We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nate Sparks. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nate below.
Nate, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
I prayed for it.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Once an aspiring big band writer, I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of my life to serving music in the Catholic Church, devoting my skills as a composer and pianist now to music in the liturgy and for the church at large.
For this, I think I’d been searching my whole life. It perfectly explains a seemingly God-given desire to become a great musician. I have loved music from a very young age, but always struggled to find a purpose for it that brought more meaning than to hear an applause for my efforts. Music in the liturgy (the Catholic mass) is a performance for God–not given by merely the musicians, but all the faithful participants who gather on Sunday to join their voices and prayers–and the rewarding applause isn’t heard until/unless we reach His kingdom, where we find that it was never for us, but for Jesus Christ.
My most recent project was a composers’ ensemble concert, for which I and several friends (including Kyle Athayde) wrote new pieces of music to accompany traditional sacred texts (Ave Maria, Te Deum, etc.) for SATB Choir and strings. Recordings and video are being uploaded to my YouTube channel (Nate Sparks).
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Early piano lessons (7 years old). Though my private study history was spotty, I’ve never stopped striving to improve my piano and keyboard skills.
Music Theory (also learned early, but for me mostly self taught) and Eartraining. These go together for a basic “understanding of music” which was always my primary interest, and a quality I noticed lacking in many musicians around me who had more “chops.”
Orchestration and Arranging, which I learned through mentorship with Kyle Athayde and various professors in college.
As for what kept me searching for and eventually realizing my purpose of becoming a musician for the Catholic Church, I can only assume it was the Sacraments of initiation, which my mother insisted I attain in my upbringing: Baptism, First Eucharist, and Confirmation.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
This is such a great question and I think about it all the time. It depends on the day, but I’ll almost always advocate for “putting all the eggs in one basket,” the former of these two schools of thought, as at least the lesser of two evils if not the ideal. I know way too many young people in highschool who spread themselves way too thin just because they think it’s what they’re supposed to do when they’re in highschool. This is the time to turn the temptations of curiosity–the part of our mental faculties that take us on a 5 minute DIY Youtube journey through cooking, building a shed, and investing, ultimately yeilding no fruit in any of these areas–into studiousness, which can only be attained through deep, intentional study and practice, with some good purpose as the end goal. If you’re in highschool and you’re going from marching band to a full school day to 2 hour track practice to a showchoir competition to speech club all within 24 hours, and you’re not a true 1/1Million genius, you probably suck at everything you do, and you need to focus on fewer, even just one thing. Your conscience will tell you when it’s time to move on to something else.
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Sarah Escarez
Kevin Jiang
Betsy Guthrie
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