CV

It all started without a viol in sight: my mother trained at the Orff Institute in Salzburg to be a teacher of pre-school kids (in Germany that means up to the age of 7) for general and fun music-making, using not only recorders, but percussion, lots of drawing, xylophones and rhymes, up to filling old coffee jars with beans and hiding alarm clocks. She trained while she was pregnant with me and I blame the exposure to recorders during the course for the fact that I was born with my left ear scrunched up inside. The left ear is supposed to be the artistic and musical one, and it seems obvious that it suffered greatly during the pregnancy. My parents thought I was born without a left ear altogether, until it just popped out after a few days, relieved to discover hospital silence. When I was 1 my mum started teaching other people's children and I was very jealous. So, by the time I was three, as soon as the last pupil was gone I said 'Now me!' and started learning to play the recorder, mastered the xylophone and learned my letters by learning notes. Soon, it is reported, it turned out that I was quite musical, and I progressed from the limited number of letters in music to reading the ingredients on the back of the cornflake packets at breakfast. Because I never went to a nursery, I had unlimited daily access to the musical instruments in the house. At some point my parents, who had next to no money at the time, even bought an old piano which came out of a chicken shed.
My mother is a very musical person herself, having learnt to play the accordion as a child. This was after she was forced to learn the mandolin first after my grandmother was sent to the pawn shop to get a guitar for her daughter's birthday, and came back with a mandolin. To this day it is unresolved whether this happened out of ignorance or for lack of money. My mother's greatest dream was to play a bowed instrument, but due to financial constraints and the fact that she got married and had children very young, this couldn't happen for quite some time. My father, who was a proficient player of the Bavarian Zither in his youth, and managed to remember 3 Xmas carols for a number of years (but gave up getting the instrument from the loft once a year due to the painful blisters on his fingers), had set himself up as a self-employed structural engineer, but had very little work to start with. He became disillusioned with his career choice and thought (after all, it was the 70s and everyone was doing Yoga classes and bread baking) he should do something social rather than draw plans for houses. He decided to become a development aid engineer in the 3rd world. Part of the required training was a language course in England for which he failed all his exams. My mother, however, was quite good, so an exception was made, asking them to stick together wherever possible. During those 3 months in England my parents went to a concert - and I remember this evening quite well: me and my brother were alone at home (which was a manor house on the outskirts of Exeter where we rented a room) and we were supposed to put ourselves to bed. But we ended up having one of those mad moments during which we (well, probably more he than me) decided to tear up my comfort blanket. Needless to say, I was devastated the next morning and we had to find a replacement very quickly. That evening my parents heard a Viol Consort, and my mother was so delighted with the sound (so far no Consort has come forward to take credit for this) that she decided to get a viol as soon as possible.
We ended up in Uganda for a while, until we had to leave the country in haste (it was 1977 by then), only to return to Bavaria in shorts and T-shirts in mid-February, with no possessions whatsoever. The building trade had picked up by the time we returned, so my father was back in business and we could afford to buy a house. My mother's first action was to pick up the phone to find out where to get a viol from. She first borrowed one and had lessons with a local teacher who had advertised herself as a viol teacher in our local music school. After some time, my mother suggested that the teacher brought her viol to the lessons, but the teacher had to confess she actually didn't own one. So, my mother got in touch with the very few people who were interested in Early Music in Southern Bavaria, found some people to play with, got a better teacher, and ordered an instrument. This instrument was a 6string copy of a Barbet viol, made by Hartmut Muenzberg in Lower Bavaria. It was delivered by the -then young and thin- Walter Waidosch who had just started training with Hartmut. Walter was on his way to see his mother in our neck of the woods and turned up on our doorstep with the instrument on Xmas eve (the German equivalent of Xmas day). He seemed like Father Christmas to us. Sadly my mother's involvement with viols and her speed of learning to play meant for us children that she suddenly seemed very busy and often away. But after all, she had found a new life which she was enjoying very much.
When I was 8 I started having lessons on a Quintfiedel - this was at the time an instrument which was used to teach children the basics of bowing and learning the notes, in preparation for violin lessons. It is a rectangular instrument, with an apex-shaped top, roughly viola size, with pin pegs, fixed metal frets, steels strings, underhand bowing (using a regular violin bow), tuned like a violin plus a c at the bottom (see photo below). My parents endured me practising on that thing for hours, until they decided to hand it back to the school after a year, as they could take no more. In an act of desperation my mother applied for my dad to go on a 10-day course to glue a pear-shaped fidel-viol together out of a few pieces of wood in a shoe box. 2 weeks before the course my dad had an unfortunate meeting with some liquid concrete he was handling when building an extension to our house and as a result he was unable to drive for some time. My mother, clueless about woodwork, decided to go on the course instead and take me (plus a recorder and the re-borrowed Quintfiedel) along. Now, I had not applied to go on the course, I was 9, a skinny red-head, and none of the tutors wanted me in their group. Luckily, the cool group on the top floor was run by the same Father Christmas Walter Waidosch who had delivered the viol, and we ended up doing all sorts of things that year and the following years, including some totally non-Early Music. Oh yes, and playing Volleyball and having countless strawberry cakes in the nearby Cafe. These summer courses became my new life, my new purpose. 2 years later I went on my own, with my mother's new treble viol (bass viols were still a bit big for me then), with two course participants as appointed adoptive parents - (only a few years ago (25 years after the course) the appointed adoptive father confessed to the appointed adoptive mother that he had a huge crush on her back then. They were both happily married at the time).
In the years between that and my decision to study the viol I learned to play the violin and the piano, but I was never any good on either. When I was 14 I knew I would want to be a musician (or at least I was asked what I wanted to be and gave that answer, although it had always been obvious to me) and age 15 or 16 I felt I needed to decide whether to study the viol or the violin. I slightly preferred the viol because it can play tunes as well as basslines, and I had some good advice from Michi Gaigg at the time: She said in order to be a good violinist I would need 10 years of solid lessons, and I would not get good technique from a baroque violin teacher, as they are only used to polishing properly trained violinists. This was certainly the case at the time and since I couldn't stand that steel e string in my ear one more minute, I opted for the viol. I started having lessons with Hartwig Groth in Nuremberg, travelling 3 hours (one way) on the train after school every 2 weeks, returning at 10pm. At least that was one day when my homework was done - on the train. Age 17 I had still 3 years of schooling left - I started late and failed one year because of Maths and Latin, so had to repeat it - and I decided that summer to leave home and do part-time music study, combined with finishing my schooling somewhere else. There was no decent viol teacher anywhere near where I grew up, so this seemed the only option at the time, although in hindsight I would have thought someone with a brain could have advised me to give up on school altogether there and then and study music full-time. I tried my best, but came to a point at which I would have had to be a full-time A-level student or give up. Needless to say, I did just that, handed in my school books and signed on the dotted line. I was then free to get my driving licence and think about getting a better music degree than Nuremberg could have offered me at the time. I decided for Rainer Zipperling in Frankfurt.
Now, that I know more about bureaucracy and how Universities operate (or are supposed to anyway) I'm highly amused by my blissful ignorance of any institutional system. I seem to vaguley remember having done an entrance exam for Nuremberg for which the result was probably more than inadequate - I couldn't provide them with three examples (composers and work) of 20th Century Symphony or 19th Century Lied, but put down 3 obscure 18th Century Oratorios I had recently performed and which would have been difficult to find in mainstream music dictionaries. After all, I had grown up exclusively with recordings of Emma Kirkby, Jordi Savall and Wieland Kuijken. I only consciously heard my first orchestra aged 16 and didn't know at the time what Vivaldi's 4 Seasons were. But I knew a hell of a lot about performance practice and unknown viol music. I also had no concept of the bureaucracy that might have been involved in the admissions requirements and technicalities of getting into music college. I just did it, and the institutions seemed to follow. When I turned up at Frankfurt Musikhochschule I had to matriculate and that involved a talk with the man in charge. He claimed that what I had done so far was no education and I had to do 6 years. I bargained him down to 4, and in the end left after 2 1/2 with a postgrad diploma.
In a way the whole journey up to that diploma was a string of lucky events: my parents' visit to Exeter and the concert, Walter's presence and inspiration at the first course I wasn't really supposed to be at, my physics teacher in year 10 who gave me one mark better than I deserved (quote: ' I thought this might be the last useful school report you have' [the German year 10 school report is a step below A-levels and quite significant]), which meant I didn't have to repeat yet another year, a lucky exposure to the right people who let me gain a lot of (paid) performance experience age 13 onwards, good advice not to study the violin, and last but not least my sailing through my final exams due to a few strokes of good luck: my final exam on the harpsichord in Frankfurt was supposed to have my harpsichord teacher and the Head of the Early Music Department, Michael Schneider, as examiners. Michael was ill that day and I persuaded Rainer Zipperling to sit in the exam. My own harpsichord teacher gave me a bad mark (I had to start my Bach Fugue 3 times), but Rainer was more generous, later reporting that this was technically the worst harpsichord playing he had ever heard, but musically the nicest. And my final composition exam was actually only supposed to be the interim exam, as I had not completed all required elements for a final exam. There was a room with two piles of exam papers: a 4part Fugue in the style of Bach (interim) and 6 couplets on a Chaconne theme (final). Since I had no clue about Fugues, I picked up the Chaconne paper and handed it back in 10 mins later. This caused some confusion in the marking, but the school secretary let me off the hook, because I had one of the best marks of the final year.
All in all, I count myself lucky having met some generous and very inspirational musicians along the way who just seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Looking back, the sequence of events seems to make sense, almost as if it all had to happen the way it did.