Cello Lounge: creative ideas for creative cellists

Playing with Hegel Quartet tonight at 7pm in Hannover, last minute tix here:

https://villa-seligmann.de/events/von-wien-nach-hollywood/?fbclid=PAAaaUmeGOs5ysgkxTCuf1V2hWqdTmCCWUOJa7DNH5vVPJ8TCyEB_IMLp8iMQ_aem_th_AfqRBuhvmurvni7ZDBKAOGZt_3x8e5quzK1OcXFJc8CrZFQpA0wradj8fQJFGD772Gw

This was my first concert since October 30th, 2020. I went through all kinds of thoughts on the way to this one: I don’t want or need to play concerts anymore. I can’t do it anymore. Everyone else has weathered this time of no concerts better than I have. 🤨

🙈 Let me just say, it is f**king hard to not play for 8 months and then go out there again. I fully realize that there are far greater challenges faced by people in utterly less fortunate circumstances, not to mention the challenges we now all face as humans in the age of environmental self-destruction. But in order to be able to enjoy the immense privilege of playing in this gorgeous hall with these great musicians, I had to acknowledge for myself that it’s just damn hard to come out of cultural hibernation and pretend that everything is fine and exactly as it was before, especially for a recovering perfectionist like me.

I did indeed enjoy this performance, the rush of adrenaline, the awareness of our mutual listening (between performers, between performers and audience), the spontaneous things that happen in live performance, the acoustics of this amazing hall.

And because I enjoyed it and am aware of the privilege inherent in this experience, I want to rethink things. I believe this moment in time is a huge opportunity to do things differently, more creatively, to be more in touch with our audiences and ourselves as creative beings. We’ll be exploring these topics and more in the upcoming season of

I was not expecting for this to be an emotional experience, but I found my eyes stupidly welling up as I stood in line behind an estimated 200 people at the vaccination center at Berlin-Tegel. This is the airport that Berlin citizens built themselves during the Cold War to assist the airlift and build a bridge to the outside world from the island West Berlin had become.

Now, terminal C is a vaccination center. Hundreds of people here are helping hundreds of others get vaccinated every hour— to build a bridge to society from the islands we have all become this past year.

Lots of people have been complaining about the way the pandemic has been handled here, but I’m full of huge gratitude today to all those people working to get us past this.

...and I’m going offline till the 20th. Time to look inwards and concentrate on my purring. ❤️

These are not my students. These are sheep grazing on a hillside just outside of Freiburg. Watching them—the sheep, I mean—gives me the opportunity to reflect on the work we do down there in the valley, which sometimes doesn’t feel like work. It’s been difficult to focus on art sometimes lately, because creating it doesn’t produce any immediate results. It won’t directly bring about change in any of the areas where our world so desperately needs it. It won’t make the virus go away and it won’t put a bandage on climate change or social injustice or any of the other ills we’ve caused.

And breathe.

Once in a while, students graduate, and that gives me the opportunity to marvel at how these young people have shaped themselves and their worlds, to imagine how they will continue to do so as they go back to their home countries, to envision those hours spent together in intense concentration as the center of an outward rippling, affecting so many more lives in concentric circles of love.

Sometimes, in the middle of a teaching marathon, it’s easy to forget what it is we are actually doing in closed rooms with these analog, unfashionable old instruments for hours on end. We are observing something together—a desire, an idea—and watering it, tending it, giving it sunlight and water, standing back to let it grow.

Real growth takes time, but there is no substitute for it, and no limit to what it can in turn heal and create. I am inspired and humbled by being witness to this process again and again. Enormous congratulations and gratitude to and Clara Muñoz del Guayo for mining and cultivating that most precious gift we have, our artistic selves, and for reminding me how important it is to go on doing this for as long as I am among other humans... and sheep.

And please forgive me, I didn't have good pictures of us together. The sheep will have to do.

Now more than ever, it seems we are being called upon to adapt to circumstances we never thought we'd be in... in so many ways, on so many levels.

🍪 The standard cookie-cutter conservatory education has not prepared us for this state of affairs. The old focus on excellence and adherence to tradition is just not going to cut it in this current Wild West of pandemic music-making (and floundering). How do we plan anything? How do we develop other aspects of our personalities to adapt to the constantly changing world? What do we strive for now that some of our most revered institutions are crumbling? How do we reinvent ourselves as individual musicians and as a collective? 🌎

On Monday, 9 November at 20:30 CET, and I will be hosting a live video chat on our page (Out of Rich Darkness) with Philippa Allan of . Please join us with your questions, comments, and concerns about the current state of the music world. Let's do this.

This burnt, hollowed willow tree gives me hope while wildfires rage on. Apparently, if you plant even just the bark of a willow tree, it will take root and sprout new branches, just as this one is doing from the shell of a tree. 🌳 I realize these are different trees than the ones burning now, but it’s an example of nature reclaiming and regenerating what is seemingly lost.

Then there are the human initiatives that can help us live closer to nature even in the city- like .de 🍅

They grow flowers and vegetables in public parkland and have an aquaculture farm that produces fertilizer from fish excrement. Sounds yucky, but the plants love it. 🐟 🌱

…and today we air part 2 of our conversation with the amazing Fabiana Biasini on ! In this episode, we talk about the health of being ‘only’ a musician and how to make a lasting change wherever you are.

This is our *final* episode of season 2 and we want to thank all the fantastic, inspiring people who have made this a journey and an education for us: , , , and Fabiana Biasini. We’ll be back as soon as our schedules allow and will continue to envision new ways of making music and sharing it.

In the meantime, let us know what you think- send us a message or post a comment. Who should we talk to next season? What change do YOU want to see in the music world?

Thank you all for listening and supporting us through our first 2 mini-seasons!