So I guess this is where I blab about myself for those of you who want to know, huh? Okay, decisions, decisions, do I start at the beginning and work forwards? Or backwards from now? Hmmm... Maybe I'll just jump around, since that's the way my poor ol' brain works anyhow. As you've probably surmised by now, I'm a string quartet addict and a hopeless bibliophile, neither of which I'm particularly worried about. Nobody dies from an overdose of Brahms or Dostoyevsky, at least not last time I checked. It's summer, so I'm between the two years of my masters degree up at Eastman, frantically researching my orals and practicing recital rep, plus some quartet stuff I'm auditioning on in September, and you know, all the recital pieces, and let's throw in some Bach just to make things interesting. Lemme tell you, these damn sonatas and partitas are about 4 times harder on the viola than the violin. You just can't get around physics, at least, I can't, and it's driving me nuts. I just got a new instrument about 8 months ago now, a deep, rich, purple-velvety 16 3/4" Tertis model to which the usual reaction is "Wow! That's big!" Well, yeah. But my head is small. Don't believe me? Look at my Photo Gallery, you'll see. I should probably do a paragraph about here, huh? I don't like paragraphs much. Okay, here we go.

There. That wasn't so hard, really. Maybe it's the Pisces thing of going in two directions at once, but I seem to go in every direction at once. If I lose you, don't feel bad, half the time I don't know where I'm going anyway, but I'm sure something interesting will happen along the way. I'm just sort of sitting here typing whatever happens to pop into my oddball brain - Joyce, I ain't, but there may not be much connection here. Did I mention that eclipse? No, guess not, anyway I was born in the middle of one (ah, here we go, beginning of story) way back in the 70s (gasp), 26 Feb. 1979 at 12:04 PM if you want to get really specific. And apparently my natal chart is totally wacko, so don't even try. I'm something like the 4th generation of my dad's side of the family living in this same crazy town (that would be Falmouth, MA - yeah, Cape Cod) and have umpteen zillion cousins that I can't keep track of (as well as a nearly unquenchable appetite for hyperbole and parenthetical insertions. Can you tell?).

Enough of that, let's see, okay, so how about school? Yeah, all right, so I did the usual-normal public school junk up until 11th grade, wasted a tremendous amount of time learning to do things like outline a chapter of a history book and manufacture TNT and nitroglycerine - okay, maybe those two are sorta fun. Somewhere at the beginning of that year, though, I decided that since I was going to be a performer I really didn't give a rodent's butt about calculus or physics and I'd run out of levels of French class, since I skipped one in the middle, and said "Screw this!", took my SATs, filled out a few applications, took a couple of auditions, and presto! I went to Eastman. Good move on my part. Great school, fantastic teacher, good people - okay, the city's a bit crummy, but I'll say that about anywhere I can't get to an ocean quickly enough. I recently found a whole bunch of really old report cards, like preschool, elementary, stuff like that. Quite amusing, I suggest that if you're a pack rat you go check your own out, nothing like 15 or so years to put perspective on a lousy penmanship mark.

As for music, well, I started taking violin lessons in the fall of 1986, inspired by Big Bird Discovers the Orchestra (I kid you not). Switched teachers and goals a bunch of times till I ended up turning into a violist when I wasn't really paying attention; had my first viola lesson in April of '94 and haven't looked back since. That was when I got into chamber music too, and I've been in at least one quartet pretty much ever since I was 13 years old. Good thing there's so much rep. I admit to a strong bias in favor of Brahms - some of his stuff is just so, I don't know, it's like aural chocolate or something. Mmmmm....

Okay, break. Hungry. Stay tuned. Or not, doesn't really matter, now, does it?

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