masterclasses

“Do you play with a regular ensemble?” the lady at Kinko’s asked me. Lately I’ve noticed this to be one of the routine first questions that new acquaintances throw my way, especially in New York.  My theory is that music aficionados latch on to this question, while novices (often in airports, as we can all testify) tend to focus on the size of the cello case and the hilarity of imagining something else inside it: an AK-47, King Kong’s tennis racket, mother. In this instance my cello was not with me, but the scraps of dissected scores scattered across the work station easily gave away my vocation. She asked, “Do you play with a regular ensemble?”, which is exactly the wording that gets me like a deer in headlights. The [...]