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- My name is Dexter Mott.
I'm a senior at La Follette High School, and I play the violin.
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My older brother, who's one year older than me,
he started when he was three, I started when I was three,
and my sister also started when she was three.
Both of my siblings quit music, but I really wanted
to just keep going with it.
And what helped me do that
was when I started taking lessons with Eugene Purdue.
- Ba-da, blah, make sure to lead all the way...
- Dexter: When I started lessons with Eugene,
I started entering competitions.
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And that sort of inspired me
to take it a little bit more seriously
and make it my own thing.
A lot of musicians view building technique
and building musicality as two separate things,
but Eugene likes to reinforce the relationship
that they have with each other.
'Cause when you play musically,
it actually reinforces your technique, and vice versa.
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I've been doing the Bolz competition
for about four years now.
I even made it to the semifinals one year.
So this is the first year I've made it
into the actual final round.
I didn't want to graduate high school
without getting somewhere with it.
So it's definitely really, really, really cool!
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I just love playing music with friends.
It really strengthens the bond that you have with people
when you're able to share music with them.
Last summer, as we were getting into the pandemic,
my chamber group did our own little live broadcast
of a Mendelssohn string quartet.
And we just livestreamed it on YouTube.
That was probably one of the coolest things I've ever done.
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Music is something that I'm good at.
And it's always been something that I enjoy doing
with other people.
Playing music and rehearsing and improving
and thinking critically about the way that you're playing
and the way others are playing and communicating with them,
it's just a really, really, really fulfilling experience.
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