Vlog!

Here it is, my very first video blog!  I apologize for the audio/video synch problem - if you think you know the reason and can help, send me a message PLEASE!  :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rzr1aW17fQ

Arrival in London!

 


After all this time - I started toiling on my Marshall application in July 2011 - I am finally here in this phenomenal city and getting ready to start school!  It was an incredible summer filled with many trips, including concerts in Montreal and New York, a lake vacation in Kentucky, three weeks at the amazing Banff Centre in Alberta with the Larchmere String Quartet, and then five sweaty concerts with the LSQ at the beginning of August (we performed in 90+ degrees!).  And even though I found myself getting a bit sentimental about leaving the states for 12 months, now that I am here I am looking to the future and seeing quite an endless list of possibilities for the next year of my life!


My Masters program doesn't begin until the 10th, so luckily I have some time to get my bearings first.  I live in a stunning place called Goodenough College (see picture above of the quad), where everyone is an international graduate student - automatically giving us all something in common.  The Queen herself came to visit for its 80th anniversary last year, so I now get to enjoy many of the improvements that were made on campus to prepare for her arrival.....like giant, gorgeous trees in the garden.

The neighborhoods each have a street named after the neighborhood with the word "High" preceding it so that you can always find the places of high activity (restaurants, shopping, etc.)  The tall, blinking lights on the sidewalk indicate that the right of way belongs to pedestrians, who I imagine are still in the right even if they are hit by the speeding red buses.  There is no such thing as Walmart, but the UK does have Argo's, where you fill out a card with numbers corresponding to the items you choose in a catalog the size of 15 Complete Shakespeare books put together, and then someone goes to the back and brings everything back for you - no aisle searching, just Walmart in a book.  But most of all, I love that history follows me everywhere, even in the most unassuming and quietest of streets.  Here at Mecklenburgh Square, one house was the home of Virginia Woolf, another was where D.H. Lawrence wrote one of his novels, and the Charles Dickens Museum is one block away.

All for now - updates to continue!

~Madalyn

Larchmere String Quartet!

Greetings from the road again!

I am always thrilled to travel, and this time I am en route to Cleveland with my new ensemble, the Larchmere String Quartet! My wonderful IU friends and colleagues, violinist Tim Kantor and violist Rose Wollman, along with myself and cellist Schuyler Slack from the Cleveland Institute, have joined forces as a string quartet and will perform our first audition tomorrow; with the help of Bartok, Beethoven, and Haydn, we will hopefully find ourselves spending a few amazing weeks this summer at the Banff Festival!

Getting to know the string quartet literature has been such an exciting addition to my musical life. Thanks to my new toy, an ipod(!), I can listen to the Razumovsky quartets back-to-back with my favorite Radiohead songs while walking to school or ballroom practice. And not only am I expanding my personal library of great music, I am also deepening my understanding and appreciation for the master composers in a way I never have before. On a more technical level, working as a four-member string unit has heightened my ear's sensitivity to issues like intonation, balance, and color, which must be used expressively in as sophisticated a way individually as collectively. What a worthwhile challenge!

Meanwhile, I am watching the days fly by as my final semester at IU gets into full swing. My 21st birthday arrives in just one month, and the ongoing preparations for new music concerts and recitals make the weeks seem short. Luckily, I still have time to practice several days a week with the university ballroom dance team, and I also look forward to working at the elementary school again soon. Indeed, I am really going to cherish these last few months being at my amazing school and with my incredible friends and colleagues!

All for now.

~Madalyn

London, Here I Come!

Hello everyone!

Last week I returned to Bloomington from New York, where I spent Thanksgiving break getting to know Prokofiev's Violin Duo, seeing old friends, and of course, doing lots of cooking for the holiday. Even though it was nice to spend a few peaceful days at home, the feeling of quiet was spiked by some very exciting news - I have received a Marshall Scholarship! The application process began during the summer, culminating in a final interview at the British Consulate in Chicago last week. I am so happy to be free of the paperwork and off to a new chapter of my musical life! The Marshall Scholarship will fund my Masters degree at the Royal Academy starting next fall, which means I will be moving to LONDON this summer! I am so excited to join and explore the incredibly vibrant music world of this phenomenal city. And for an Austen-reading, Shakespeare-reciting, BBC-watching fan like me, this is truly nothing short of a dream come true.

To say that November was a very busy month is an understatement. On the 1st, I performed my third Artist Diploma recital - only one more to go! - and afterwards I literally ran to Auer Hall to play Matthew Peterson's solo violin piece, Nacken, for one of the composition department recitals, and then made a beeline for the Indianapolis airport; I flew to London, where I auditioned for the Royal Academy and got to spend some time becoming acquainted with this beautiful conservatory. Before leaving for my final Marshall interview in Chicago and ultimately my "home for the holiday" vacation, I played twelve concerts! Four of these were part of the Midwest Composers Symposium, which is a coming together of composers from the universities of Michigan, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana. What an amazing event! It was so exciting to see so many talented composers sharing their music together. Meanwhile that week, I also played three chamber music concerts for some of my friends' doctoral recitals; Beethoven's Septet is now one of my favorite chamber music works. :)

With only a few weeks of the semester left, I look forward to our final round of performances and projects at the Jacobs School. Cicely and I have two more duo recording sessions coming up in a few weeks, so we are steadily making progress with our new music CD project, In Real Time. After this month, there will only be one more session left before just the recording portion of the project is finished! This is truly a marvelous collection of modern duos, and working with the composers themselves like Bill Bolcom, Lera Auerbach, and Paul Moravec continues to be an amazing opportunity.

All for now. There is SNOW in Bloomington!
~Madalyn

Return to Bloomington

Bloomington once again!

Such an astounding amount of activity, concerts, traveling, and adventures have taken place in between last September and the present one, and yet it somehow feels as though no time has passed since I walked into the Jacobs School for the first time. I didn't realize just how much I had missed our campus until I started seeing all of the familiar faces of friends and colleagues and started to settle into the school routine once more. The IU opera, ballet, and orchestras have such a tremendously exciting year of programs lined up, and it is rumored we have the largest incoming class of freshmen yet. A quiet summer certainly has its charms, but I thrive on the excitement of such a bustling university!

I am very glad to say that I am performing with the New Music Ensemble again this year, and in addition to working on fantastic piano quartet chamber music with Cicely, Tim Kantor, and Kati Gleiser, I am also taking a New Music Conducting class; no doubt this last one will prove a challenging project, but what a great opportunity to learn something new - in more ways than one!

Since the semester has only just begun, this serves as more of an introduction to the year, so to end today's entry, I've attached a link to a very moving and exciting article I found from last spring; every time I hear of the success classical music has found in the lives of children, I can't help but feel more and more convinced this is an essential part of being an ambassador of art!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/16/sistema-scotland-stirling-classical-music

All for now.

~Madalyn

Summer Music

Hello everyone,

After a thrilling first year at the Jacobs School which was immediately followed by a whirlwind, month-long Parnas/Kohlberg Trio tour in Europe and Israel, it is a relief to be in one place this summer! I often feel this time of year presents a conflict of objectives; for me it seems a special opportunity to rest and rejuvenate oneself following the endless, though invigorating, demands of the school year and concert season, but it can also be the ideal time to work intensively and accomplish many more things in preparation for the year ahead. Thanks to a quieter schedule, there is more time for me to broaden and manage my activities, so I have had the luxury of completing both objectives!

One of these projects which has served as an important musical focus for my summer has been continued preparation for recording sessions in the fall with Cicely; our exciting new music CD, “Present Tense” is going to be sensational! First of all, we have been doing some groovin'! One of our duos was written by Frank Bennett, a great composer/percussionist/veena player, and orchestrator/arranger for countless big-time Hollywood movies, including everything from The Wedding Planner to Predator to Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Well, his duo, Three Sketches for Violin and Cello, and the third movement in particular, features a rather jazzy and difficult-to-notate rhythm, which for classical string players like Cicely and me poses a bit of a challenge. So, we went to an expert for some advice. Lincoln Mayorga, our good friend and master of the bridge between classical and jazz approaches, got us thinking in terms of "feeling" a rhythm rather than calculating it, and after some chuckling and more than a few repetitions, I think we got it! A word of advice to all classical musicians who have not had the most robust instruction in their non-classical backgrounds: make friends with the jazz players!

As I may have touched upon in previous posts, one of the joys afforded by playing new music is the chance to work and communicate directly with the creator. Once again, this immensely edifying and enjoyable opportunity arose when we traveled to New York City last month to meet with the amazing Lera Auerbach, composer of Three Dances in the Old Style for violin and cello. This bewitching little suite of mischievous dances, so ostensibly simple and unassuming, is filled with the witty nuances of a personality amused by her own work, and it was incredibly entertaining and exciting to explore these intricacies together with Lera. Indeed, there can be no doubt that her entirely original and captivating musical fingerprint will be attracting some much –deserved attention on our track listing!

All for now; the return to Bloomington swiftly approaches and more musical adventures along with it! Stay tuned for more new music updates as we continue exploring the duos of living composers William Bolcom, Paul Moravec, Charles Wuorinen, Joel Feigin, and more.

~Madalyn

The Salon Concert

Hello and Happy Spring!

What an amazingly busy March for Cicely and I; today seemed like the first "normal" school routine in nearly a month! We had a great recording session for "Living in 2010" during spring break, followed by two duo concerts in New York, and soon after returning to Bloomington it was Artist Diploma Solo Recital time! Though exciting (and a little nerve-wracking!) to prepare entirely different repertoire (and lots of it!) for performances within days of each other, as always, the challenge of the experience taught me many things. I will not say "glad that's over!" but I must admit it is a relief to once again begin fresh with something new.

One of the performances we gave this month stood out for me. It was a duo concert for the Mt. Kisco Chamber Music Association in Armonk, NY. By now we have been able to experiment with many types of programs, repertoire, and formats for our duo performances, which also benefit greatly from some added discussion along the way. Incorporating all of these different elements together in a coherent, enjoyable way has been a fun and interesting process for me, but there is one important variable which we usually cannot control: the performance venue.

Well, what a perfect environment this was! Thanks to the great generosity of one of the Association's board members who hosted the event, we had an absolutely lovely space in which to play - a spacious, beautiful living room with room enough to seat at least 60. The front row was close enough to read the music off of our stands, but while in days past I might have found this disconcerting, now I couldn't have pictured it any other way. We've now done a few of these salon-type concerts, and I honestly hope the appeal of them continues to catch on because as a performer (and speaker), I sense that this kind of intimate, but formal setting is truly one of the most effective and positive ways to share music with an audience. So, for me it became very clear at this particular concert that no matter how wonderful and carefully designed the program is, the result is impacted tremendously by the nature of the setting - thank you, Mt. Kisco Concert Association, for the enormously special afternoon!

All for now. Off to Arizona in only a couple of weeks!

~Madalyn