and playing tourist--in Paris, Milan, Venice, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Heidelberg and London, to name just a few stops.

"She's actually been into music since she was about six months old," her mother, Carla O'Shaughnessy, says. "She would dance around in a diaper to 'Barbara Ann' by the Beach Boys."

Cathy picked up the clarinet when she was in the fourth grade, added saxophone in fifth grade and picked up trombone in eighth grade, in October 1996. She plays music at school and with the San Jose Youth Symphony, in addition to the tour this summer.

"I don't really have much of a life beyond that," Cathy says. But to listen to her and her mother tell stories, life is one thing Cathy has never lacked.

In the fourth grade, already a Shakespeare fan, she decided she wanted to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet with her class. Since some of the dialogue was a bit steamy for fourth-graders, Cathy wrote her own adaptation of the play. "You can't have the nurse asking Juliet if she's that 'hot,' " Cathy says with a smile.

In addition to directing and writing, she performed the parts of Benvolio and the friar.

Cathy decided to skip the seventh grade because "it just felt right." A little red tape and cajoling of parents later, she was an eighth-grader.

Once, while playing with the San Jose Youth Symphony, she was asked to understudy the harp part even though she did not know how to play the harp. "I had heard the C-string was red and the F-string was blue," she said, describing what she knew of harp playing at the outset. With one month to go before the performance, Cathy not only learned to play the harp, but also prepared herself to play her trombone part.

"I was purely relieved," she said, upon learning she would not have to juggle a bass trombone and a harp during the performance.

Cathy is also an eager reader, favoring science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov. And she operates the television camera for KTEH during pledge breaks. She said she gained her technical skills through a program called the Tech Trek Challenge, which taught teens to make commercials. She then created commercials for the San Jose Library, suggesting books to other teens.

Cathy says she is nervous about traveling, but that it isn't "real" to her yet. She says she can't picture a day without music, and wants to be a professional musician in the future. "In a big symphony," she says, "so I can eat regularly."

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