Why I’m Doing This - Part 1
When I was three, my mother bought herself a cello and found a local teacher, Mrs. Dalley, who agreed to let a three year old sit in on the lessons. I dimly remember a dark room cluttered with stacks of sheet music everywhere. There was a child’s size table and chair where I sat with my coloring book and crayons. Apparently Mrs. Dalley asked if there was something wrong with me - I was too quiet for a three year old! My mother continued lessons with Mrs. Dalley for many years. At least 10 years later, when I had begun to play viola, Mrs Dalley made sure we had comp tickets whenever her son’s quartet came to town. Her son was the second violinist of the Guarneri Quartet - John Dalley.
By High School it was clear to me that the only thing I really liked to do was play viola. But my parents were not very supportive of this as a career. I also had university professors who accepted me into their studio but once I was there, they were anything but encouraging. I spent years of my life trying to figure out what orchestra committees wanted to hear in an audition. What a broken system! How can a profession based on creativity and musicality be so stifling and soul-crushing?
After two children and a hiatus from performing, I happened across an add for an online course with Nathan Cole through Artistworks. This was the early 2010’s so it was a pretty novel idea. For a nominal monthly fee you had access to videos of him playing various etudes, excerpts, and solos. These videos were so well done you could see his fingerings and bowings. This seemed like a gold mine to me. This is what I had been missing all those years when I was practicing for auditions. You could submit two videos per month of your own playing and he would send back video comments.
I bought myself a violin (I had started on viola, never owned a violin) and signed up! Looking back, I think this was a good way to get back into playing. If I had picked up my viola and tried to start where I had left off it would have felt like swimming backwards. Playing violin was new - but similar to what I had done before. Eventually, I went back to my viola, but I had a much better outlook on playing.
A pivotal moment was when I attended an online masterclass with Nathan Cole and James Ehnes. Nathan asked Mr. Ehnes: When did you first take responsibility for your playing? I don’t remember how Ehnes answered but it hit me hard. I had never really thought about it. I was doing what I thought everyone else (teachers, conductors, audition committees) wanted me to do. Not what I wanted - how I wanted a phrase to sound, how much bow I wanted to use, how loud or soft I thought a passage should be.
I first discovered 18th century women composers during the pandemic - when EVERY string player was playing Bach. As the Pandemic wore on, I began to get tired of all the Bach. Wouldn’t it be cool if violists had more Baroque music to play? We do have transcriptions of Bach’s Violin Sonatas and Partitas and his cello Suites, but there is little else. And why had it never occurred to me that there were women composers alongside the men in the 18th century? Once I started investigating it, I realized they were there. So much of their work was ‘lost’ and they were left out of the history books. It is important to me to bring at least some aspects of these women’s lives to light. I find it fascinating to learn about their work and what Europe was like in the 18th century.
