After my undergraduate degree at the Juilliard School, I had a pretty radical pivot where I went back home to my native Alberta, Canada and quit playing and started a second undergraduate degree in psychology, and then a Master’s degree in theoretical psychology. Then I moved back into playing, and in trying to reconcile the relationship between these two fairly disparate fields of practice, I ended up doing a PhD in Ethnomusicology. It hasn’t always been clear to me about how any of these disparate pursuits were connected until relatively recently, when I started to see that the thing that connects all of them is understanding a process of inquiry and thinking about how we might defamiliarize the habitual or the taken-for-granted.
Read MoreLast fall, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report predicting irreversible, apocalyptic conditions by 2040 if immediate actions weren’t taken, at once and everywhere, to curb rising carbon dioxide levels. That same day, I lectured on personal finance to the musicians in my classes at the New England Conservatory. How do you teach compound interest and retirement savings when the very possibility of continued life on this planet seems to be called into greater question with each passing week? Everyone knows it’s tough to make a living as a musician. Up until now, though, living itself – that is, remaining alive – was mostly assumed.
Read MoreWho is the future symphony musician? What do they see, hear, think, do and say? In this session, Dr. Tanya Kalmanovitch and Anna-Christina Phillips will apply their perspective as leaders in one of the world’s foremost conservatory professional development programs to provide a snapshot of the orchestral musician of the future. Music students who graduate today are facing very real challenges that will shape their livelihood and their craft. In this session we will explore the world in which they live, the way it shapes their perceptions, and how this new generation of classical musician can engage with challenges.
Read Morehis exercise uses listening dyads (structured, paired discussions in which participant exchange the roles of dedicated listener and speaker) to uncover, define and articulate the essence of our personal, artistic and professional stories. In pairs, participants will first take turns responding to a series of prompts that elicit the key experiences, values, relationships and goals that shape them as artists and people; then mirror one
Read MoreI graduated from Juilliard in 1992 with two pieces of professional advice. The first was, “Take care of the music, and the music will take care of you.” The second was, “If you can see yourself doing anything else, do it.” I accepted the first piece of advice as an article of faith: a noble contract. The second I dismissed as irrelevant. I had never seen myself doing anything else but music.
But six months after graduation, I quit.
Read MoreWHEN I WAS 14 YEARS OLD, I decided I would become a professional musician because it had nothing to do with oil. I was born in Fort McMurray, Alberta, home to Canada’s notorious tar sands and the world’s third largest oil reserve. For a time, I lived in a neighborhood called Petrolia. Our hero was Wayne Gretzky of the Edmonton Oilers. The McDonalds had a pumpjack in the playground.
Read MoreShe grew up next to the biggest bitumen oil reservoir in the world. Her neighborhood in Fort McMurray, Alberta, is informally called Petrolia, the nearest professional hockey team is the Edmonton Oilers, and a local playground has a pumpjack. Oil, Kalmanovitch says, “paved the way for my family to go from being rural poor people to entering into the middle class.”
Read MoreI hadn’t really been aware of Tanya Kalmanovitch before but I am bowled over this recent collection of duos, Magic Mountain. Two microtonal violists! Good god. Apparently the artists themselves don’t always know who is playing what on this exceptionally surreal and beautiful performance.
Read MoreIt is a commonplace to say that music is the ‘soundtrack’ to social change, but music does not merely accompany social movement. Rather, it is an invisible engine of change. Music transacts between the internal realm of human experience (memory, emotion, culture) and the physical.
Read MoreEarlier this summer, as I was preparing to leave for Alberta, the Edmonton Journal's Roger Levesque interviewed me about my project. I was apprehensive about being interviewed for a project that hadn't yet begun, but it was a good note upon which to start my journey, and a vote of confidence in my idea that a personal conversation about oil and our relationship to it is a conversation worth having.
Read MoreAround age 14, I decided wanted to be a professional musician. My mother warned me it wasn’t a stable path. To some extent, Mom, you were right. (There. I said it.) Since I graduated from Juilliard in 1992, the music profession has suffered debilitating changes.
Read MoreTransitioning to the outside world can be scary and complicated. To complicate things further, not one of us has been handed the same deck of cards. But I know that each of you can survive as a musician. And I know you can expect more than survival: you can set up a life that allows you to thrive.
Read More“Music is a potent mechanism for self-actualization,’’ said Tanya Kalmanovitch, a violist and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music. “To be able to convey something through music requires you to recognize that you have something to say, and that you have a right to say it. That alone in many contexts can be a radical political act.’’
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