Improvising

My improvising journey began the year after graduating from Lawrence University with a Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance, on my Watson Fellowship wanderyahr. My proposed Watson project was to compare the violin schools across Europe. This was interesting at first, and I was deeply thankful to be able to listen to great teachers including Stefan Picard in Berlin, but the burnout that had begun during my final year at LU increased, and I found myself searching and questioning my chosen path.

I spent a lot of time at museums looking at oil paintings and I read books including the Autobiography of Malcolm X and John Cage’s Silence. At one point, my violin was stolen, and I was relieved, as if a higher power had given me permission to take a break.

I had started to feel like a cog in a machine, like many thousands of other violin students. It became untenable that the music I was studying and playing was not a true reflection of the current world around me and my lived experience.

If music is supposed to be an expression of our identity, what was I expressing? I tried experimenting with improvising and found that my fingers would only land in the places they had always landed - truly a rut. I strung up a clothesline and bowed it (by then I had borrowed a violin), and after a weekend at the Musique Action festival in Nancy in 2002, I found my way to the lowercase improvising community in Paris, often listening at the venue les Instants Chavirés.

I wasn’t yet satisfied with my own work, but most importantly, I realized that like marks on a page, if one does not make the unwanted raw sounds, the sounds one seeks will never find their way to light. Ultimately, I moved to New York in order to continue being in proximity to a strong improvising scene. Since then, I have had the deep privilege to play with many wonderful, generous improvising musicians over more than two decades.

By focusing on non-classical music for several years, my passion for classical music was reignited, once I had deeply explored what it means to express my own lived experience through music.