50 Years of Music Making

This year marks the 50 year anniversary of my first violin lesson. This post is an archive of major musical milestones in my life, how it informed the person I became. It is a reflection back to review what is important to me so that I can set the direction for the third act of my life.

1980s

The Aspiring Classical Violinist

In the summer of 1975 I picked up the violin for the first time. I remember thinking it felt like it was a part of my hands and arms and I felt like I became complete.

The first decade of my musical life, I was singly focused on becoming a “great solo violinist”. I practiced multiple hours a day, leaving me little time for pursuing any other interests or friendships, but I found early success, which fueled the desire to keep trying.

Awards and media attention, including Glamour Magazine naming me a finalist in the Top College Women of the Year kept my motivation going through graduation from college.

The classical training was all about technique, repetition until perfection and then adding artistry without sacrificing competence, to add “abandon” to fast fingerings and complicated bowing which in retrospect are at odds. By the time I reached adulthood, my confidence began to erode as I tried to reconcile what I wanted to express musically versus pursuing technical perfection.

1990s

Rock and Roll Power Trio

my first demo cassette tape was recorded in 1996, at the peak of grunge culture in the Pacific Northwest

Performances included Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival for the Jimi Hendrix Experience Celebration, North by Northwest Festival, and the legendary CBGB in NYC.

2000s

Digital Experiments

Rock and Roll is a young person’s game, and when I became a new mother, needed a bit more sanity than the late night shows and unreliable bandmates. This led to my meeting Samite, who taught me how to do digital looping and David Borden, who taught me about composing with electronic audio processing.

Again, media coverage and a growing fan base kept me motivated to keep writing, performing and experimenting.

Highlights from this point in my musical career was an opportunity to perform at the Museum of Modern Art, the La MaMa Experimental Theatre, The Knitting Factory in New York City and Washington Mall in Washington DC.

2021 - today

Today, though I perform less and less following an auto accident that impaired my hearing, I do occasional performances that I find meaningful. Art Museum events, collaborations with experimental artists, both on stage and in studio.

My latest endeavors have been to learn to create compositions using other musical instruments. This video is a collaboration with my artist husband Stafford H Smith, and is an audio-video portrait of our families’ ancestries. This will be presented at an international conference that focuses on Migrations in Hawaii later this summer.