Part 2
Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work. Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?
Wellbeing for myself and my family is central to each day. To that end, I start most days with either a long run or an hour of yoga and meditation. When I’m not on the road for concerts, days can get busy, so I often do this between 5 and 6 am before my husband (violinist Daniel Chong) and our six year old son Cole wake up. Morning coffee, breakfast, and getting our son off to school is next, which then enables me to get to Harvard (where the quartet teaches and rehearses) by 9 am to either teach or practice for an hour before the quartet’s 10 am rehearsal.
On most days at home, our quartet rehearses until 1. The time between 1 and 3 is spent either practicing, teaching, or taking our dog, a 12-year old vizsla named Bodie, on a walk around Fresh Pond in Cambridge. 3 PM is school pick-up time and playtime with our son. We enjoy taking our time walking home from school, looking at every interesting stick, rock, or insect, going to a park to fly a kite and lie in the grass listening to the sounds we can hear, playing with legos, or drawing. Next is dinner and the routine of getting Cole to bed.
I’m usually exhausted at this point, but after Cole is asleep, Daniel and I often use the time to talk together, read, catch up on work, or watch something together. Sometimes, Daniel and I have to stagger our teaching and practicing times, so it can be a bit hectic, but family life is central to us, so we try our best to protect the time after school and weekends as much as possible.
In terms of music and other aspects of my life blending or being separate, I believe there is a bit of both. The idea of connection and impermanence have become inspiring to me, and those are aspects that have the potential to blend seamlessly through everything I do.
Can you talk about a breakthrough work, event or performance in your career? Why does it feel special to you? When, why and how did you start working on it, what were some of the motivations and ideas behind it?
Around eight years ago, a festival asked me to stay a little longer than the quartet to play a viola/piano piece and join a piano trio for a piano quartet - I realized how much growing I could do by placing myself outside of my comfort zone. That sparked a whole different side of me that led to giving my frst recital since leaving school a few years later. I had spent so much time playing rewarding quartet concerts, but I was drawn to push myself to look at some different repertoire than I usually had the chance to do.
For that recital, I played Hindemith Solo Sonata (1937), Berio Naturale with the percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, and Mozart Divertimento with Daniel and Yeesun Kim, the cellist of the Borromeo Quartet. This experience made me realize how much I love delving into solo viola repertoire, varied collaborative partners, and playing string trio repertoire. In the last fve years, these three elements have become a much larger part of my life and are elements I hope to continue to develop.
There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?
There are certainly many approaches to fnding an ideal state of mind for being creative and for tapping into this during performance, and over the course of my life, my approach has evolved according to my infuences and overall development as a human being. At this time, I have two primary thoughts.
The first is that we are all connected - this can be applied in terms of the way our bodies can be resonating vessels taking in and giving back the energy from the performance hall, the audience, our colleagues, and the sounds we each create individually and together. The second is the idea of impermanence - no two moments can ever be the same, so we might as well be as fully open to the potential of the present moment as possible. This is not to say that we cannot have goals or visualize - visualizing is extremely important, but there can be a special balance between visualizing while also being present to the moment.
When that balance is successful, it really feels like all worries melt away and the music can flow freely. Of course that is not always possible, but to tap into that as much as possible has been a recent goal.
To have this state available to me, I have been incorporating meditation into my daily life. Also, while playing, or running or talking with other parents for that matter, I think about the space around me - specifically the idea of “listening” from behind - to tap into the sense of connection and presence. Physical balance and openness are also integral parts of allowing the mind to be free.
Music and sounds can heal, but they can also hurt. Do you personally have experiences with either or both of these? Where do you personally see the biggest need and potential for music as a tool for healing?
One way to approach this is to look at how artistry is fostered. Too often, it seems that western classical music is too much like a sport, with a sense of competition and measurable achievement taking precedence over artistic expression.
A healthy sense of competition can be a wonderful thing, and artists of course need a way to be discovered, but when too much of the industry is reliant on or feeding off of competition or social media success and losing the ability to have open ears and minds, we all suffer.
Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?
A few years ago, Daniel and I had the incredible experience of having a meal at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, the primary restaurant of Dominique Crenn, who was the frst woman to receive three Michelin stars in the US. We’ve been extremely fortunate to experience some incredible meals on our travels, but when I tasted one of the dishes at Atelier Crenn, my entire body felt warm and tears came to my eyes. It’s unexplainable in words, but the sense of taste reached my whole being in a way I had never experienced. Sound has the same potential to reach the unexplainable depths of human existence.
The most immediate way I feel this is through resonance from my instrument into my body and the way a resonating instrument feels in the hands. It can be interesting to notice what happens to the sense of sight when performing - how I can use my eyes to see my music or colleagues, but because of the visualization happening in my mind, any other elements of sight seem almost focused inwards rather than outwards.
Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?
In such a complicated and busy world, music gives me the opportunity to imagine what is possible, to imagine a world of integrity and honesty, to imagine a world of generosity and openness. To represent these ideals on stage can hopefully spread to others this sense of possibility.
In a direct sense, equitable representation and climate change are two of the most important issues in our world today - in the quartet and individually, I am consciously making choices with programming and travel plans to immediately address these issues on a daily basis.
What can music express about life and death which words alone may not?
Because music does not have the definitions that words have, it is able to tap into the in-betweens of life where undefinable dimension is found.
