Blue Valley senior Lindsay Cho remembers exactly when she realized that piano was not the instrument for her.

After starting to learn piano in kindergarten, Cho kept with it into fifth grade. She recalls spending half that year learning how to play “Canon in D,” which she describes as "a basic elementary-level piece.”

“It took me six months to even get it all together,” Cho said. “That's when I realized I don't enjoy the piano, I'm not good at it and I should find something different to play.”

She turned to the violin next, but that instrument gave her “a legitimate headache while I was playing, so I had to quit that.”

It looked like her days of musical performing might have come to an abrupt end.

Instead, Cho made the change in seventh grade to attending a public school after previously going to a private school. Her parents wanted her to give music another try, this time joining many of the friends she already knew who were members of the band program at that middle school.

With piano and violin ruled out, Cho started to give all the other instruments a try.

“I couldn't get a noise out on anything but the flute, so I ended up playing the flute,” Cho said. “The rest is history.”

Cho, a 2024 KSHSAA True Blue ® scholarship recipient and this week’s CapFed® True Blue ® Student of the Week, finally found the right instrument for her. 

Cho would go on to receive multiple all-state honors playing the flute as a soloist, in small ensembles and as a member of the Blue Valley Tiger Marching Band. For the latter, Cho is a drum major and performed alongside her bandmates in the KSHSAA State Music Festival. They earned their school a Division I rating each of the previous two years.
 

Back when Cho had to figure out what instrument she wanted to play in the middle school band, her focus was on finding one which provided her a few things that piano just did not. One thing she definitely wanted was an instrument that she might be able to “excel in playing.” She never felt like that was the case with piano.

“I couldn't get anywhere with it, I was really bad,” Cho said. “Piano was complicated, reading all those notes and chords. Playing the flute is so much easier, you can only play one note at a time. That made it a lot easier to be good at it because there's less going on.”

But it was not just about the challenging nature of her original instrument. Cho also just found playing the flute to be more fun.

“I genuinely enjoy it,” Cho said. “(With) piano, I'd always dread practicing during the lessons. But for flute I never have had that feeling.”

Of course, she admits sounding good also had an impact on her enjoyment of playing this new instrument.

“If you sound bad, it puts you down,” she said. “I feel like you don't want to practice, you don't enjoy it as much. I know you won't sound good as a beginner, but when you eventually can get there, it's very motivating.”

Now, Cho’s years of struggling to learn piano was not all for nothing. Her experience ultimately paid off well when it came to her performances on flute. As soon as she joined the middle school band, she already knew how to read the notes, allowing her to focus on just the physical and mechanical elements of learning how to play her new instrument.

“I could read the notes, I feel like, a little bit better than my peers who had just started music,” she said. “That gave me a little boost and helped me out there.”

Cho started to enjoy her quickly improving sound on the flute, as well as the sound of the group overall.

“I just enjoyed the whole sound as ‘the band.’” she said. “You could hear every section working together versus piano, which is still really cool, but it doesn't have the same impact as like brass blasting and whatnot.”
 

As a member of the band, Cho helped lead the group to Kansas Band Association Grand Championship honors each of her last three years of high school, only missing out as a freshman when the event was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. She also got to be part of her school’s wind ensemble, reserved for the top musicians for that section of instruments, during all four years.

“Playing with the highest level of players is such an honor,” she said. “You get to hear quality, all the time.”

This year, her and her bandmates got to experience that high quality on another level when they attended Grand Nationals.

“We were with the best bands in the country,” she said. “It was so cool to see what other bands can do with their programs and what we could do as a small band from Kansas.”

Cho said she also loves participating in the regional and state competitions, especially the KSHSAA Solo and Small Ensembles Music Festivals. She’s participated in both solos and small ensembles at regionals and/or state for each year of high school.

“It's always fun to perform a piece for someone other than your friends or your private lesson teacher,” she said. “You get different feedback from someone who doesn't know you.”

This year, her small ensemble performance was a quintet with four other flutists performing Satoshi Yagisawa’s “Five Sincere Expressions.” For her solo, she played Charles-Marie Widor’s “Finale.”

Cho has a hard time picking between which type of performance she enjoys more, as part of a small ensemble or as part of a full band performance.

“I think I feel comfortable with the band playing when I don't want my mistakes to be heard per se, but it's a lot easier to fine tune issues and musical techniques in a small group setting,” she said.

But sometimes that benefit of fine-tuning is not able to outweigh the experience of the full band setting.
 

“I also like the big band setting because there's more giant sounds and different sounds,” Cho said, adding that everybody in those performances benefits from removing the potential spotlight felt by the musicians if they were to miss a note.

Cho won’t have to worry about that performance pressure for her last outing with her high school bandmates. She’ll perform in a senior farewell spring concert on April 29. Cho said she expects that performance to feel bittersweet for her.

“It's my last performance as a high school ensemble group and with these people, but also it's exciting because I'm moving on to other things,” she said.

Cho will attend the University of Southern California next year. She plans to major in business administration with an emphasis in marketing, tapping into a different aspect of her creative side. 

Still, Cho plans to continue performing as a flutist during her college years. She’s looking forward to auditioning for an ensemble concert band at the school, as well as possibly trying out for the USC Trojan Marching Band. 

“They get to meet a lot of cool celebrities and do other cool things, so I’ve been considering that,” she said. “But I don't know if marching band is specifically something I wanna keep doing.”

Cho is less interested in the possibility of meeting famous people attending USC football games than she is at seeing other types of celebrities, ones who will be giving their own musical performances.

“Being able to go to things like Coachella is kind of a big incentive (to attending USC),” she said.

Cho will graduate with a 4.0 GPA, which hits 4.71 when weighted with her extensive AP coursework which includes psychology, statistics and calculus. During her time at Blue Valley, Cho was also the president of the Mu Alpha Theta Honor Society, vice president of the National History Honor Society, the social media manager for the Asian American Association and the treasurer and class representative for the Student Council. She was a member of the National Honor Society and the Tri-M Honor Society.