This photo was recently passed along to me after years of hearing about it and I thought I’d take the time to tell the story.
The seed of my interest in alternative genres was actually planted in the first few months of my initial study of the violin when I was nine. My friend Claire had seen Itzhak Perlman on the television show Sesame Street. She was so inspired, and the performance was so amazing to her, that she told me we simply had to play violins. I never saw the episode until much later, but believed her when she told me that we had to play violins. In this case, peer pressure paid off.
I had been taking piano lessons for two or three years prior to trying the violin and though I was an average student on the piano, with a violin in my hands I took flight. By the end of my first year of violin lessons I was playing Vivaldi Concertos. I loved the mobility of the violin: I could play standing, sitting, walking, or dancing, and both inside and outdoors. Generally shy and soft spoken until somehow I would feel comfortable enough around the person I was with to break out of my shell, I loved the fact that the nuances available on the violin so closely mimicked the sound and quality of the human voice. Finally I had a way to communicate exactly what I was feeling without having to speak.
My first performance, as a wandering minstrel and musical accompaniment for the maypole dancers at a May Faire hosted by the Monterey Waldorf School I attended, a few months after I had started taking lessons. You can tell by my expression in the photo that I took my job very seriously! The pieces I played with a group of six or seven adult musicians, included tunes like “The Irish Washerwoman” and “Cumberland Gap.” Through this experience I discovered a special affinity for fiddle music. The tunes seemed so familiar it felt as though I had played them before. From then on I often used jigs and reels as my “dessert” after scales, etudes, and concertos. My regular “gig” that first year of playing violin became providing music for my school’s folk dance class, taught at that time by my mom.
