The bittersweet melody

George Rogers Clark High School marching band senior Olivia Root looked to her closest friends standing beside her, tried to hold back tears, and smiled as they walked onto the football field.  

“There is a special spot in my heart for her,” said Misael Morales, a junior in the marching band and close friend of Olivia’s. “I deeply love her with everything in me. She’s like a sister.”

Olivia started her musical career at the Rev. Henry E. Baker Sr. Intermediate School. She wanted to become a drummer. But Mr. Leedy, the intermediate school band director, asked her to play a clarinet. “He deemed it was the right one for me,” Olivia said.

“I tell my friends, she had a painful period when she first brought the clarinet home from school, and it was so bad it hurt the dog’s ears,” said Carl Root, Olivia’s father. “We made her go out in the backyard and practice a couple days, and then she came inside and was just playing music.”

During the pandemic, Olivia struggled to keep her love of music. “I was one of the kids who was on a computer,” she said, and she was not alone. Her friend Angel Fisher recalled her time with Olivia on Zoom meetings. “We would sit on our Zoom calls and we would go in the chat. We would text each other and be like, ‘this is so boring.’”

It wasn’t until her performance “Of Our New Day Begun,” written by Omar Thomas in tribute to the nine people killed in the 2015 mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, that she found her spark to go on.

“I want my music to evoke change in society,” she said. 

Olivia “set the bar really high for everyone in terms of what a soloist at GRC should strive to be,” said AJ Cook, the high school band director. She has the distinction of being a Kentucky Music Educators Association all-state musician all four years of high school.

Her mother, Danielle Root, said she has taken on a leadership role, teaching music classes and always holds her classmates responsible for the work they do.

As the melody of music comes to an end, Olivia thought about what comes next for her.

She wants to attend the University of Kentucky and play the clarinet, become a member of the band, and eventually become a music teacher.

“Olivia leaving is going to leave a big gap in my heart because she is a really, really close friend,” Morales said. “I would see her as either pure gold or pure diamond, because she’s strong, she’s independent-ish, but she’s pure and kind-hearted.”