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If you want to know about Locrian member Katie Lansdale, the best place to
start is with Ronda Cole. This legendary Washington D.C. violin teacher was
her most important early influenceâ€"she entered Cole's studio at age
eightâ€"and her unique attitudes towards performance seem to have been fostered
by their studies together.
What Katie remembers best about Cole is her inventiveness. "Ronda was an
imaginative teacher," she remembers, "with both students and their parents.
She had a way of making the adult come out of the child and of making the
child come out of the adult." Cole's love of teaching was manifest in her
constantly changing approaches to the relationship between technique and
actual music. She used the most imaginative means to bring the two together.
"She is very insightful, always curious. I visited her recently, and she
was exploring a new way of listening where the player tries to hear the
baritone voice within any melody."
It is not surprising that, coming from such an environment, Katie possessed
the curiosity and flexibility that the playing of new music requires. It is
also not surprising that teaching is now an important role in her life. (She
is on the faculty of the Hartt College of Music in Hartford, and has also
been a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.) In
fact, she doesn't really view her roles of teacher and performer as separate
tasks. All her work as a musician is mixed up in her love of the art.
Upon graduation from high school, our heroine was already a regional
sensation, having soloed twice with the National Symphony and once with the
Baltimore Symphony. She deferred admission to Yale and spent two years at
Indiana University with the late violin pedagogue Joseph Gingold. Having
turned out such talents as Joshua Bell and Miriam Fried, Gingold might be
called a Midwestern Dorothy Delay. And his philosophy about what one might
call the culture of the violin also parallels that of Delay's virtuoso
factory at Juilliard. "He had a love of the violin for the violin's sake. I
know it sounds outrageous, but Fritz Kreisler was his favorite player and his
favorite composer because, I guess, of his intimacy with, his closeness to,
the violin."
After two years at "Violin Central," Katie was ready to broaden her horizons,
and she moved on to Yale where she majored in Humanities. There she
undertook broad multi-disciplinary projects like an essay on
Transcendentalism in tandem with an all-Ives recital. Such projects earned
her a junior humanities prize and the senior arts prize. Amidst all these
accomplishments, our young scholar was traveling to New York on weekends to
study with Felix Galimir at the Mannes School.
In these years she spent her summers as a fellow at the Tanglewood Institute,
and it was there that she was thrown for the first time into an intensive
contemporary music environment. She was appointed concertmistress of the
Fromm New Music Week orchestra, soloed in an electric violin concerto and
formed the Lion's Gate Trio with cellist Scott Kluksdahl and pianist
Florence Millet. Although they originally got together to perform the Ives
Trio, Lion's Gate soon became a regular showcase of contemporary trios,
commissioning and recording European and American new music. "We do slip in
an occasional Beethoven piece," she adds wryly.
After her graduation from Yale, she spent three years at the Cleveland
Institute, where she studied with Donald Weilerstein, former first violinist
of the Cleveland Quartet. While there, she started a prep chamber department
at the Institute and taught Suzuki viola. Coming to New York in 1993, she
barnstormed through the Manhattan School of Music, completing a doctorate in
three years, writing her thesis while teaching full time in North Carolina.
At present, Katie maintains her Herculean schedule, living and teaching in
Hartford and performing around the globe. The Lion's Gate Trio has recently
released a CD of chamber music by French composer Nicholas Bacri, and will
soon release a recording of four new American trios on the Centaur label.
Later this year she will be performing the complete solo works of Bach in New
York, Hartford, and this summer in Salt Lake City.
The music of Bach is very important to Katie, and if you press her to name a
favorite composer, his name will most likely come up. In 1991, she won the
Schloss Prize for performance of solo Bach in Salzburg; she founded the
Greensboro Bach Society; and she has used Bach's music as a cornerstone in
her audience outreach work.
Katie finds in Bach's work a universality that is not present in most other
Western composers' work. "His music is unique in that it seems to work at
both the amateur and professional level...his energy speaks in so many ways."
And do the so-called neoclassicists of the Twentieth Century have a similar
breadth? "Stravinsky's music is important to me as a performer and teacher,
but it's so specific to genre and instrument and certainly to sophistication
and skill." She loves the way a Bach piece can speak powerfully even when
transcribed and when played or sung by an unskilled musician.
In a way, the many facets of Katie's musical life also reflect her admiration
for the composer/organist/improviser/choirmaster/teacher/administrator from
Eisenach. Her work defies the boundaries that are taken for granted in
today's music business. For her the music business isn't a business at all.
She doesn't even like to be called a professional musician and, except for
the fact that she makes a living at it, she fits the etymological definition
of amateur perfectly: one who practices an art out of love.
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