Category: Guest Artists

1. How did you start playing music? When did you start playing the violin?
2. At what point did you decide maybe it was time to be a little bit more serious than a kid going through the woodwind section in band?
3. What is the experience like for you playing with the orchestra or in a rock band?
4. How would you explain the Symphonie espagnole, by Édouard Lalo. What do you like about it?
5. Why did you choose this piece?
6. How’d you come to know the orchestra?
7. What are your other interests outside of playing music.

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KCO: Let’s start with your origin story. How did you start playing music? When did you start playing the violin?

Luis Alcantara-Nenninger: Well, I started music when I was in maybe fourth grade. My aunt Marianne would come over and play our piano, and I thought that was amazing. “I need to learn something like that.” Shortly after, I began playing the clarinet. I played all the woodwinds and worked my way through the band. I didn’t like any of them.

Then we moved to a new school in sixth grade that had an orchestra. They had strings. I saw people walking out with violin cases instead. I told my mother that I want to try that. She said, “it’s your last instrument. Go for it,” and it stuck. I fell in love with the violin.

KCO: Where was this?

Luis: This was in Burnt Hills, New York, the capital region of New York, but we moved shortly after sixth grade.

My neighbor was a violin teacher, Dr. Solner, my first teacher. I went to him for many years until I moved from that school district. Then my mother found a new teacher through him who was recommended highly. I auditioned for his studio and got in. He helped shape me into the person and the musician that I am now. I stayed with him up through college. He was Josh Rodriguez at the Juilliard school.

We took a more serious approach. He recognized that I had a very good ear and picked up the violin very quickly compared to other people. I don’t know why exactly, but perhaps because of my training in band and on the piano, I progressed. I knew that you put your fingers down and the sounds get higher. That made more sense to me.

I was his student from around 15 to 21. I just fell more in love with the violin and how expressive it was, and how you can make cool sound effects. I just took to it really well, I guess, and I found that it was a way to express myself even more than just playing the piano, which was nice. The violin was just like “whoa, this is amazing. I can’t put it down.” I would sleep holding it sometimes just because I loved it so much.

KCO: Did you go to college and study music there? 

Luis: I studied at the Manhattan School of Music. 

KCO: When did you end up in Western Washington?

Luis: I ended up here about six years ago. I heard the music scene was awesome, and I decided to try it out. I’ve actually fell in love with the weather. So, I never left.

KCO: At what point did you decide maybe it was time to be a little bit more serious than a kid going through the woodwind section in band?

Luis: That’s a good question. I think probably when I started taking lessons with Josh Rodriguez at the Juilliard school. He pushed me, pushed me, pushed me, pushed me to play the violin more, to get into it.

Plus, I enjoyed just watching all the musicians coming in and out. I realized, oh, this is what I want to do. It’s just such an expressive form of communication. It’s nonverbal. It’s great. It transcends languages. That’s pretty cool, too. I just fell in love with music, and I knew that it was something really special, and something that I was probably meant to do.

I also feel like you’ve never really made it. You’re always just working for your next gig, your next job. Experience in music, it leads us different places. I started out playing Broadway shows. Then I realized I didn’t really like playing the same thing every single night, the same exact way. It was creatively stifling so I branched out and played in rock bands, jazz clubs, and classical orchestras, which are so fun. And ballets!

Every step gets me to the next place I’m supposed to be. There’s never an arrival point for me, really. It’s always the next experience you’re having with this instrument. You learn something about yourself during that, and then more about the instrument as well.

I realized I could make all kinds of sounds with this thing. I played a gig when they said play this like a cow would moo. I never thought I could actually do those kind of sounds, you know? For me, when I realized I wanted to do music, I was not set on just one path. I was set on a desire to experience as much of it as possible and as many different avenues of music as I can. 

It certainly does take sacrifice to your family and your social life because when everyone else is free from work, you’re performing because that’s the entertainment they go to see.

Then, during the day, you’re practicing alone. A lot of the time, you’re more alone. I feel like the concerts are the glamor part, and it is maybe 10% of music. And the rest of it is just practicing a little thing, and whatever else, like driving in the car.

KCO: Are your parents musicians at all? 

Luis: No, they are not. They are both attorneys. I’m so lucky because they have been incredible supporters of the arts and music in general. Every concert I ever played, they were in the front row recording me with a video recorder. They were so proud of my music, and what I was doing with it. I’ve been so fortunate to come from a family that supports me 100% with music while having no understanding of it. I’ll be talking about music to them, “I missed a crescendo. I missed a couple accents.” And they say I don’t know what that is, but it sounded great.

KCO: You mentioned playing in rock bands, what is the experience like for you playing with the orchestra or in a rock band?

Luis: It feels like everything aligns for a second, nothing else matters in the world except for that music. The orchestra is such a big group of people coming together, all breathing together, all moving together. It’s really something special there. That doesn’t happen in every day in life.

I feel that sometimes, especially if you come from playing with bands rock bands and stuff, everyone’s kind of in their own little bubble a little bit. 

It’s nice to translate what we learn classically over to other forms of music too. Playing sweetly and dolce, maybe expressive with a little solo lick, and then also playing like the aggressive rock player. It is fun and it scratches a different itch, I guess you could say. 

KCO: When you’re playing in a rock band, are you playing the violin?

Luis: I play the viola in a couple rock bands, and I also play violin in one as well. In the rock band, I feel like the bass guitar is what we rely on almost all the time for our rhythms, our intonation, because everything squeezes in towards the lower end. We definitely have that in our in-ear monitors. We crank the bass. We crank the drums sometimes not as much vocals, but definitely guitar and bass are our rocks in the rock band setting, for me personally. That’s what I like to hear. 

KCO: You’re going to be playing the Symphonie espagnole, by Édouard Lalo. How would you explain the Symphonie espagnole? What do you like about it?

Luis: What do I like about it? Oh gosh, this is a deep question.

The piece comes right at you. You’re just blown right out of a gun. There’s no long introduction like in other concertos where it’s a long orchestra introduction, flowing and meandering around. Or, one where the soloist just seamlessly melts in. In the Lalo, the soloist makes us feel, “I am here. We are ready to have some fun.” 

I love the expressive nature of it all and the excitement it has right from the get-go. It’s such an exciting piece, but it’s also really emotional music because Lalo was Spanish, even though he was born in France. He was Spanish.

He has passion in his music, a lot of it. And this is one of his most played works too, so I’m really excited to kind of dip my toe in the legacy of it.

I would say people who don’t know music might consider it more like a story. It starts out with the Allegro. It’s really quick and fast. Then we slow down in the Scherzando movement, which is a little bit dance-y. Then, the Intermezzo comes in. That’s kind of like a singer, like if you went to a concert that night and saw a singer. The Andante movement is almost a funeral march. It’s very sad. It’s almost the end of the piece. It slows down a lot. It’s like you’re tired after going out dancing or whatever. Then you have that Rondo movement, which is like the next day where you wake up, and you’re remembering all the fun you had. It’s kind of like a story in that way.

I try to think of it in terms of portraying different events. I know it was written with folk music and themes of Iberia in mind. That’s part of it as well. I was born in Chile, South America. I feel the Latin flare. I play it more closely to how it is played in Latin America, then how it is played in American orchestras. There are things that I do that people wouldn’t do perhaps, or choices I’ve made that other people don’t do. But I’m excited, and for me, it makes it more of a story. 

This piece kind of gave birth to all these French composers writing Spanish music like Bizet. It’s just really interesting. It might have influenced Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, believe it or not. I think it was in a letter or some obscure writing of Tchaikovsky, where he mentioned that Lalo had influenced his concerto, the violin concerto, particularly the last one.

KCO: Why did you choose this piece? 

Luis: I just felt like it has so much to say, and it’s such an adventure from start to finish. I’ve dreamed of playing this piece with an orchestra. When I got the opportunity and the chance to play it, I said yes immediately. I cleared my schedule just to play it. For me, I’ve always wanted to play it, so it’s a dream come true.

Also, I feel it is a little bit in my blood because Chile was colonized by Spain. So, part of me has Spanish in there somewhere. I feel a connection to this piece and especially the flare of it, the theatrical element of just sinking into the really delicious slow stuff and just letting my fingers fly on the fast stuff. I feel like it’s almost coming from me in a way.

The way I interpret it is different from other people’s interpretations, and I love that. It’s such a special piece to me personally. Growing up, I would listen to this on repeat. Every version I could find just repeat, repeat, repeat. So, it’s been in my blood for a while and I’m really just excited to get a chance to play it. 

KCO: How’d you come to know the orchestra? 

Luis: I play in a string quartet called the Emerald City string quartet with Libby Landy, the principal viola of the KCO. We’re really good friends. I adore her, and she got me this opportunity. She suggested me for it.

KCO: What are your other interests outside of playing music.

Luis: I would consider the rock gigs fun for me right now. I play in a string quartet for King Youngblood. He’s an up-and-coming artist. He’s a fantastic singer songwriter genius extraordinaire and everything. He has pulled us in as part of his string section. I play the viola so I’m loving that.

But in my spare time, I really like to spend time with my family because they are so important to me. I have a twin brother. I have a little sister with two kids and my parents are all back in New York still. When I can I love to spend time with them.

I am still very close to my aunt Marianne. I consider her like a second mother to me. She’s been there for a lot of musical things for me. If I have any musical question, should I play something this way or that way, she’ll help me figure out what sounds best. 

I also like to longboard. It’s like a skateboard but longer for going down hills. I like to do that in my spare time as well when it’s nice outside. 

KCO: Whoa, you definitely have to wear those special gloves with the pucks on them for protection.

Luis: Oh, I wear all the pads. I wear the helmet. I “suit up” as they say in the sports. It’s all about protection. 

I think about my hands more than most people probably would. Sometimes I think I can’t do something because I might hurt my fingers, or I don’t want to lift something up today because I need to save my energy for practicing. My brother calls me ninja fingers because as musicians, we train those little muscles in ways other people don’t, so we can open jars no problem. Our fingers are so strong. My glove size is like a half size bigger on this (fingering) hand than on this (bow) hand because of the violin. 

But I really do love music. It’s such a gift. I feel like we’re so lucky to play it in any capacity. People have asked what’s it like playing a Broadway show? Exactly the same way it felt to go on stage for a community orchestra performance of anything. You have that same excitement. You’re playing your heart out on stage. No matter what level you’re at. It’s all the same. There’s no difference from the bottom to the top. It’s all excitement. It’s all just that energy and that emotional connection and connection to other people as well, in a way that normally you probably wouldn’t connect with other people. 

KCO: That’s great Luis. I really appreciate you time and energy.

Our third and final interview with one of the virtual concert creators is with David Spangler. In addition to the KCO, David plays with Puget Brass and Woodinville Community Band. David has also helped those groups with their video projects.

1. Who are you and what do you play in the KCO?
2. When did you start playing an instrument and describe your musical journey?
3. How did you connect with the orchestra?
4. How did you get started on the virtual projects?
5. How many hours does it take to put together the video?
6. What about this project is surprising to you?

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KCO: Who are you? And what do you play in the orchestra? 

David: My name is David Spangler. I play the trumpet, and I’ve played in the orchestra since 2003. It’s been quite a long run. I think all of that’s been with Jim (Truher) as the director/conductor. 

KCO: Was there somebody before, Jim? I started in 2006. 

David: There was somebody, I don’t remember the name of the person, but Jim was not the first director. Jim started around that time as well, as I understand. But somebody else actually started it. 

KCO: When did you start playing an instrument and describe your musical journey?

David: When I was in fifth grade, I joined the Honolulu Boy Choir as a charter member and started singing. My mom had strongly suggested piano lessons, so I took piano lessons for two or three years when I was about eight or nine. That really wasn’t my thing. When I was in fifth grade, I picked up the trumpet. I liked it and kept going.

In intermediate school in seventh grade, the band teacher was a trumpet player. I started taking lessons with him. He was a great, great teacher and very, very calm. The kids loved him. It was really a family-type environment. Instead of eating lunch, I would go and practice. I played a lot. I really got started there.

I had a choice to attend ninth grade in the intermediate school or go to the high school. I stayed there in ninth grade and played, and we had a fantastic band. We played some hard pieces that were challenging. They made (vinyl) records of it! It was just a very positive experience. Mr. Matsumoto was the guy who made it a great experience.

Then, I went to Kalani High School for three years. I was first chair, pretty much through high school. We did marching band where I was the assistant drum major. The director told me he wanted me to be the assistant so I could play the trumpet solos for some of the pieces, which was fine with me.

I loved being in band and doing that. That was really it for me.

I went to college at the University of Hawaii and played my first year. I was in engineering school. I did a mechanical engineering undergraduate. The first year, I did the marching band and went to the football games. I was spending 25 or 30 hours a week in the marching band. We did a new show almost every week.

After the first semester, I realized that I can’t do this. I’ve got a lot of other classes to study for, and I just can’t spend this much time on band, even though it was a lot of fun. I pretty much gave it up.

After I got through college, I went to Stanford to get my Master’s. Then I came up here to work at Boeing and so I really didn’t play through those years. A few years later, I did play in the Boeing concert band for four or five years. I met a good friend of mine who lives right down the street from me. And that’s important, for reasons I’ll tell you in a second.

In the mid- or early 90s, Boeing and the industry went through a downturn. Morale was bad. I left there to do some consulting and so didn’t play for a while. In 2001 or so, I was doing some consulting at Microsoft and that turned into a full-time gig at Microsoft. That’s around when I start playing with the orchestra.

A little earlier, I started playing with Puget Brass, too. All of a sudden, I’m playing again. Anita (clarinet player in the KCO and David’s spouse) was in a choir. She heard this brass band rehearsing next door to where the choir was rehearsing. The guy I mentioned, who had played in the Boeing concert band, was playing in Puget Brass. That person is Chuck Fleming.

I called him up and he said we have an opening right now because one of the cornet players is out on maternity leave. I subbed in the band, but I didn’t have a cornet at the time. I bought one from Matt Stoecker (KCO trombone). They put me in the solo cornet row, that’s the front row of a brass band. I asked if any of these other people want to move to the solo cornet row (like first trumpet)? And he said, “no, they are good where they are.” That was my introduction to Puget Brass, which is a British-style brass band. 

Chuck is a great player. He’s also a very social guy and so he likes to talk “a little” to people. I started playing and I’ve been with them ever since. It’s been 13 or 14 years of fun.

I’ve played everything from flugelhorn to solo, 2nd and 3rd cornet. I just play wherever they need me. That’s been a great experience. I grew up in wind band tradition. Playing with the orchestra was a different modality. I hadn’t really played with strings before. We had an orchestra in the schools, but we never played with them. So playing with the then Microsoft orchestra was interesting because it’s a different use of the trumpet.

The reason I’m still in the three groups — KCO, Puget Brass, and Woodinville Community Band — is because they’re all very different. I also subbed in a little bit in some jazz bands over the years. Right now, I’m subbing in a jazz band. The Solid Gold Hits group as the lead trumpet, but I don’t consider myself a lead trumpet player which is interesting. Most trumpet players have that really type A personality. 

KCO: When I first met the trumpets in the orchestra, I thought these guys aren’t like the other trumpet players I know. They’re actually a little bit humble. What’s going on? But I adjusted.

David: Exactly. I get it. I understand the stereotype and that’s just not me. I’m more of a kind of a support. I’m just not a Type A person. 

The Puget Brass band is how I got started on the videos. I’ve made six videos now with Puget Brass and Chuck participated in several those. It’s been hard to get people to engage. Some people are not interested in the virtual thing and recording themselves. I know several people like that. Or their living situation doesn’t really allow it.

I’m on the board for  two of the groups, and both boards are asking how do we keep people engaged and prevent members from leaving?

One of my biggest fears was that if we didn’t play for a while, and it has been over a year, that people would say I’m done. Then, hang it up. We’d be back to square one and not able to play some of the more challenging, more fun pieces.

KCO: How did you connect with the orchestra?

David: I was working at Microsoft and the orchestra was rehearsing on campus. I just heard about it through some news groups at Microsoft. They had clubs back then and “hey, they have a music club? Great!” 

I went to audition but they said, just come and play. It’s been a great experience, a big learning experience. Now I have a “C” trumpet. I got one because I was playing an orchestra. There were a lot of pieces where the first trumpet is in C D and even F.

I got to play a bass trumpet, which is kind of cool. We did a Vaughan Willams piece, and that was very interesting. You were there when I played the thing. Matt Stoecker brought it in. It had a bigger mouthpiece. I said, “wow, this feels like playing a tuba mouthpiece” and you said, “What’s wrong with that?” (laughter) That was awesome.

KCO: How did you get started on the virtual projects?

KCO: I can’t imagine you were just like making video projects before. 

David: No, I had not done anything. When COVID hit, we were in the process of preparing for concerts for multiple groups. On the board, we decided we just can’t meet anymore because of COVID. That was a bummer.

I have an “adopted” sister, JoAnn, who is from New Jersey. JoAnn would go to Hawaii because she won the second trumpet position in the Hawaii Symphony during the orchestra season. In Hawaii, she was staying with one of the cellists in the community orchestra that my mom plays in. My mom plays cello. Something happened with her living situation so my mom said to JoAnn, “hey, I’ve got a room” so she was staying with my mom. 

KCO: So, how did you meet her? 

David: I was talking to mom who said we have a trumpet player staying here.

JoAnn is big-time and she’s become a really good friend. I mention that because we were chatting at one point and she said, “hey David, you want to play a duet?” Naturally, I said yes to this professional trumpet player. She had used this app called Acapella. She played her track and sent it to me. I played mine and it worked out well for a duet. I thought that was kind of cool.

During the pandemic, the board for Puget Brass started talking about what are we going to do? I told them about Acapella app. We decided to try it. We picked a piece called Deep Harmony, a tonal thing, that’s very, very slow. We use it for warm-ups. I figured we could use that because there’s not a lot of notes and it’s a good start.

We tried it but there were several limitations. You can only have nine tracks total. The coordination was complicated, and if you have one person that was delayed at all, everything just stopped. It took us three or four weeks to get that first recording. That was a very simple piece so I said, we could only have nine people and the end result was decent.

The other limitation is you only get one shot at it. If it didn’t work, you could record it again and again. But, you had to record it all in one take. For a short piece like this, each part is a about a minute and a half. For a more complex pieces, that was a non-starter.

That was our first attempt, and it was frustrating. It took a long time. There was minimal editing you could do. I had seen what some of these professional orchestras from Europe were doing, and they had 20 or 30 tracks. That’s obviously cool, but I also knew that it’s a lot of work. Having been in software pretty much my whole career, I knew there’s some effort there. Little did I know.

I decided I’m going to learn this and figure it out, so I did some research. I found a program called DaVinci Resolve. We created a click track and sent it out. Then I came up with the rules about how we’re going to do this. I just got started doing it. That was in March of 2020.

DaVinci Resolve had a free version. I didn’t really have to invest anything to get started. I found out it was a really powerful piece of software that motion picture studios use. If that’s if it’s good enough for them, it has everything that I would need, right?

I figured it out, and started putting the videos in. The first video we did in the Puget Brass, the result was really good. I obviously put in some time because I had a learning curve, but it turned out well. The lead cornet player, Matt Dalton, commented after we released the video, “that was way better than I thought we could do.” He knew how much work it would be to get everybody to sound good and be together. A lot of our members are not used to the studio musician mentality of playing with the click track or sync-ing with other people remotely, in a studio setting. This was the first time most people had done that. And it’s so different musically.

Plus, you’re recording yourself and you’re listening back to yourself thinking that sounds bad. That experience was foreign a lot of people in my groups. We’re not used to it. On the other hand, many high level musicians know it’s very important if you really want to improve.

The good news is that we’ve had enough engagement that we’ve been able to keep things going. So that part has been great.

When we did Sleigh Ride, I had 53 tracks in that video. That was the most I’ve had to had to deal with and that’s a lot of data. But it’s a big data set to learn from.

I learned a couple interesting things. One is that a lot of the players had a difficult time with the metronome and the time especially offbeats. It was difficult to line things up. I developed a process for how I would do this. One of the things I look for in a music video is: does the video sync with what you’re hearing? It’s a pet peeve of mine when it doesn’t sync up. My process is to lineup everything in the time-space. I’ll line everything up, including the video and audio, keeping them together to do all the cuts together. Then I’ll combine it into a single track in that time space. Then I’ll work on the video aspect of it.

Really, I do the audio part first so it’s clean and then I’ll do some post-processing on the audio as well, doing some mastering. As my friend Ron Cole says, “adding the talent” right to the audio to make it really sound good.

I took some sound engineering classes in the last eight months and that has helped a lot. I can understand some of the effects and more the art of how you actually make it sound good. How you cut out some of the unnecessary audio effects and make it sound better, better stereo bandwidth, etc. It’s been a total learning space. Every video I’ve done, I’ve learned something, .

KCO: You were just motivated to basically teach yourself this?

David: Yes. When we were talking to the Puget Brass board early on, we wanted to continue doing something and playing in some fashion, virtually, but how do we do it? I volunteered. You know what? I think this is important for us to do. I want to do it. I’m going to invest the time, and now I had the time because I had retired. I had the time and motivation to figure this out and learn it. And it’s come in handy.

KCO: Come in handy?!?! That’s an understatement, Dave. It’s fantastic!

David: Jim, our director, and the board are not going to compromise or put people in a position where they like feel like they have to come to rehearsal and then have somebody get sick. Jim and really everyone would feel so bad. So, they’re really playing it super safe.

KCO: How many hours does it take to put together the video?

KCO: Let’s use Sleigh Ride as an example. It’s about four minutes of music approximately. I know you sent some of the audio to Ken, and some of the parts Doug helped create. So just talk about your part of the process.

David: That’s a good question. In practice, this is what happens. The tracks come in over a period of time. I set up the template for the project, and then I bring in the tracks as they come in. So there is the calendar time of weeks. It’s much more than the working time. It can take probably three weeks in the calendar time from the time I start getting the project setup and track start coming in to completion.

There’s a period that gets intense. Not everyone is organized and gets tracks to me on time. So there is some wrangling to do. Once I get the tracks, then I can usually work like maybe four to five hours at a time before I need to take a break. I would say, all up, it’s between 30 to 40 hours, of time for a four-minute piece.

Early on, the first videos I did, the video took maybe two thirds of the time because that was the hard part. Some of the video controls were not there. About six to seven months ago, DaVinci Resolve had an update to version 17. In that version, they had a new control that’s called ‘collage,’ which is what I was doing. This control made it MUCH simpler to do. It really simplified because I didn’t have to do a lot of the masking and whole bunch of layering that took a lot of time.

With the new collage control, I could just set it up—boom, boom, boom—then resize each of the individual videos. Before, I had to figure out all the masking and background effects. It was a lot harder.

Now, it’s probably 50/50, maybe even 40/60 for the video. And it was 60% for the audio because I really want to spend time on the audio and get it just right. That takes a lot of time, making sure people are lined up vertically, in pitch, and horizontally, in time.

KCO: One of the things you said to me, you said, “these things last a long time. They are going to be out there a long time.”

David: They do, exactly right. When you’re performing it live, it goes out, the audience hears it and they generally remember the last note that you play in this or the first, but if you make a mistake, it goes out and it’s gone, unless of course, you’re recording it. Then that will persist for quite some time after the performance.

It seemed important, when we did Fanfare for the Common Man, getting that opening section solid when three trumpets are playing in unison for 15-16 bars. It has to be together or else, it’s bad. I would spend some time in those cases making it sound better.

A person submitted recording and said, “measure 52, I played the wrong note. You want me to record the whole thing again?” No that’s fine. I found that note, I cut that note and adjusted the pitch. It was off by a third. I just moved that note down a third, and it blended right in. 

KCO: But that’s more work on you. 

David: That’s a little bit more work, but if it could save somebody else having to re-record the whole thing and potentially make other challenges. Those types of things are not a problem, and I’ve learned the tool well now. That’s something super easy to do.

I had someone submit a track and I put it together with mine. I listened and thought, wow, that just doesn’t sound good. The track was flat but it was flat the whole way through, so I just adjusted him up like 25 cents and then it was fine. I asked the person about it later.  “Oh. Right. I forgot to tune when I recorded.” Oh well, that would explain it! 

KCO: What about this project is surprising to you?

David: I have a new-found respect for the people that do the audio engineering and recording. And the professional videographers.

To be clear, I knew it was going to be a bunch of work and now I know it’s a lot of work. But I also know it’s doable. Before, I had no idea. When you don’t know, it could be it’s like ten or ten thousand, right? I now know it’s a lot of work but it is manageable.

You have to learn and understand the tool. I’m there now instead of having to research and figure out how to do everything. Just getting familiar with the tool and coming up with a process I could consistently reproduce. I then knew, in my own head, where we are in the project. I could understand about how much more time I have left.

I did get a set of studio level speakers and that made a big difference when I was mixing the audio part because the speakers that I had initially were just the run-of-the-mill computer speakers. They really missed a lot. With the monitor speakers, I was able to hear what was actually there. I could then do the adjustment and fix for it. That was probably the biggest thing that made a difference.

Creating the click tracks was something I had to figure out. I wanted to create something that had the music because I heard a couple click tracks that were just the click. It’s hard if meter changes. It’s easy to get lost.

I got feedback that the click track was a little too soft relative to the sound that I’m hearing. I made the clicks much louder and that helped a lot, but adding MIDI music helped not only where we are in the piece but also with intonation. You need the music to adjust while you’re playing. You need to hear it or you’re not playing to anything except the click.

KCO: Go figure, the musicians around you matter.

David: Exactly. That’s the biggest piece: what’s missing is you don’t really have other people. It was surprising to learn how much you rely on those other cues and the other the people playing around you to play. Which also leads people to play too loud, I think.

But the whole nature of this music is a give and take, playing with a group, and how do I respond to them? And we’re all going to go through this thing together. That’s really kind of a missing element in here.

KCO: I agree. Dave, this was great. Thank you.

Thanks to David for the interview on 19 May 2021.

by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO

Our second interview with one of the virtual concert creators is with Ken Adamson. In addition to recording and playing in the KCO, you can hear his recording as Sonolux on Soundcloud.

1. KCO: Who are you what started you down your musical road?
2. KCO: How did you end up in the orchestra?
3. KCO: How did you get involved with the virtual projects broadly speaking?
4. KCO: How long does it take to mix and master the audio for a video and how long does it take to master a concert?
5. KCO: In a project like this, what is something that people just don’t expect?

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KCO: Who are you what started you down your musical road?

Ken: I’m Ken Adamson and I play French horn.  I play French horn now, but I didn’t always play French horn.

I started playing an instrument in the fourth grade. It would have been recorder or something like that, but they moved you off to another instrument pretty quickly. My dad was a clarinet player and was into the Dixieland Jazz-style clarinet. We grew up in Louisiana so it was a given and so that was what I played all the way through high school.

For my last two years in high school marching band, I played mellophone because who are we kidding, clarinets are useless in the marching band and I wanted to play something a little bit more flashy.

The band director said we need mellophones. Here’s a fingering chart and instrument. He had to show me some more. He was a trumpet player, so I got some private lessons from him.

I didn’t pick up the French horn until college. I thought that it would be pretty similar to mellophone or trumpet. Turns out, it’s much harder. Had I known, I might have picked a different instrument to switch to, but it was sort of opportunistic.

I went to college on a partial music scholarship for clarinet. The idea of switching instruments was a big deal. I would have needed to re-audition. But, the way that I came to playing French horn, it was a bit of a boondoggle.

KCO: What school was this? 

Ken: That’s at Northwestern State University, at Natchitoches Louisiana, Central Louisiana. It’s a pretty decent, but unheard of, music program. The music program is almost a quarter of the school. It’s well funded by athletics. We were at all the games and everything.

You have to audition for every ensemble. The only thing that was a near guarantee was marching band. Even then, the section leaders required you to play some scales and learn the fight song. Not a full audition, but they make sure that you can actually play. You don’t have to be good, just be able to play.

They didn’t have as many ensemble choices in the fall, so that they didn’t compete too heavily with marching band. I don’t know where you hail from, but in the South, marching band is a big deal. 

KCO: I went to school in New England and, you’re right, not as big a deal.

Ken:  I was playing mellophone in marching band. I was going to my private, mandated clarinet lesson because I was a music major at that point. My clarinet teacher gave me the audition materials for fall wind ensemble. Show up and you do your audition on clarinet.

I show up and there’s a hundred clarinet players. Wind ensemble is going to take 12. But I really want to play in this thing. I’m listening to these people practice and we’ve got upper classmen that are virtuosic. I realized that I’m so out-classed there’s no chance that I’m going to be in this group. One of my new friends told me that she, “was the only person auditioning on bass clarinet. They need two bass clarinet players. Have you ever played bass clarinet? “

I played bass clarinet in high school. Using her instrument and materials, I basically sight-read the audition. I was the only other person to audition so I got in.

That was in the morning. That same afternoon the mellophone section leader from the marching band comes to me and asks, “do you play a concert horn?” I said no, not really. He handed me his horn and asked for some scales. I got some scales out and he said, “okay, well, your fingerings are wrong, this is double horn.” He actually had to show me some fingerings, and I went and I auditioned. I think there were 10 people auditioning for fall wind ensemble. I didn’t make it on horn. But with only 10 people, it wasn’t as long a shot at getting in on B-flat clarinet. But I did, I did wind up getting in the next spring.

KCO: This is your freshman year? 

Ken: My freshman year, yes. I stuck with clarinet for another couple of months, so still going to my clarinet lesson, while playing in wind ensemble on bass clarinet, and marching band on mellophone. I dropped it entirely the next semester. I don’t know how they let me keep my scholarship. They should have made me re-audition on French horn, but maybe shoddy record-keeping?

The other interesting thing, at some point, I actually became a liberal arts major. I had a pretty shotgun set of focuses and among them was music. The other ones were actually engineering, math, and physics, which is the other half of my other major.

As time went on, that grew. My advisor asked if I knew anything about computers? I knew a lot about computers. She said that I really should think about computer science. That’s going to be a hot field and this in ‘93 or ‘94. 

KCO: That’s some good advice though. 

Ken: And it led me to Kirkland Civic Orchestra, by way of Microsoft Orchestra.

KCO: How did you end up in the orchestra?

Ken: It turns out that there’s a heavy overlap between tech and music. Every place I’ve worked, there’s been other people around me that play an instrument. When I was working for Microsoft, someone told me that Microsoft had an orchestra. That surprised me but I decided to check it out.

I went to Christmas concert in 2007 or 2008. I just watched. Hey, they’re not bad and they only have three French horns. But I chickened out. I could have joined and finished out the season but I waited close to a year and joined later in the season. I didn’t join early enough to play the first fall concert but in time to participate in the Christmas concert. I remember the first piece of music that I saw on a stand was Babes in Toyland. I just sat down where I thought the horns might be. The seating wasn’t that organized. I remember people start filtering in and it turns out that I just helped myself to the first horn part. Everybody in the horn section was like, that’s fine. I realized the error of my ways. By the second rehearsal, I said, “I’ll play another part.”

KCO: How did you get involved with the virtual projects broadly speaking? 

Ken: Flash forward a few years. I’ve left Microsoft and I’m working at Getty Images. I meet a guy who is similarly a musician and a software engineer. He has a side business/hobby as recording engineer: recording, mixing, mastering–basically audio engineering as a whole.

I had been doing a little bit of that essentially remastering projects from the orchestra and from another concert band that I’m in. I started asking him questions and he said you just need to come over to my house and see my studio.

He took me under his wing and taught me quite a bit. That was around 2012, 2013. During one summer, I worked with him for a good six months or so. In the fall, I made the proposition to Jim, to let me handle recording. Jim does so much and that is one thing I could take that off his plate.

The recording part wasn’t a stretch for me because I had done a lot of that in college. There was a nice recording studio there. Our recital hall was fully mic’d and so I did quite a bit of practice on my own because I had keys to that stuff. When I was a student, I had jobs all over the music department.

I’d go in late at night and make copies of the master tapes and practice mixing on tape copies. I was somewhat familiar with the process but all analog. It’s a totally different world, when you’re about digital recording. A lot of the metaphors are still the same. We still use the same software as the 90s. Pro Tools was starting to be the predominant software even then.

The mixer behind me? That’s basically the same mixer that I learned on in college. The Mackie, 32 channel mixer, and I still use it. There’s a lot to be said for working in the analog domain for sound and muscle memory.

KCO: Using a mouse and even a touch screen, it’s just not the same thing.

Ken: It’s not. There’s nothing like a real, physical piece of equipment to work with that responds and has its own character. It’s like an instrument. If you’re already a musician, working with a piece of analog gear is a lot like playing an instrument itself. 

Mixing and recording for the orchestra makes me the natural candidate for mixing audio in the virtual recordings, but I wasn’t originally tapped to do it. Dave was going to handle all of it. At the last minute, I was said why don’t you let me mix the audio. He was very appreciative, and I’ve had a had a great time doing it. 

KCO: They sound good to me.

Ken: I treat them like a studio recording. It’s a little different when you’re recording the orchestra live. You have, essentially, a pre-mixed sound that you’re trying to capture. We’re fortunate in that, where we perform, in the chapel at Northwest University, has great acoustics. Getting a good stereo live recording is not a problem.

By contrast, when you have each individual part being sent to you in a video, I can treat them like studio recording. I do as much technically as I can to help the sound and help out the player. There’s a fairly intense editing process that is the same as with any studio recording: getting everybody in time, in tune, and still trying to preserve our sound. I think I’ve been reasonably successful with that.

KCO: Your skill level has increased over time. If I go back and listen to some of older the recordings, the newer ones are better. 

Ken: Some of that is different techniques and better equipment, but I don’t want to deep dive and get too geeky about it. The KCO, we’ve just been getting better. I’ve been surprised at how much better that we’ve been getting over time. We’re also tackling harder and harder repertoire. Having a better sounding orchestra helps me move to techniques that you use for a better sounding orchestra. They go hand in hand. 

KCO: How long does it take to mix and master the audio for a video and how long does it take to master a concert? 

Ken: For the audio, 15 to 30 hours. Dave extracts the audio from the videos that are sent to him. I’m not exactly sure the extent of what the other guys do. I know that what I get has the first notes and the last notes lined up. All the stems (basic tracks) are the right length, and he just sends me a stack of files that are just 1 per instrument. They start at the same time and end at the same time. It takes 20-30 minutes per track just to place in the software on the grid. I mean that’s a few hours of work right there just to get everything lined up.

Fanfare for the Common Man was around 16 tracks and was fairly fast going. As a horn player, I’m already quite familiar with the piece. There’s not a lot of noodley fast moving parts going on. It’s mostly quarter notes, half notes whole notes stuff. It’s all about the texture. And the percussion is so critical in Fanfare.

With the click track, I then go about making very fine adjustments – in a non-destructive way – to individual notes to get everybody even more lined up and starting and stopping together.  I take care not to make it “perfect”.  The software I use could, in fact, make it absolutely flawless – but that sounds bad and artificial. 

Mixing takes about a half day, including timbre corrections and setting the group into a “real” virtual space together. 

For a concert, it is mostly a mastering job. I know we have a sound that I go for, and Jim trusts my ear and my aesthetic. I used to have to do a lot of back and forth. I would master track and then I would upload and share it with Jim, and he’d give me his feedback. As the years have gone on, he’s done less and less of that, where I just put it out.

KCO: I love that Jim has learned to trust people if for no other reason, then it’s just a way to divide the labor.

Ken: Mastering takes a lot of focus and absolute quiet in the house.  The entire process usually takes a day to three of focused work for a single song.  

Being part of the group, I want the music in as best a light as possible. My goal is for it to sound to other people the way I hear it in my heart. When we play something like Bruckner 4th Symphony or Shostakovich 12, I know those pieces. I know how I want them to sound. I know how I hear them at the concert, and my goal is to present a finished product to make other people feel the same way that I did. 

With these virtual recordings, you have a lot of control because you have a single person’s isolated recording and there is the temptation to go and fix everything. To make it as flawless as possible. That’s great and all, but at what point is it no longer the same group? You’re essentially remixed and remastered it to death. In a sense, it’s not really the KCO anymore.

I don’t want to turn our recordings into something that you can produce in software with an orchestral library. I do a lot of eyeballing whenever I line it up beats and things like that rather than using the exact start of the waveform because I know that I’m going to introduce a little bit of error. It stays a lot more organic sounding.

Like I said before, I look at it as difference between a live recording and a studio recording. There is a lot more that can be done with a live recording than people realize. There’s amazing software out there that is actually capable of subtracting a bad note out.

After a concert, I’ve had people come up to me and say, “so you heard me flub my entrance? Do you think you could fix it?” I will give it a shot. I’m taking care to preserve someone’s dignity and it helps the overall product without being too ham-handed with the mix.

With a studio recording, you either trust your studio engineer or you don’t. I had a conversation with David Spangler. We’re talking about how far do you go with production to make these videos look as good as possible and sound as good as possible? And I said that I’m treating it like a studio session, so I’m going to do everything that I can, short of making it sound like sampled, orchestral music. He said that was good because these videos are going to be permanently in the world now. We need to treat them as well as we can. Dave and I are in the same camp.

KCO: In a project like this, what is something that people just don’t expect?

Ken: I try to work in highest fidelity domain as possible. I mean that I actually have photos of the orchestra that I’ve taken. I have measurements provided to me, by Jim, of our footprint. And I’m able to reproduce, physically, a sound stage from that. I do it in hi-channel surround sound or what’s called Ambisonic format.

I’m working in sometimes seven, eight up to 13 channel virtual audio for some of these projects. That’s a high-end film technique, but I’m a big fan of film music. I love me some John Williams and Alan Silvestri. Ben Hur, that’s one of the best soundtracks ever and they were working with monaural sound (mono).

I’ve even started working in Virtual Reality (VR). I’ve got my Oculus Quest 2 (VR headset) here and I’ve got some software that actually allows me to grab an instrument and place somewhere: like cellos stage left, violins stage right, violas in a spot, brass in the back, and woodwinds in the middle.

That’s how I mixed Fanfare for the Common Man. I watched several YouTube videos on different brass sections of different, famous orchestras. I saw how they were laid out. The one that struck me as best sounding in terms of the depth was Berlin. We are laid out in Fanfare for the Common Man in the same relative positioning as a video that I found of the Berlin Philharmonic brass section playing Fanfare. 

KCO: Wow. that’s cool.

Ken: And it all gets played into this virtual environment. And what I have is, peoples’ recordings from their living room, and their closets, and their bedrooms. You have to make it sound like something other than recording in a bedroom. I picked St. John’s Basilica as one of the reverbs that I used.

I took some measurements of the chapel at Northwestern University and the primary reverb is this chapel but with the tails turned way up, so it has a nice deep long, lush reverb to it. This isn’t just panning left and right, which is all the control you have with an analog board like that, but actually placing sounds in three-dimensional space. Not Just X and Z, but also on a rake.

If you think about it, if you’re in a balcony, looking down at an orchestra, by your perspective, they’re at an angle, right? And that all makes it sound differently, particularly top firing instruments like the tuba. With a steeper angle, you get the more of the high-frequency material. You hear the lip sounds and overtones and everything. It really helps you blend better with trombones and horns and everything.

I spent some time over the last couple of years, diving deep into modern film score mixing and mastering techniques. I’m starting to use that for rather more mundane projects than scoring a film, but no less rewarding. I think that it’s turned out to be a really cool approach and set of tools for realizing projects like this.

KCO: It’s awesome. Well, thank you very much. 

Thanks to Ken for the interview on 6 May 2021.

by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO

Thanks to Doug for the interview on 11 May 2021.

by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO

Cori Belle will play the Mendelssohn #2 at our next performance. She is a musician and a mom. We discussed her playing, her upcoming performance, and some thoughts on her social media presence.

1. When did you start playing music and did you start with the piano?
2. When did you know you wanted to head towards a life of music?
3. What’s your connection to the Kirkland Orchestra?
4. Why did you choose Mendelssohn #2, or how did that happen?
5. What is the connection to Beethoven?
6. Could you talk a little about the role of social media for you as a performer?

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KCO: When did you start playing music and did you start with the piano?

Cori: I did start with the piano. My parents both play. My dad started studying with a professor at the university while in high school. He was then able to continue studying with the same person after he graduated from high school – kind of under the table. My dad got a very good music education in college without having to major in it. My mom was a church musician as well as a piano teacher. She was my first teacher and that lasted about maybe a year.

KCO: Was that around here?

Cori: No, we lived in Oregon at the time. As is common with moms and daughters, that didn’t last very long (laughter) and so she traded me off to her friend, another piano teacher. And her friend taught me, and my mom taught her friend’s kids piano. This was a great solution for both moms.

Cori:. My mom tells me I learned by ear first, and she taught me some chords to go with melodies.

KCO: And this is what age?

Cori: I don’t know. Before school, maybe 5. Then formal lessons around first grade. Those continued forever. I went through a variety of teachers.

We moved to Arizona when I was in fifth grade. In junior high, I had my music teacher from school teaching me. That wasn’t real challenging. I wasn’t practicing. I was sight reading through my lessons and then leaving it. My mom called Arizona State University and asked for a recommendation for a teacher and that led me to Barbara Stoutenburgh, who’s still teaching. She prepared me for college.

She created a program that is now part of the Arizona Music Teachers Association. It’s a standard piano curriculum with a theory background and performance opportunities. It was amazing. I never had a teacher like her. She really got me on track.

You asked me if I played other instruments. No, it was always piano. I wanted to specialize. I think it takes a lifetime to really learn an instrument, especially with piano.

KCO: If you end up playing the viola or the bassoon, it’s not usually where you start.

Cori: Sure. I had opportunities to dabble with harpsichord or even organ and those, they’re completely different instruments. They have the same keyboard, but a different technique and a different literature. There’s so much music for piano, that’s what I studied for.

KCO: When did you know you wanted to head towards a life of music? Would you call yourself a professional musician?

Cori: I have a hard time with that term (laughter).

KCO: I do too, actually, so let’s say when you decided to become more serious.

Cori: My sophomore year of high school I got involved in choir. It was actually because I liked a boy who was in the top chamber group, and he introduced me to the choir teacher and said, “you’ve got to go play for her,” so I went and played. She said, “you’re hired!” It happened during my prep period. I had it free, so I went and played for the top chamber group every day at school for a year and that morphed into the next three years of playing for as many choirs as I could at the school, and playing for all their school musicals, sitting in their pit orchestra.

Our district was really arts centric, and they offered a concerto competition at one point. I applied and won and got to play with members of the Phoenix symphony, a Mozart piano concerto.

Choir got me hooked. I just loved accompanying. I loved the challenge of it. I loved the repertoire we did. We did Rutter’s Gloria. We did major works.

KCO: One of the things you get when you’re an accompanist, which I think is also a little different from a piano soloist, is you get to play with other people. It’s a way to be social, but also a different musical setting. I’ve done some singing, and I’ve played solo literature with piano accompanist. It’s a different mentality to be an accompanist. When you’re in music school, finding your accompanist is a big deal, so that’s cool. I can see how that would hook you.

Cori: Yeah, so that’s when I decided, maybe junior year, I was talking to my piano teacher and found out, oh this could actually be a living. I could be an accompanist and get paid for it. And I did get paid for it in high school, so I guess you could say I’ve been professional since then (laughter), if that’s your definition.

KCO: Was it the success as an accompanist that gave you the of external validation? That insight you get when someone else says you are capable of doing this. Was that the moment?

Cori: I think I got that validation from my peers, too. All of a sudden, I had this group of people that loved me and loved music, you know? We loved that same thing. Getting paid was sort of a bonus. It wasn’t something I was looking for.

I majored in piano performance, not in accompanying. I thought I wanted to do accompanying, but the professor I ended up studying with suggested I study piano performance. You’ll get all the technique and you’ll learn the literature, and then you can still do accompanying on the side.

You can still learn the languages and play for singers and do all that, but it’s harder to go the other way, just studying the accompanying. You don’t always—and it might have changed, this was twenty years ago—but you don’t always get the best professor. You don’t always get the same focus on solo literature because you just don’t have time. When they know you have the skill that they need, you go to college and other students find out you’re an accompanist: every singer needs an accompanist. All the instrumentalists need an accompanist. The choirs need an accompanist. That can completely consume your time.

KCO: Right! Where was this?

Cori: I was at Grand Canyon University in Arizona. At the time it was a huge, great music department and it’s since changed. I don’t think it has as much of a classical focus now. It has more of a worship production focus.  The students will write, perform, and record their own CDs on campus and Christian worship music. There’s still a choir. They’re still doing some classical. I’ve noticed some of my professors coming back after hiatus, so I’m hopeful that it comes back. It was such a rich place for me to learn.

KCO: What’s your connection to the Kirkland Orchestra? How did you get involved with that?

Cori: I had played for Kirkland Choral Society for the last four years, and Kathy Truer is one of the singers. Jim comes to all the concerts and after one concert, about a year or two ago, he came up to me and asked if I would be interested in playing a concerto someday. I said sure.

Then life happened, and so a year or two later, we got back together, and he said, “do you want to do this this season? Are you ready? Let’s sit down and talk.” So we did!.

Kathy, she talks about the orchestra all the time, all the soloists and everything.

KCO: That is fantastic. Why did you choose Mendelssohn #2, or how did that happen?

Cori: Jim and I sat down, and I knew he wanted to do Beethoven focus this year, so we talked about the Beethoven fourth. We also talked about the Schumann A minor piano concerto, which I love. And then the Mendelssohn, and so time constraints were part of the conversation. What would fit well within a good program for the orchestra, and the connection to Beethoven. Jim wanted to make sure it was there, and the size of the orchestra, just making it fit.

KCO: What is the connection to Beethoven?

Cori: I don’t know what Jim would say (laughter). The one that I found is, they both use this three-note pattern, and Beethoven goes down a minor third for a symphony. Mendelssohn brings it up and it’s a completely lighthearted, different feel. But he plays with that same motif of notes.

KCO: With the Mendelssohn, my impression is that it is really technical, which surprised me. What are your impressions of the Mendelssohn? To me, even though it’s romantic, it has a lot of classical elements and a focus on scale play.

Cori: Mendelssohn in general, he did all the Songs without Words. He did a lot for voice and piano. His sister did a lot for voice and piano, so those soaring melodies are really what drew me first. This is a piece that I studied in college. I studied both the Mendelssohn concertos, 1 and 2. I like fast finger work. I like the challenge of that. It’s fun; it’s exciting.

KCO: Oh, one hundred percent! I think it’s a sort of trapeze act when I listen to it.

Cori: I read something this morning: Robert Schumann looked at the score, the Mendelssohn second, and didn’t think there was anything for virtuoso pianists to play. He thought this has all been done. It is not challenging. It is not impressive. Even Mendelssohn wasn’t really happy with what he did. I even had a fellow pianist comment to me, “oh that’s such a cute concerto,” and as I’ve been working with it even more, I think there is nothing cute about this, it’s really difficult (laughter).

KCO: What else appeals to you?

Cori: He trades the melody between hands so while you’re doing the sixteenth notes, continuously, you’re also supposed to bring out those quarter note melody that alternates between the hands. Creating the balance between those is another trick. In the end, it is a challenge to make it all sound easy, and effortless. It’s easy to play fast notes, but to play them and carry along the melody, and make it seem like it’s no effort at all, is really difficult.

I don’t know if you knew, he wrote it on his honeymoon. I feel like that’s  present in there, and that’s where I get the emotional cues. I think sometimes he’s in conversation with his wife. I think there’s a male voice sometimes and a female voice sometimes.

The whole second movement I feel like is a love story between the two of them, so tender. And then the last one, somebody called fireworks. I think it’s just part of the ecstasy of new love and you’re on your honeymoon and everything’s rosy and the future is bright. I don’t know, I guess I’m a hopeless romantic in that.

But you’re right, he stays with the classical form. It’s like a sonata allegro form. He doesn’t have the angst of Beethoven or of Schubert. In fact, he died when he was 38, I think. He had a young life, but it wasn’t fraught. He didn’t deal with deafness, or syphilis like Schubert, or death. Mendelssohn seems like sort of steady, not a lot of drama. Maybe that’s why some don’t think of him as one of the major players.

KCO: Could you talk a little about the role of social media for you as a performer?

KCO: I was on your website, and I love the aesthetic. What are you thinking about your IndieMusikhaus? How does that relate to what you might want to tell people about for in the future?

Cori: I guess first and foremost, which we haven’t even talked about, I’m a mom. I have my three girls and super involved with school and their gymnastics and dance. Everything else has to kind of be periphery so even though I don’t have a full-time job where I get paid, I’m a full-time mom. That needs to be my focus and so playing for the choir is a part of my life. Indie Musikhaus is the series of house concerts that I started seven-eight years ago as a way to bring music into our home and not impact the family too much negatively. So instead of going out and playing all these concerts, I wanted to bring my friends in, and also have a chance to play.

KCO: They are in your home?

Cori: Yes, in my home. My vision is bigger, eventually I’d like it to be a circuit where Indie Musikhaus is sort of the name and the programming, but then we perform in different places. Maybe it’s not just homes, maybe it’s also retirement centers or libraries or schools. But it was a way to sort of marry my priority as a homemaker and mom with my love of music.

It’s been phenomenal. I guess the website actually started out as a personal blog of being a mom for the first time. It has morphed. I don’t want to talk so much about my kids because I want to protect their privacy. It is really music focused now. It’s become a website, https://coribelle.com/.

A couple years ago my kids started in school full time and so I decided, hey, I want to make this classical CD that I’ve been dreaming about forever. So that was the focus of my first year without my kids at home during the day. A friend of mine helped me outfit my living room with a couple of microphones and I recorded at home when they were at school. When airplanes had passed and the garbage truck, you know, it was really interesting. Some of the social media stuff has happened because I want to promote my CD. That’s on the website. That was the impetus in creating a professional Facebook page. I don’t do much beyond that. I’m not on Instagram or Twitter, it’s too much, as it is, to manage what I’ve got.

KCO: Did you work with somebody who was knowledgeable in music to create the website?

Cori: No these are all template based, so my website is based on a template by BandZoogle. Their focus is more like Indie rock bands and country music. They have such cool templates. I thought, “Why don’t I just use it for classical music and see how it turns out.”

And they update it. The neat thing with them is your content always stays the same, but you can change your template and you have a whole new look. You don’t have to recreate any of your text or images, they’re all saved. And same with Indie Musikhaus, that’s a Wix site. It’s very basic. Yeah, I’m all self-taught, figuring it out as I go.

And so, the only thing I would add is I am hoping to do more chamber music in the future. I’ve started talking to another violinist in the area and she wants to do a concert. We’ll probably start out in the Indie Musikhaus. That’s one thing I haven’t delved into very deeply. I’m really familiar with choral works and with a lot of voice arias and art song. but chamber music is next. Let’s see what this has to offer.

KCO: Thanks for talking to us.

Thanks to Cori for the Interview on October 29, 2019.

by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO

Amnon Govrin will play the Vaughan Williams solo The Lark Ascending at our next performance. Amnon is also a fellow musician in the KCO as the concertmaster. We discussed his upcoming performance and playing in the KCO.

When did you start playing music and why the violin?

If you were doing so much music, why not pursue music?

How did you progress from concert master to doing a solo?

Can you give your thoughts on the solo?

Do you have any thoughts or unexpected surprises about being the concertmaster or anything about the Kirkland Orchestra that you find funny?

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KCO: When did you start playing music and why the violin?

Amnon: My brother started to play the piano when I was 5 (he was 9). The story in my family is that I wanted to play something too, but the violin and not the piano. Granted, it was a good choice, as I stuck with it long after my brother stopped playing the piano 5 years later.

My dad wanted to play the violin himself, but couldn’t do that in the 1920’s and 30’s and then, of course, the second world war in Romania, so he didn’t get to do that. I can imagine that even though he says that I picked the violin, he had something to do with it as well.

KCO: Where did that take you, from 5 years old onward?

A: I started playing, then after several years, my brother stopped playing the piano. I continued. When I was 12, I joined the Haifa Youth Symphony Orchestra and after a few years became the concertmaster. Then, when I went to college, I went to an engineering college, the Technion. I played in the orchestra there as the concertmaster as well. After college, I played on and off without any real consistent playing and that’s it.

KCO: Where was this?

A: I grew up in Haifa, Israel. At schools there, unless they were art schools, there wasn’t any orchestra. The municipal orchestra was a great place for all the kids from all the surrounding cities to play in an orchestra, all the instruments. A big span of ages from around 10 to 20 and sometimes beyond. We also went to Europe to do a bunch of festivals and competitions so a pretty cool experience as a teenager.

KCO: That sounds fantastic. I had similar kinds of experiences. I really cherished them.

A: The big kids take care of the little kids, there are some parents who chaperone, but it’s kind of like a big family going together, playing and meeting other people.

KCO: How did you make that decision? If you were doing so much music, why not pursue music?

A: I think that one of the things was that I saw myself as an average player, versus a very good at math and physics student. That was part of it. Another part of it was that, growing up, the PC (personal computing) revolution happened and I got a computer. Combine the two and it was a very clear decision to study computer engineering.

KCO: I think what you’re saying is you found something you’re just as passionate about, in computing.

A: Yes, and maybe even more. Another aspect of it was that I had an amount of perfectionism creep in at some point, and it was easier to achieve it at school then with music.

Letting go of perfectionism is a maturing process.

KCO: At what point do you decide to get back to playing?

A: Like I said, I played on and off, just for myself. I was picking up things here and there, playing with a few people like some folk music, bluegrass a little bit when I had people at work who played the accordion and guitar and things like that. I never completely stopped, and then when I got to Microsoft (where I work), I created a mailing list of chamber music players. That didn’t go very far.

At some point I decided to look for an orchestra, and there was the orchestra mailing list.  It was the Microsoft orchestra which is now the Kirkland Civic Orchestra. I talked with James and came to a rehearsal and I was hooked.

The thing that strikes me the most is that in my line of work and personal life – with a family of 4 kids – there is constant context switching. Coming to that first rehearsal and spending 2 hours of playing, it shut all that down. I was in a state of mind that I wasn’t in for years.

KCO: I have to say I had a similar experience. When I sat in the back row with my tuba, I thought, “I don’t have to think. I know how to do this.” I never thought about it as context switching, but that’s exactly right. It is almost automatic.

A: When you do this, you also have a very tight feedback loop around any other thoughts or other distractions. Because if you’re distracted, within 2 seconds, you will miss a note or something like that. You have too tight a feedback loop so you avoid getting distracted. It’s essentially meditative.

KCO: The Kirkland Orchestra evolved, and you become the concertmaster. How did you progress from concertmaster to doing a solo?

A: Last season, as concertmaster, I had concertmaster solo one of the pieces. It was great to do that. At the end of the season, James suggested, “we’re going to do Lark Ascending, why don’t you play the solo?”

I was a little hesitant. I told him that I’d think about it. I took 2 weeks to practice it as if I were going to do it, to see how far I can get with it. I don’t practice hours a day like I did when I had free time on my hands. I wanted to see how far I could get and extrapolate that to actually being ready for a concert. It seemed reasonable and I just loved the piece.

I knew the piece before but I of course, wasn’t as intimate with it as you become when you start playing it every day. It was fantastic. It just felt like something that I can play now, much better than I could play when I was young. Even though, technically I could play more say “fast and furious” things when I was young, because of that daily practicing and the muscle memory for things like Paganini violin Concerto or a Tchaikovsky. Things like that were available to me to pull on back then and they’re not so much now. However, now I think that the different types of sounds that I can produce is different than what I could, and better than I could do then.

KCO: Would you call that tone? Your tone is better?

A: Yes, my tone is better and more varied. Back then I think I could play the fast and the furious and now I can do the sensitive.

KCO: That’s one of the few good things about aging, I think.

A: I don’t take it out of the realm of possibilities if I again played hours a day, consistently, then I could reach some of the fast and some of the furious, but it’s not something that is available. There’s only so many hours a day and work for example.

KCO: You mentioned that you were the concertmaster in your younger days, but that doesn’t generally mean you’re also a soloist. Soloists are almost a different group of people. Did you do more solo stuff? Are you just really coming back to it now?

A: I did a few. I soloed as a violin student. I had my yearly student concert and recitals, and the final recital for finishing the conservatory.

I played very few solos with the orchestras I played in, where perfectionism turned stage nerves made these experiences something that I had the urge to do but ended up feeling like I could have done better. It’s a part of what makes Lark Ascending feel right – it’s an expansive, flexible piece that takes a different ratio of artistic lines and technique than many others, a piece that requires the breathing and maturity that I feel I have now compared to my youth.

KCO: Great. I wanted to give you a chance to give your thoughts on the solo.

A: I’m a bit disappointed to play it with the sheet music. In my youth, by the time I knew how to play something, I knew it without the music. Lark Ascending is also a piece of music unlike most that I played as a kid, when technique was easier for me to learn and the pieces I played took me on that path.

One thing that I didn’t tell you that I think is a little amusing, is that when I became concertmaster of Kirkland Civic, this is essentially the first time I get paid for playing music. I took that first check and I framed it and jokingly because it says, “I’m a professional musician, regardless of anything else.”

Playing solo, relates to that a little bit and it’s really exciting to take on a piece like that because it’s a piece that requires ⅔ maturity and ⅓ technique.

It has its technique. It has its high notes: the E string and some fast stuff and difficult parts to it. However, if that’s the only thing that you do with this piece, then it’s a huge disappointment.

Listening to a bunch of different versions of it, of other people playing it over the course of this year, made this very clear to me that that was the case because there were people who played it flawlessly technique-wise, but it was just not there. It wasn’t connecting. I’m hoping at least that I can bring out the emotional pieces there and make people connect with that piece, which is something that I don’t think that I ever did as a kid.

KCO: Last question, do you have any thoughts or unexpected surprises about being the concertmaster or anything about the Kirkland Orchestra that you find funny?

A: Kirkland Orchestra is unique in the sense that it’s a not an orchestra where you come and audition. It essentially accepts everyone who wants it enough to sit there and play in the orchestra. Coming from a place where I, as a kid, I had a recital every year and I finished the conservatory, I actually now know more about the level that I’ve reached than I was realizing then.

I have to say that I was a bit skeptical in the beginning, but I think it’s what comes out of the orchestra at concert time. What James in his wisdom is capable of getting out of us as a group is pretty amazing. I’m definitely proud to be part of this orchestra and definitely overcame my skepticism early on.

Being concertmaster is interesting, it’s fun, it’s a little stressful because you know, I have no one to come to, but myself and of course James. It’s here specifically I do more I think, bowing, than I have done in the past. Maybe the reason is that in the past orchestras that I’ve been in, we’ve played things that were more on the beaten path, than symphonies and concerti for violin or piano that have been played again and again and again. There was much less need to think about it before starting rehearsals as opposed to the pieces that James picks.

One of my pleasant surprises was to realize how technology helps us with this, because when I was last playing with an orchestra in the early 90’s, we were very far from having the scenario of using a computer to put markings on parts and then printing that. The parts were all original parts that had to be manually marked. There were none of these capabilities that we have right now.

Jim puts stuff on OneDrive, I take it off there. I mark it with my laptop that has a pen. Jim gets it right away. This was an interesting kind of connection between the technical world and the musical world. Two worlds that were 100% separate from one another before.

KCO: Same for me. I’m used to show up; they give you a book; you go back there. At the end of the night, you give them the book back. All of a sudden I can download my parts! What? I was blown away by that.

A: Yeah, and the fact that, I can tell you that there must be someone who is a musician in the team that does Edge at Microsoft, because all you need to mark music is Edge. It has not only a pdf reader, that’s pretty mundane, but you can also set it to show 2 pages and you can tell it to essentially flip pages like they’re a book of music. You can say whether the first page is by itself or with the second page. Essentially you mimic the physical sheet music. I can tell you that when I practice the orchestra pieces, I just sit in front of my monitor and have the music there. I don’t even pull out the actual sheet music that we’re playing in the rehearsal.

KCO: I don’t do that, but that sounds fantastic.

A: There must be someone who’s a musician because this is a purely musical scenario versus just reading a pdf. With a normal pdf document, you could just scroll it and you wouldn’t care about pagination and about first page being separate or not.

Thanks to Amnon on May 14th for some proofreading and clarifications.

Interview on May 10, 2019 by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO

Charlotte Marckx will play the Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto at our next performance. Charlotte was nice enough to talk to me. Her exuberance was charming and invigorating.

When did you start playing music and when did you start playing the violin specifically?
When did you know that you wanted to be serious, or maybe you don’t. Do you?
When did you get the impression, “hey, I’m pretty good at this?”
What is your connection with the Kirkland Orchestra?
How did you choose the Tchaikovsky? How did that come to be the next one?
What else are you looking forward to in your playing or in your non-musical life?

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KCO: When did you start playing music and when did you start playing the violin specifically?

Charlotte: I started when I was 5 ½.

KCO: And I know you’re 16, which makes you different than some of the people I’ve interview. So 5 ½ isn’t that long ago really.

Charlotte: It feels like a long time, but not really.

KCO: What made you pick the violin, and do you play anything else?

Charlotte: I started on the cello at age 5 because my mom is a cellist and my sister had started on the cello 3 years before, when she was 5. I was terrible at the cello so my mom decided that she wanted to switch me to the next closest thing, which was violin. At the time, I had no idea what the violin was. I had wanted to play the piano, but I was, I want to say, obedient. I was more like a lump of clay. I didn’t really care, so she started me on the violin. I’m really, really glad that she started me on that and that I switched to that one.

KCO: I think you can just call that being compliant and open to new things.

Charlotte: Yeah, exactly.

KCO: So she put you on the violin and what happens after that?

Charlotte: [My mom] was a little bit worried because I had been so terrible on the cello. I started with Jan Coleman, who told my mom that actually I had some promise. And that’s all that I’ve done since then. That’s my only real instrument.

KCO: When did you know that you wanted to be serious, or maybe you don’t. Do you?

Charlotte: I do. I think that my parents have been super supportive of music, and I’ve always been a specialized kid. This is what I’m going to do and then I don’t do much else. I wouldn’t say I’m super well-rounded in terms of my interests. I’m very much a humanities person and a music person, specifically. Since I was really little, I’ve wanted to be a violinist. You know every once in a while, I’d tell my mom I want to be an archaeologist, and she’d say “good for you, honey.” But I always knew that I was going to end up a violinist because that was sort of the track that was planned out for me. And now that I’m older, I consciously choose that track. When I was little, I always just assumed that was what I was going to do.

KCO: It sort of made sense to you somehow?

Charlotte: Yes. It was it seemed like the most natural thing to do because I spent so much time on music, even when I was little. What seemed like a lot of time doesn’t seem as much to me now, but it seemed like a lot of time then. It just seems natural that I would do what I spent a lot of time on and what I was really good at, which was the violin.

KCO: Right, and when did you get the impression, “hey, I’m pretty good at this?”

Charlotte: I don’t know. When I was little I was successful in local competitions, but it was mostly people telling me that I was good and treating me like I was good. That really made me really feel like I was good. One thing that I always really liked to do when I was a kid is to go into my class at school and play when I was in elementary school because I really liked when my fellow students would ooh and ahh over my violin skills. It was really just people telling me that I was good at the violin, rather than any sort of personal revelations.

KCO: That makes sense. People like that kind of positive feedback, for sure. When you’re young, if you can get over on your classmates, that’s pretty good because it’s not always easy.

Charlotte: Exactly!

KCO: I understand people kind of fed this into you, but when did you know? Was there a sort of thing like a moment, when you realize, “okay, I’m different, my level is different?”

Charlotte: I think, one thing that was really cool for me was going to my very first international competition, the Johansen Competition. It was a really cool experience for me because even though when I went there, my first impression was I don’t belong here. I was hearing the people and they just sounded so absolutely incredible, and I was terrified. I said to my mom, “I need to get out of here. I’m not at this level.”

I was the youngest person at that competition. I think actually being there and being forced to go through with it, and by some strange fluke of nature I actually made it into the finals. To this day I still don’t know how I managed that because I definitely felt when I was listening to other people that I wasn’t at that level yet. But I had a realization that I wanted to be at that level, and this was something that was a goal for me. It was something that I wanted to be able to compete at this level and be able to really pursue music at this incredibly high level.

I wanted to play in these competitions and feel proud and confident, to feel the way I imagine everyone else at the competition felt. So that was I think where I saw what the level was. I had always been somewhat isolated in my studio. I actually recently tried for the Menuhin Competition. I had been, I think, the only one in my studio who tried that didn’t get in and that was a very disappointing thing for me. This was very important for me to show myself that I could still compete at that level. It was really important.

KCO: How old were you then?

Charlotte: 13, I think you had to be 13 and I got in by a week.

KCO: What is your connection with the Kirkland Orchestra? How did you become the guest soloist? I know you’ve done it now three years in a row.

Charlotte: My sister and I have a duo called Sempre Sisters, and we do a lot of multi-genre stuff. We really love it. It’s our outlet besides classical music and the maestro (KCO’s James Truher) and his wife were watching one of our concerts. They came up to us afterwards and asked if we’d like to play the Brahms Double Concerto with the Kirkland Civic Orchestra. We were really surprised because, it was actually very, very nice. Not a lot of people would be willing to take that leap of faith with multi-genre duo because we weren’t sure if they knew about our classical ability or lack thereof. It actually ended up working out great, and they were so friendly and supportive. And the orchestra was so fantastic. It was really just a great experience for us to play the Brahms Double Concerto. When I came back to play the Saint-Saëns, it was also just amazing. I’m so excited to be coming back again to the Tchaikovsky.

KCO: How did you choose the Tchaikovsky? How did that come to be the next one?

Charlotte: I actually have played it in the past. Then I chose to bring it up again. It’s really just such a classic kind of war horse concerto that you’re really going to have to bring it up again at some point. It just felt like the right time for me to bring that back and I had several concerts coming up that I really wanted to have that kind of war horse concerto for. You’re on a concerto for a long time, and I thought it would be nice to be able to bring it up again, finesse it.

KCO: How does it compare to the other pieces you have played with the KCO, just for you personally?

Charlotte: The other one that I did was the Saint-Saëns solo. The Tchaikovsky and the Saint-Saëns are very, very different pieces because the Saint-Saëns is in your face and I’d say aggressive. That’s not exactly the right word. It is just very, I’d say, a masculine concerto and the Tchaikovsky is just more sensitive. It’s very romantic, sweeping, It’s also got a lot more contrast and character.

KCO: The movements are so different.

Charlotte: Yes, exactly. I feel like the first movement has the contrast between the character of the second movement and the character of the third movement. It is like a kind of yearning, lyrical theme. Although in the second movement it’s much darker. In the first movement it’s more romantic. But the third movement and part of the first movement have this really proud and playful quality that I think is really amazing. Also the Tchaikovsky has such a broad range that gives depth.

I feel like the Saint-Saëns is really like a character portrait. I think of it as a character study. It very much had this feeling that you were learning more about a person. Whereas the Tchaikovsky, it feels like more a broader reflection on life.

KCO: What else are you looking forward to in your playing or in your non-musical life as things are unfolding for you?

Charlotte: Well I have several concerts coming up. In December, I’m playing with the Port Angela Symphony, Vivaldi Winter. It’s going to be so much fun. And also I’m playing Tchaikovsky again with the Kalamazoo Symphony in January, as part of my winning the Stulberg national competition very recently, which was totally amazing. I’m very excited for that. And then I’m playing with the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra in the next season. I think next fall. I’m also incredibly excited about that. So those really exciting things coming up.

Also the duo, Sempre Sisters, we’re releasing our debut album very soon, actually in about a week. We’re incredibly excited. It’s an amazing CD. Everybody’s going to love it. It’s a multi-genre, pop music, a little bit of classical Bach, Scottish folk music, Danish folk music. It is basically all the music we love on an album. Olivia’s (my sister’s) arrangements are so spectacular, so we’re really excited about that. We’re mailing out the pre-orders, pre-sale. It’s very exciting.

KCO: That sounds really great. The first time I saw you guys was as the Sempre Sisters. I couldn’t play the tuba for that concert, which was interesting, because I watched the entire concert from the audience, a different perspective. Your performance, especially of the encore, was just so charming. I really enjoyed it. It was so uninhibited. It was great.

KCO: So, what about non-musical stuff? Anything you want to say?

Charlotte: I have very little life beyond music. There’s no big developments, but I’m really enjoying school. I do a couple classes of public school. I’m mostly home-schooled. I love writing. I just finished a novel, I’m probably not going to do anything with it, but it’s my first novel, so that’s really fun.

It’s been fun because my sister’s in college. Every night we like to set up FaceTime and Skype watch a TV show together. We watched The West Wing, Parks and Recreation, The Office, all these classics and it is really cool. It’s one of my favorite things to do. It’s really something I look forward to at the end of the day.

Interview on October 25, 2018
by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO

 

Mary Riles will play the Haydn Concerto No. 2 for Cello at our next performance. I spoke to Mary about this concerto and her musical life. She was kind enough to take the time to engage in a wonderful discussion.

When did you start playing music and how did you start playing the cello specifically?
When did you know you wanted to be serious about it?
When you were in Oberlin, when do you know that cello playing was “for real” for you?
The Haydn Concerto No. 2, how did you choose that piece and why did you choose that piece?
What are the things we should watch for?
Soliloquy is solo cello, no accompaniment. It’s so different than the Haydn. What are the solo challenges?

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KCO: When did you start playing music and how did you start playing the cello specifically?

Mary Riles: I think I started with recorder when I was 4 or something like that, I don’t really remember. My older sister played harp and her teacher gave a recital with a friend of hers who played cello. My mom brought me as well as my sister. I was 4 years old, and it was the first time I’d heard the cello. I was just struck. It’s my earliest clear memory. I remember the church, and I remember the purple cushions in the pews.  I remember seeing her, and I remember being overwhelmed by the sound of the instrument. And so I knew I wanted to play the cello.

A couple years later, I started lessons with her, the woman that I had heard play. She was my first teacher and I think I studied with her until I was about 12 and she moved away to New York City.

KCO: Wow, and where was this?

Mary: St. Louis.

KCO: You were in St. Louis, you hear cello for the first time and you’re just overwhelmed. And where does it go from there? You take lessons from a really early age?

Mary: We lived in England for 9 months when I was 6. My dad had sabbatical. I think it was the next time I heard the cello. We got off the plane and went to our friends’ house and their daughter, who was a few years older than me, was practicing cello. I walked in the house and heard cello again. I remember looking down the hallway and seeing it. I must have started lessons right after we got back. I was the tail end of being 6 years old.

KCO: That’s really early!

Mary: Yeah. I think that music education was important to my parents and also I had strongly expressed the desire to play the cello. I think they were waiting until I was a little bit bigger.

KCO: Did you go Suzuki method?

Mary: No, I studied with this woman that I had heard the first time and we used Dotzauer and golly, that was so long ago, Dotzauer and then various other pieces.

KCO: How did you manage the size of the cello though?

Mary: They do make very small cellos. I had a half size to begin with I suspect that the half size might have been a little bit too big for me but I’m not sure.

KCO: I see. So, you took lessons and when did you know you wanted to be serious about it?

Mary: Well, in the sense of sort of personal commitment and heart connection, I was serious about it from the very beginning. I went to Oberlin, and I was double degree there. I was in the college and the conservatory.

I had two passions through my life: one of them was music and one of them was language, English. I intended to double major in cello performance and English, so I had an advisor who was in the conservatory who was my teacher and an advisor in the college. Somehow between those two advisors, and myself, somehow I did not realize that I had to take the first course in the English major sequence my very first semester in order to be able to complete the degree in the five years, given distribution requirements. I didn’t do that and by the time I realized what that meant, it was too late, I would’ve had to stay a sixth year, which was not in the cards.

I wound up doing ancient history, classics as my college degree. I had taken Latin for like six years or something like that when I was growing up, and it’s just one of those moments in time where this seemingly super inconsequential choice has these really profound long run repercussions for the rest of your life. Had I done the English degree, I think it’s reasonably likely I would have gone the academic route rather than the musical route because the academic route was so much easier than music, which is, you know, fabulous and brutally challenging.

KCO: Yes.

Mary: And I, for a while in my life, but by the time I was a junior, probably, I’d decided that I wanted to strive to be the best cellist that I could be and that I’d rather be a professional musician and a nonprofessional reader or thinker or whatever you want to call it, than the other way around. The idea of playing substantially below the level, sort of below the capacity I had, sounded very unappealing to me.

You have to make choices. Playing in ensembles is the right place for me. I get to teach people over a long course of time, it’s just really wonderful, personal, collaborative endeavor.

KCO: You make it sound good. I haven’t had a teacher that I’d connected with, in a long time.

Mary: My first teacher was really wonderful. I had a couple of teachers who were really not wonderful. My college teacher died young of esophageal cancer and in fact my first teacher also died young, she had a heart attack, and so I don’t have a current mentor. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a mentor relationship like that.

KCO: I’m sorry to hear that. That’s rough.

Mary: I grew up in a family of teachers, my grandfather was a band and orchestra teacher, my father a professor, my brother and my sister are both teachers, it’s really in my family DNA maybe, and I really just think it’s such an important profession. I definitely have missed having the presence of a relationship with a former teacher for sure. But it’s also true that you can learn from so many people and so many different ways. I have so many incredible colleagues who I learn from and whom I respect, and I really feel grateful for that.

KCO: When you were in Oberlin, when do you know that cello playing was “for real” for you ? When did you think, “I know I can do it?”

Mary: Those are two different questions!

Well I think, I decided by my junior year that playing the cello was what I wanted to do. The self-doubt demons like to mess with any conviction that one acquires. I think that, to be honest, I think that I’ve known on some level that I was a musician since I was very young, some part of me.

KCO: The Haydn Concerto No. 2, how did you choose that piece and why did you choose that piece?

Mary: Well, I had a conversation with James and we talked about what to do. We had been talking about the Elgar and I can’t even remember how it worked its way around to being Haydn. He had been talking about a particular program, I think an English program, and the Haydn. I played the C Major Haydn maybe 15 years ago. D Major is a Concerto that I’ve always really loved. It is so lyrical and so elegant and yet possesses such a depth of feeling and it really resonates for me.

It’s a big technical challenge. You jump up and down a lot, there’s a lot of notes up high on the finger board. There are places where it goes really fast, but it is also doesn’t feel extraneous or like as an ego expression of the composer or something like that.

It’s an expression of energy. There’s so much joy that runs through it, so it’s a piece that really appeals to me. It definitely felt like a challenge, but a challenge that I wanted to take on.

KCO: That was a great description, because I was going to ask the follow up question about explaining to a non-string player.

Mary: I think energy and joy are the things, but also depth of feeling, like its form is elegant, but it’s in no way a superficial piece. It sings.

KCO: What are the things we should watch for?

Mary: Hmm, the things to watch for?

KCO: Well listen to, but I’m thinking from the technical point of view. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s hard about someone else’s instrument.

Mary: Well it goes up really high. it also goes up high and crosses all four strings, often you’ll be up high on the A string, maybe a bit on the D string, but this goes all the way across all four strings and it’s hard to balance on a cello because the range is so wide. Having both clarity and power across all four strings is challenging in terms of just making a cello and playing a cello, so one of the challenges is to play up high on the C and G strings and have a clear tone, have it not be muddy.

KCO: That’s easy for a brass player to understand because it’s hard to make all notes sing because of the physics of the instrument.

Mary: It has lots of leaps. Big, big intervals up and down the string are hard. It’s also full of chords, which can be challenging to get in and out of with grace.

The third movement that has all these wild octaves that go up and down the instrument, way up high in the register and way down low. If you look at a guitar, the frets get closer and closer together as you go up the finger board, and of course the same thing is true on all stringed instruments. You can’t just put your thumb and third finger on an octave and them move that shape up and down the cello. You have to adjust how far your fingers are from each other in order to retain the octave as you move up and down the finger board. Doing that at a high rate of speed presents some challenges.

KCO: I saw your performance of Soliloquy online. Soliloquy is solo cello, no accompaniment. It’s so different than the Haydn. What are the solo challenges?

KCO: Are they the same in both pieces? Does it really come down to interpretation and really finding what you want to say as a player?

Mary: Well it’s a really different thing to prepare a solo piece as compared to a concerto which is not a solo piece in the sense that multiple people are creating this piece of music. Yet, I’ve been spending several months working on the Haydn by myself, in my studio. I’ve listened to it, and what I wound up doing actually was writing orchestral cues in my part. Not all the way through, but in various places, so that I could feel them as I was playing my part. I even recorded some of the orchestral lines so that I could play with myself as a duet so that I could feel the rhythmic interplay between the two parts.

I’ve also played it, a pianist friend of mine offered to play through it with me, so I’ve played with him. I’ll probably do that again, and then obviously I will rehearse with the orchestra. And part of rehearsing with the orchestra and writing in cues is logistics, how does everything fit together, and that’s not even, that can be not as simple question because rhythm really drives phrasing so much and so you have to know how things fit together in order to make music.

But also, music for me is fundamentally about communication and relationships and when you’re working on a piece which is solo, literally you are the only music and yours is the only part, it’s still about communication and relationships. I mean obviously it’s less complicated from the fact that you don’t have to refer to what anybody else is doing.

KCO: It also means all the pressure squarely on you. It’s not like your entrance is going to be late, but still, to me, and they are worlds different.

Mary: When you’re playing by yourself you have to create everything. The fewer players you have, the more responsibility each player has for creating the harmonic and rhythmic world and structure. As a single player, you are both more free and also have to be even clearer about what it is you’re presenting, because you have to present the whole thing.

The concerto is a funny, odd duck because the person who’s playing the solo part has such profound influence on the process and musical choices, but at the same time, all of us in the room are finding and expressing the spirit of the piece and its relationships. It goes well beyond, well “x” section has to be quieter so that you can hear “y” section. All that stuff is super important but it’s like, when I’m explaining rhythm to students who haven’t been playing for very long. I tell them that as they develop their sense of the beat. Every time they play it’s a dance between the beat and the notes on the page; it’s a relationship.

Feeling that relationship deepens your understanding of the music and your feeling for the music. It’s not just a sequence of events, it’s how the music is with or is not with the beat, for example, and similarly, certain things are only visible in relief. The concerto is not whole without all of its parts and all the parts inform all the other parts.

KCO: Perfect. We’ll look forward to it. I look forward to hearing it.

Mary: Thank you!

Interview on May 22, 2018
by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO

Darcy Hamlin is the French horn soloist for our next performance, playing Strauss: Horn Concerto no. 2.

We asked Darcy some questions about her musical background and the concerto she is playing.

Editor – Darcy was erroneously called “Darcy Susan” in the first release.

1. How did you get involved in music? When did all start for you?
2. When did you think that music could be your profession?
3. How did get connected with our orchestra?
4. Why the Strauss, Horn Concerto No. 2?
5. You apparently love soloing. But you also play in a section, what would you tell a musician is the difference? Which one do you like more?

Kirkland Civic Orchestra: How did you get involved in music? When did all start for you?

Darcy Hamlin: Well, my mom was a general music teacher. She was a music educator. She had all these wonderful, classical music LP’s. Remember vinyl LP’s? This was a specific collection geared toward kids, so it was perfect. I had my little briefcase record player. They had oval handles. I would open it up and it would be a phonograph player. You would plug it in and it was portable.

I would raid this collection and I fell in love with, they had this narrated version of Till Eulenspiegel, which was outstanding. I just remember identifying with Till because he was such a troublemaker. I loved the horn and I loved Aaron Copland’s Hoedown from Rodeo. That was really great and just all these really great pieces inside. I just fell in love with the whole orchestral genre.

When it came time for me, we had a piano and I always just sit down and play the piano. I would just make up things and play by ear. I didn’t start official piano lessons until I was nine, but that was when I started playing an instrument.

I really loved playing the piano. Then it was time for me to pick a band instrument when I was ten. My mom was so brilliant, because she’s obviously a music teacher, and she was so smart. So I wanted to play the horn, the tuba, or the flute, and those were my choices. The reason I wanted to play the tuba is because of, I don’t if you know this with your kids, but there’s a series about Harry the dog and he goes on a quest to find low sounds because he lives next to the lady next door who sings really loudly and he finds a tuba and I thought that was really awesome.

KCO: I don’t know that story but I can identify with it.

D: It’s a fantastic book, I remember loving that book. But my mom said, “Well honey, the tuba and the horn are in the same family, and you know you’re going to have to carry this instrument to and from school,” so I thought that was really valid point and so I said, well okay, lets narrow it down to the horn and the flute.

All my friends were playing the flute and it seemed really easy to carry back and forth to school, and I thought it might give me some girl cred because I was a little bit of a tom boy, had short hair, and you know, not interested in girly things. This’ll be good, you know, flute.

My mom kind of knew that I was going to pick the horn because, in my spare play time I would go out in the backyard and play songs on the garden hose in the backyard, like I would just play songs on the hose. I’d be swinging on the swing and the neighbors would be calling, like what is that in your backyard? And my mom would look out the window and she’d say, “Okay, I think I have a brass player on my hands.”

My mom, being brilliant music educator, knew that I would be into trying the instruments. So with her connections, she was able to borrow a single horn from one of the local schools. And all of my babysitters played flute so we borrowed one from them.

We had a fun tryout session right in my living room and I got out the horn and oh it was so great! It was so much less painful than the garden hose, it didn’t dig into my face and I could play songs on it.

As a fellow brass player, you know the fingerings don’t really matter. You could pretty much play any notes by lipping it around, I thought that great!

I thought everybody says the flute is really easy so this is going to be even better cause everybody says the horn is hard. I’m going to nail the flute. I could not get out a sound out of it. The only way I could get a sound out of the flute was buzzing into the hole.

My mom, with reverse psychology, said, “well honey, if you really want to play the flute, we can find you a teacher who can show you how to play the flute,” and I said, well why? I can already play the horn so I made the right choice.

I think like a year later I started private lessons in sixth grade, and it was fantastic. AC Meyers was retired from the symphony, and he was just really low key and crazy. He would let me play whatever I wanted, so it was really the perfect first private teacher, so it was nice. I was the only horn player for a while, until I got into high school.

KCO: When did you think that music could be your profession?

D: Well this is another hilarious story because I got braces when I was a sophomore in high school. My horn teacher said, I was only going to have them on for a year, why don’t you just take the year off? It’s going to take you so long to get used to the braces and then when you get them off, you’ll have to get used to having them off. It’s just going to be a lot of grief.

He knew that I played piano, and I had gotten pretty serious about the piano, and I thought, okay. I’ll just spend the year working on piano. And this was great. I took a year break from the horn, and my band director, said, “oh, she reads music, she can read bass clef and she’s got strong fingers from the piano. Let’s have her play the bassoon.”

He found this bassoon in the band storage room that had just been rotting there for however many years, who knows. And this bassoon was just a nightmare. The pancake key would stick all the time and the whisper key was jerry-rigged with a rubber band.

KCO: I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad.

D: Oh my gosh, it was just a really unfortunate bassoon. It was in need of serious work. No one told me that I had to soak the reeds so I couldn’t get sound out of them of course. I had to play on the plastic reed and we all know how wonderful those sound. It was the most horrible sounding thing you can imagine. We have home videos and you can hear me practicing in the background. I practiced that bassoon more than I had ever practiced the horn up until that point and I never got any better.

It made me angry that there were different fingerings for every single note and your ear just didn’t help you at all except to tell you boy, you sound bad on this thing you know.

I got my braces off and I ran back to the horn. I had never really appreciated it or that I had some talent on it. I didn’t really know what talent was but I discovered emphatically that I did not have it on the bassoon. I guess I needed that sort of Ebenezer Scrooge experience to have me really appreciate what I had on the horn. I finally got my braces off and I started practicing again the end of my sophomore year. I was really motivated and that’s when I joined the youth orchestra and started to get really passionate about practicing. I got serious about my lessons and about auditioning for various regional orchestras and all-state orchestras. Things like that.

And then my parents, when I got into Oberlin, were very insistent that I would get a marketable degree. A performance degree obviously doesn’t guarantee work anywhere so they pushed me to do music education. The nice thing about Oberlin was that they don’t care what your major is. If you can play really well, you can get into the orchestras. It’s a small enough college that there’s no politics about being a performance major so you’re going to get in, or this other person isn’t. I know a lot of bigger universities are like that.

Oberlin was great. I performed a ton and I don’t have an undergraduate in performance. I just got the music ed degree. But it became really clear, the longer I was at Oberlin, that I wasn’t going to pursue music education. I was going to go into performance and that was what I was going to pursue. Then I went to the Cleveland Institute of Music and I got a master’s in performance.

KCO: How did get connected with our orchestra? I take it you know Matt Stoecker.

D: That’s how I got this gig actually. I knew Matt very well at Oberlin. We attended Oberlin together. Matt and I keep in touch with each other regularly on Facebook. He really beats me a lot in scrabble online so that’s always nice.

He asked me if I would be interested in soloing and I said absolutely. I’d love that. And he said I could play whatever I wanted to. And I thought that was a really fun idea. It was far enough in advance that I can secure the time off and I can think about what I want to play.

KCO: Why the Strauss, Horn Concerto No. 2?

I chose the Strauss second concerto because it’s one of the lesser known Strauss concertos.

The first one is the one that opens with the big fanfare, that’s the one that most people know. The second is not performed as often. It’s a more complex piece. it’s a very elegant piece. I believe that it was written later in his life.

It’s very elegant. It’s very playful. It’s also significantly more difficult than the first. It’s very technical. It’s very noodly, and it’s got a lot of very almost “woodwind-y kinds of motives and lots of fast scales and lots of jumpy arpeggios and things like that.

But it’s really fun to play. I’ve never actually performed it with an orchestra. I’ve played it on recitals before but, and it’s been a while since I’ve worked on it. I thought, you know, why don’t I make this a good challenge for myself. I always feel like when I am working toward something difficult it makes me better as a musician.

It’s also the juxtaposition of the very typical hunting horn call, very traditional types of playing bugle calls. And then there’s this beautiful lyrical sweeping melody just soaring. It’s just gorgeous. The whole first exposition is really good at demonstrating that.

It’s a really fun piece for the orchestra too, I think. It’s got some really neat stuff. And in fact, there’s some really great sections for me and the whole horns section so it’s super fun for that. It’ll be a really neat piece to experience.

KCO: What else are you looking forward to experiencing?

D: Well I really am excited about the master class. I love teaching, even though my calling wasn’t to teach in a public school setting, I do adore educating and instructing privately. And also, in a more specialized setting, more just horn and more just brass. And I love doing master classes and I love teaching, I’m on the faculty of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music here and I also have a home studio of students who come study with me at my home.

I really am excited about getting to know some of the musicians and to just work with them and to just share some things with the musicians, that’s going to be super fun for me because I really think that that’s part of what makes music enjoyable for me, is connecting with people, connecting not only with the audience, but also with the musicians that I get to perform with. It’s a very intimate experience, to get to share, you’re on stage and you’re recreating this amazing work that you’re bringing it back to life. You know, it was written hundreds of years ago but it’s still alive because we get to bring it back to life and that’s just so exciting to me and I love engaging in that kind of connection with other musicians.

KCO: You apparently love soloing. But you also play in a section, what would you tell a musician is the difference? Which one do you like more?

D: That’s a great question. If you think about a group project at work, where you have to collaborate and really work with other people and you’ve got to really just work together on a really difficult project where you have to work really intimately with other people, that’s kind of like playing in a section or as part of the orchestra.

Playing a concerto solo is more like you get to be the featured guest speaker. You get a podium. You just speak and everyone listens to you. You’re definitely more in the hot seat. You’re at the front of the orchestra instead of the back, which is sometimes a little bit more nerve wracking. You’re certainly more exposed, and so it’s definitely more challenging.

I would say that they’re such different processes, it’s difficult to say which one I like better. One is certainly easier to make a living with. There are very few people making a living as concerto soloists. There are full time jobs available in orchestral performance which is what I do.

There are things that are really exciting about both. I really love collaborating with other musicians. I love the end product that can be achieved by connecting with other musicians in that very intimate way to recreate another piece of music.

But I think what I’m really looking forward to with the concerto soloing is that it is unfamiliar to me. I don’t often do it. The last time I played a concerto solo was with the Milwaukee Symphony on tour. That was before I had kids, that was 2006 so about twelve years ago. I’m really looking forward to this challenge. I think it’s been really good for me, I’ve been getting so much out of my practicing, and just learning a lot about endurance, I mean it’s an extremely difficult piece endurance-wise, I hope I make it through.

We just did two performances of Prokoviev 5 this weekend, and this afternoon we’re doing an all John Williams concert. If it doesn’t kill me, I should have a decent face to be running it this week before I see you on Saturday. I think it’ll be fun. I’m going to experiment with some different things. I still don’t know if I’m going to sit or stand. I still don’t know if I’m going to play by memory or use the music. I don’t know, I might sit and use the music. I have no idea, but we’ll figure that out.

Interview on March 11, 2018

by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO

Susan Harris will be the piano soloist for the at our next performance, playing Turina – Rapsodia sinfónica, for piano & orchestra, Op. 66. We asked Susan some questions in a fun and spirited exchange.

1. When did you start playing music and was it always the piano?
2. When did you know that you wanted to be a professional or a teacher?
3. Which role you like best: Soloist, accompanist, and playing with an orchestra or rhythm section?
4. What’s your connection to the Kirkland Civic Orchestra?
5. What are your impressions of the Turina, your solo piece? Any insights for other musicians?

KCO: When did you start playing music and was it always the piano?

Susan: Yes, it was always the piano, well, no. Let me stop. I started playing when I was seven.

Both my parents worked and so I was collected from school every day by a friend’s mother. She sent both her daughters to piano lessons. And of course, I went with them. I just sat there and waited and every time we came home, I went and practiced everything they had just been taught. Because I would look and watch. To the point where the friend’s mother said to my mother, it’s a waste of money sending my girls to piano lessons, when your Susan is the one who’s actually taking notes and practicing!

That’s when my parents started sending me to lessons. And I loved it! Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have started piano lessons.

KCO: I ask was ‘it always the piano’ because most of my accompanists were people who played piano and other instruments. That’s why I was curious about that.

Susan: I did try other instruments.  I think we all had recorder lessons at school, didn’t we? I tried the clarinet for a while because I was trying to get to an orchestral instrument. Being a pianist is a very lonely job. So I tried the clarinet. I wasn’t very good, and I wasn’t very enamored. My lip went numb, and I just didn’t want to stick with it. Piano is easier.

Then I started violin lessons. The teacher asked me at the end of the term, “are you going to continue?” And I said, “yes, please.” And she said, “I wouldn’t bother if I were you. ” Okay! I really enjoyed playing the violin, but I was obviously dreadful. I did one term. I didn’t even do a year. I was that bad.

KCO: That’s crazy about the teacher. You think of them as encouraging.

Susan: Exactly! You know what? That is why I always remember that, and that’s why I’m passionate about teaching. You’ve got to encourage. You’ve got to encourage a love of music.

Everybody has their favorite and least favorite composers. But, you don’t push that onto your students. I don’t tell them which composers I don’t enjoy playing because I don’t want to color their view. I want them to have the experience of playing all different types of music. I’m just so passionate about sharing that excitement in music.

KCO: When did you know that you wanted to be a professional or a teacher?

Susan: Well, it never really crossed my mind that way. Music has always been a part of my life. My mother, when I was first born, she just played Beethoven’s symphonies over and over. I could “la-la” all the themes, but I couldn’t tell you which symphony was which, because I just knew them inside out on the old record player.

Then my dad would come in, in the evenings, and put on Bing Crosby.

KCO: What a contrast.

Susan: Yes! Beethoven and Bing. That’s what I was brought up with. Then Frank Sinatra and all that stuff that my Dad played to me, which I just loved.

I just loved Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. There was my mother with Beethoven and Sibelius. She used to conduct the orchestra in the lounge. She used to close her eyes and pretend she was the conductor. So, that’s what I grew up with. Music was always there.

As you go through school, you’re accompanying and you’re doing the competitions at school and the music festivals, and going around the country. You get to an age, well I did, I got to an age of about 14-16 – I got all my grades, all my exams – and I didn’t get any better. My mother thought I was going to be this amazing concert pianist. And she was very disappointed. So thought I’ll go do a music degree then!

KCO: Well, that’s still good. I bet you did get better, but it’s hard to see that sort of thing.

Susan: Yes. I was very good at a young age, and then I just petered out. And life came up. It wasn’t just all about practicing. One, I just wasn’t that good to be a professional concert pianist and also, life comes along. You know, your friends, going out, boys, oh, dear.

KCO: Right. There’s more to being a musician than just a concert pianist.

Susan: Absolutely. I did my music degree. I did my performance diploma. I had to wait until I was 18 to do a teaching diploma, because that’s the youngest you’re allowed to do it in Britain. You can’t be a teacher until you’re 18.

I was doing my degree and then after my degree, I did my post-grad in music education because I just found this is the way to go. I really want to share this. My friends in college were going on to play in orchestras. I played with them, performed and everything, but, piano playing is a lonely job.

KCO: Well, I’ve seen you in the back of the orchestra. You seem to like to be the piano player with the orchestra.

Susan: I do. I do like that because I can be part of something. Once in a while, an orchestra would need a pianist, and just the one, otherwise, you’re performing alone.

KCO: Which role do you like best: Soloist, accompanist, and playing with an orchestra or rhythm section?

Susan: All! I think I like being an accompanist the best. When you’re an accompanist, well, the word says accompanist, as in accompanying. But really, it’s a duet. That’s what I love.

I was just at Central Washington University performing with one of the soloist state finalists. And that was fun, because I could really discuss the music, helping them with the rhythm, helping them with their ideas, spotting what they were doing, interpreting the music.

I remember saying, did you know you did a crescendo here? It’s not in the music, but it fits really well. Let’s do that. Let’s make something of that. And it’s that sort of collaboration that I love. You can do that as an accompanist, or even a member of a chamber music trio. There’s three of us that can discuss it. I love that you can say, well hang on, I’m equal parts here. This is what I think should happen.

KCO: What’s your connection to the Kirkland orchestra?

Susan: I got married to Steve about 5 years ago. He’s American Canadian. We needed to go back to the Seattle area. I’ve got to leave England, have I? And he introduced me to a couple of friends. He knows the Truhers: Jim and Kathy.

I started to attend the Kirkland Orchestra concerts. I was so impressed. Even when my parents came over to visit, I made sure to bring them over. I said, “come and listen to this orchestra. They’re amazing.” Jim found out I played the piano and listened to me. Thankfully, he thought I was good enough to offer: would you like to help us out? I leapt at the chance.

KCO: What are your impressions of the Turina, your solo piece? Any insights for other musicians?

Susan: Well the first time I heard it, I just loved the harmonies. That is my sort of music. I gasped. It reminds me of the Albéniz and the Granados that I used to play when I was younger. Oh, those harmonies, they’re luscious. It is those jazzy chords, and it’s those Spanish rhythms.

Turina is just one of those classic Spanish works where you might go  “oh we’re going on holiday to Spain aren’t we?”  You can hear it. That’s the beauty of it. I love those types of rhythms and those changes in tempo all over the place. It is so typical of Spanish music. I love that. I just fell in love with the sound of the music first, before I’d even seen the score. And I thought, yes, I want to learn to play that. Yes, Maestro, please.

KCO: Did you choose it or did Jim?

Susan: It was a collaboration actually. He started playing a few pieces to me and as soon as I heard the Turina…I just loved it.

It’s very dramatic, isn’t it? It’s a rhapsody. It’s got loads of dramatic bits, highs and lows. We’re going to change bits here, there everywhere. All encapsulated in about ten minutes.

It sounds as if Turina thought, “oh, I’ve just thought of this old melody I heard when I was young. I think I’ll just throw that in now.” It does connect though. It’s been quite challenging to learn it, but so rewarding. When it comes together, I’m counting and counting because it’s that 6/8 versus the 3/4. Between the bars, and between the parts at the same time. I am furiously counting one and ah two and ah, against the orchestras one and two and three and, at times, and vice versa.

And I’m trying to think this is the part where I’ve got to go, and you get dragged along with the melody that the orchestra has got. Then there’s my part underneath, these luscious chords. I really hope that the audience and other musicians can feel that and hear it.

Interview on May 10, 2017  

by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO