Juliana Soltis Interview
Below is the transcript to my 2025 interview with Juliana Soltis. The button link takes you to the video, podcast, and all-important show-notes!
Juliana Soltis (00:00:01):
The thing is, I think in music performance we tend to see nerves as a weakness. If you're nervous, obviously you're not cut out for doing this. Nobody ever wants to admit that they're nervous or that they're scared before a show, but in sports it's different. You talk about performance anxiety, you talk about the nervousness of getting ready. You talk about preparing in such a way so that when it comes down to game time, it's just doing what we did in practice. It's nothing different. When I was younger as a cellist, I always had this feeling kind of like, okay, yeah, I've practiced, but now I'm supposed to kind of do something I've never done before. I should be today who I should be 10 years from now, when obviously you can't be who you're going to be 10 years from now, until 10 years from now.
Leah Roseman (00:00:54):
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Juliana Soltis is an innovative cellist who has done extensive research to connect listeners with some forgotten stories of classical music. In this episode, we talked about her recent album, American Woman, which features cello and piano music of women composers; you’ll hear Juliana’s insights into the lives of Mary Howe, Amy Beach, Margaret Bonds, Helen Crane, Dorothy Rudd Moore and Florence Price and hear excerpts from this album which Juliana recorded with the wonderful pianist Ruoting Li. Many listeners will be familiar with Juliana’s playing as a Baroque cellist, and it was fascinating to hear about how the French relinquished their beloved viol relunctuantly to the Italian cello. I really love Juliana’s recording of the complete Suites for solo cello of J.S. Bach and you’ll hear some music from her album Going off Script: the Ornamented Suites for cello. Juliana shared great advice about performing from an athlete’s perspective and also the joy of connecting with audiences. This interview begins with one of her beautiful greyhounds, and for those of you watching this on YouTube, hopefully you’ll enjoy this comforting canine presence throughout this inspirational conversation. Like all my episodes , you can watch the video or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript to my website Leahroseman.com .It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the description of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including timestamps and different ways to support this podcast!
(00:02:30):
Hi, Juliana. Thanks so much for joining me.
Juliana Soltis (00:02:32):
Thanks so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
Leah Roseman (00:02:37):
So for those people watching, which of your dogs is this that they can see?
Juliana Soltis (00:02:42):
This is Ceci. You can see sort of his side right here. He is, he's now the older of my two boys. He was the younger and his sibling, his brother from another mother Rain passed away just before the new year, and he's staring at my new Greyhound, Rocky, who is lying in the bed that Ceci wants to be in and Rocky's not getting up.
Leah Roseman (00:03:08):
I'm also a dog lover and it's great. So often I've had podcast guest dogs in the picture, but not quite to this extent, so it's really nice.
Juliana Soltis (00:03:19):
Well, yeah, greyhounds are really rather long so yhey can take up a lot of screen space.
Leah Roseman (00:03:24):
So I'm so looking forward to this conversation. You're such an interesting and beautiful musician and we're going to focus very much on your recent album, American Woman, but I hope to get into some of your other projects and your life as a musician, which is so varied. So Ruoting Li, the pianist, did you know her before quite a bit before you started this project?
Juliana Soltis (00:03:49):
No, actually Ting and I were brought together by my late producer, Joe Patridge, specifically for this project. I had started working on American Woman with another pianist and things didn't work out, and there was a moment there where it looked like the whole project was dead in the water, which was just devastating because it was years of research had gone into this, and of course all the time that you spend tracking down the scores, I think the Margaret Bonds Troubled Water took me six months alone to find a copy of that score, which exists only in manuscript, and I thought, I can't believe this is it. And Joe felt very strongly that the music needed to be recorded. And so he donated studio time to the project and he introduced me to Ting who he was mentoring to be a recording engineer and producer herself. We just hit it off. Sometimes these musicians, you really hit it off. You have similar ways of playing, similar ways of thinking about the music, and we put all of that together. If you condense the time, the sessions that were spread out over several months in just a matter of weeks, which is astonishing.
Leah Roseman (00:05:12):
And have you performed this program live?
Juliana Soltis (00:05:16):
I have performed portions of this program live. I've been doing a lot of promotional touring for the album. Radio stations big and small across the us. Haven't made it up to Canada yet. I don't know. Being an American cellist, I kind of am starting to wonder if I'm going to be welcome in Canada at the present moment. Just a shame because I love Canada and I love it when I get to visit and perform, but not in its entirety. Actually, the first, I think full rendition of this program that I'm going to give is in just a couple of weeks and it's going to be at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York City. And we're going to highlight not just the incredible work of these composers, but also the role that the library plays in protecting the works of our most vulnerable artists because several of the works that appear on the album can only be found in the archives of the library and were it not for their passion for protecting our art, our music, and protecting the legacy of our artists, all of that could have been lost to history.
Leah Roseman (00:06:31):
Yeah, when I was looking up some of these composers, like Helen Crane, the first Google result was acted, the New York Public Library.
Juliana Soltis (00:06:40):
Yeah. Helen Crane's works reside only at the public library with the exception of one piece. And what's really wonderful is that anybody, literally anybody, whether you are a musician or a professional musician or a passion player or a professor or a teacher or just somebody who loves music and is interested in music, you can go to the library, you can make an appointment and they will pull those pieces for you and you can look at them yourself. You can engage with her papers, you can read her letters, you can look at her concert programs, and it's such a fantastic resource. I mean, you think about the level of gatekeeping that can sometimes occur with libraries when you're trying as a researcher to gain access to something and you're like, I just need 10 minutes with this score, or I really just need to read this one letter. And sometimes it can be a month long process to gain access to those materials, but it's the New York Public Library. It's there for anyone and everyone, and the staff is just wonderful. They're the most delightful people. If I could live at the public library, I probably would.
Leah Roseman (00:07:55):
So Mary Howe was a composer I wasn't familiar with, and this Ballade Fantasque is really a great piece. So I was hoping we could include a clip of that. And of course the album will be linked right in the description so people can go and hear the whole thing.
Juliana Soltis (00:08:09):
Mary Howe, I hadn't heard of either, most people who have heard of her have some kind of connection to what locals call the DMV, which is not the Department of Motor Vehicles. It stands for the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. And it's what people from the area call the Washington DC metro area. And the reason they know Mary Howe is because she is perhaps the greatest patron in the performing arts in the history of the district. She's one of the founders of the National Symphony Orchestra. She also at one point sits on the board for what was then called the National Center for the Arts and is now the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I think there can be a temptation to look Mary Howe to look at her contributions as a patroness to the arts and say, okay, this was just a matron, society matron. She wanted to compose. Maybe she wrote a little parlor song or two, isn't that sweet? But she's a formidable composer. She has her works performed by the New York Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic by the Vienna Philharmonic at a time when they were kind of notoriously unfriendly to both women and to foreign composers certainly, but they loved her. The wind players in the orchestra loved her music so much that they commissioned her to write another piece, her Wind Quintet from 1957. I think that maybe she's been overlooked because some critics called her compositional style derivative. She had this very unique way of writing that she called "spanning and bridging" in which she took musical styles from the past and then blended them with contemporary musics to create this very individualized hybridized musical language. And they're like, you're just borrowing. And I love that she had a very simple response to them, which is that I write what I want to write, and it's fantastic. I love it. The Ballade Fantasque, is this just, it's like this incredible pantomime tone poem. There's so much going on, so many colors, so many moods, so many different characters in the music. And as a musician, that's just wonderful to play around with.
Leah Roseman (00:10:37):
This is a clip from Ballade Fantasque by Mary Howe (Music)
(00:10:39):
And she also founded the Society of American Women Composers.
Juliana Soltis (00:12:24):
She did, she co-founded it along with Amy Beach. And I have to mention one of my favorite artifacts at the Library Performing Arts. It's a photograph and it's a photograph of the moment when the Society of American Women composers is founded after a breakfast for the Society of American PEN Women, which is a group still exists today, and all women who write things, so novelists and journalists and poets, and of course at the time composers too. And so all of these women composers are there and they find each other and realize that they're not alone. (laughing) I'm getting a nose in the neck.(laughing) And so they decided to found their own group, which sadly no longer exists, but at the time, it includes Amy Beach and Includes Mary Howe and so many incredible women whose stories and whose music haven't necessarily survived into our modern canonical view of classical music. But there's so much to explore.
Leah Roseman (00:13:30):
So what was the impetus for you starting this research project?
Juliana Soltis (00:13:35):
It actually started so many things during the Pandemic. I still think people don't quite realize that for those of us who are performers, particularly in classical music, sometimes we schedule things years in advance. And within a matter of weeks, everything evaporated. My schedule cleared out, it was unreal, and suddenly we're all at home. We have all this time on our hands, and I really wanted to do something that I could keep doing and I could see through to completion at a time when everything was so up in the air, I had started to wonder about the idea of American identity in classical music. I'm always described as American cellist Juliana Soltis, and I thought, I really don't know what that means. If you're an Italian cellist, you have this incredible lineage of music behind you that's part of your heritage. There's Bocherini and there's Verdi and Puccini and so many wonderful composers.
(00:14:51):
There's a sense of identity there just in the music, and I really have no idea what it means to be a cellist in terms of my own American repertoire. And so I started to explore that idea and think, ah, this will make a great album. And I ended up with a short list of 20 pieces, which isn't very short, and I was trying and trying, trying to whittle this list down without compromising the narrative and literally banging my head on the coffee table in the living rooms like, come on, you can figure this out. And I realized finally that for every male composer, for every man whose name I knew, whose music I knew, there was always a contemporary woman counterpart whose music I either knew only in passing or who had been mentioned maybe as a novelty in one of my music history courses or who I didn't know at all.
(00:16:00):
And yet they formed this continuous history of which I had been completely unaware. And I thought, this is the story that this lost legacy, this secret history of women who have been continuously composing in American classical music. And I thought, this is the album that I have to make. And immediately followed by the thought that, oh good lord, nobody's going to let me make this album, but I was going to do it anyways. And luckily I found other collaborative artists along the way, including the incredible team of people at Parma Recordings who shared my passion for this project and made it happen.
Leah Roseman (00:16:51):
Now, you'd mentioned Amy Beach and she's a wonderful composer. I do love her writing. I don't know if you had heard, I did an interview with Samantha Ege recently. She's a musicologist and pianist. She had written a book recently about the Black women composers and their sisterhood. And actually it was interesting because it's not just about the performers, but the fundraisers and the impresarios and all the community that you need to support that. But Amy Beach was quoted as saying that "the African population is too small for its songs to be considered American." The white women composers were not welcoming the Black women composers.
Juliana Soltis (00:17:29):
No, sadly not. If you look at that photograph that I mentioned at the New York Public Library for the performing arts, the one thing that is conspicuously missing and was honestly conspicuously missing from a larger photo of the Society of American PEN Women at the time, there are no Black women in there. And it really is a shame, and I think that it is a problem that can persist to this day. I think one of the obstacles in facing modern feminism, both in the US and abroad, is that there is often a racial divide. There's an idea that if your skin is this color and you're a woman, these are your problems. And if your skin is this color and you're a woman, well those are your problems rather than seeing that there is common cause. And certainly these women, many of these women were writing and working all at the same time, and you do get the impression that if their skin tones did not match, their paths did not cross. Which again, it's a terrible loss. Anytime that we miss that opportunity to connect with other artists, anytime we miss that opportunity to expand our minds and to expand our concept of the human experience of the American experience, we're really missing out.
Leah Roseman (00:18:58):
So in my episode with Samantha Ege, I did feature Margaret Bond's Troubled Water, the piano version, which, I love that piece, and I love this cello version. And you said it took a while to find the manuscript. So this was the manuscript for the arrangement of the cello and piano version.
Juliana Soltis (00:19:13):
This was, it's never been published, as you mentioned. It's Troubled Water is part of Margaret Bond's larger piano work, Spiritual Suite, and the cellist Kermit Moore asks Margaret Bonds who he knew to please transcribe this movement of Spiritual Suite for cello and piano. And so it only exists in the manuscript copy that she made for him and I was provided with, and which I'm very grateful facsimile of that manuscript. And as difficult as manuscripts can be to read, essentially you're reading, you're trying to decipher somebody's handwriting and we know how hard it can be to just say, read, you know, like the doctor's handwriting on a prescription slip. So it's the same thing when you're reading handwritten music, but there are always little details in a handwritten manuscript that you don't get in a published score, including that Bonds wrote a little note to Kermit Moore at the top of the page "To Kermit". This was a true labor of love, this transcription that she made just for him, I believe in 1964. And I have to say it was worth every second, every email, every ounce of effort that I put into tracking it down.
Leah Roseman (00:20:35):
Yeah, this is an excerpt of Troubled Water by Margaret Bonds. You can also hear the original piano version in my episode with Samantha Ege. (Music)
(00:22:12):
I think it might be interesting, we'll get back to that album, but people know you mostly as a baroque cellist.
Juliana Soltis (00:22:20):
This is true. The album, the new album, I think really came out of left field for a lot of people who only know me from my two previous albums, which as you mentioned, both are on baroque cello.
Leah Roseman (00:22:33):
So I was looking at your main teachers and I was kind of curious about your path and also were you still playing modern cello when you were mostly playing baroque cello for many years?
Juliana Soltis (00:22:46):
I actually did not touch a modern cello for about 10 years. I was playing Baroque exclusively. Some of that other musicians, anybody who's working will understand this. You do what people will pay you to do. That's kind of the thing about being a professional musician is that hopefully people are giving you money to pay your electric bill in exchange for doing this thing that you love so much to do. So people were hiring me to play Baroque cello and certainly absolutely loved playing baroque cello. And it was, I think my interest in exploring those forgotten stories of classical music that really led me to early music. And again, it was during the pandemic when we all had a lot of time to sort of think and to face the reality of our own mortality when faced with this indiscriminate virus that I started thinking about the course of my life and my career and about what was I going to most regret not doing. And for me, the answer was that what was really most important to me was to tell these forgotten stories or these untold stories in classical music and that those certainly weren't just limited to the Baroque era. And so that's when I picked up the modern cello again and again, that's where American Woman got its start.
Leah Roseman (00:24:23):
And some listeners won't be familiar with the technical differences with baroque cello, the lack of an end pin, for example. Do you want to speak to that a little bit?
Juliana Soltis (00:24:32):
Well, most people, like you said, they know a cello from say a performance of an orchestra or a string quartet, and it looks like a big violin and it's got that metal metal peg on the end of it, which retracts into the body of the instrument, the English call it the spike, which sounds pretty cool. And here in the US we just call it the end pin, not nearly as cool. Modern cellos, certainly at least since about I'd say the middle of the 20th century here in North America are strung with steel strings, have a steel core and then some kind of other metal winding around them. But the Baroque cello is a very different animal now. It still looks kind of like a big violin, but it's missing the end pin. The end pin doesn't come into play with the cello until I'd say about the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.
(00:25:22):
We have a really interesting, I think it's an etching of the great cellist Alfredo Piatti playing in concert with no end pin. And this is really in the fat part of the 19th century there, the Dvorak cello concerto, which is one of the just thundering mortal master works of our repertoire, was premiered on a cello with no end pin. I haven't tried it yet, but it's definitely on my bucket list. I wonder if it makes it any easier. Probably not. But baroque cellos are also strung with gut strings, animal gut strings, usually sheep gut, sometimes a beef gut, cow gut, I'm a vegetarian.
(00:26:10):
The lower strings are wound with that metal, that wire winding, but the upper strings are just bare animal gut. They produce a beautiful, warm sound. It's not the loudest sound, but baroque string instruments aren't made for punching to the back of a thousand seat concert hall. They are made for playing in small intimate spaces either in the home or perhaps in the grand parlor of your palace if you are a member of the aristocracy. And they sort of fill the room with this beautiful ambient cloud of sound. So it's something that's supposed to be kind of experienced in 360 degrees rather than punching back to the cheap seats.
Leah Roseman (00:27:02):
And your first album, which is Entrez, Le Diable!, which is Baroque French music, you had done some research for that as well.
Juliana Soltis (00:27:10):
That actually started as my graduate thesis when I did a second Master's at Oberlin Conservatory in their historically informed performance department. And my teacher was Catharina Meints Caldwell, who in addition to being one of the cellists of the Cleveland Orchestra for many, many years was a wonderful or is a wonderful Viola de gamba player. And with her husband, the late James Caldwell collected the Caldwell collection of viols, which is spectacular. I used to just be in awe when I would walk into her house and they'd all be hanging there on the wall like it was nothing! But Cathy really liked her cello students to play viol. And when I came to her, I didn't play viol, I hadn't been interested at all, but she was my teacher and I was going to be a good little student and do as I was told. And I picked up the viol and I started to realize that there were some astonishing similarities between viol music and the techniques that are used to play it and cello music of the same period, particularly in France that a lot of cellists consider to be unplayable. And I thought, well, I bet that about the time that the French started switching from viol to cello because they held onto the Viol da gamba as an instrument for far longer than anywhere else in Europe, it was very tied up in their sort of national musical identity, this instrument and its sound. I thought, well, what if they are taking that technique and just applying it to the cello?
(00:28:44):
And what if the composers are just taking those techniques and putting them into their music? And so I think my Master's thesis was Sheep in Wolves Clothing, the case for a viol-based technique in 18th century French cello playing. And the more I researched, the more I found that this was actually like a culture wars kind of moment. In 18th century France, there's actually a book, a little treatise that is called In Defense of the Bass Viol, against the enterprises of the cello and violin. These invading Italian instruments are coming for our soul. And I found that this was very real for them, that it was a very big deal when the cellist Lanzeti plays at the Concerts Spirituels for the first time and the impact that it has, it's a little like when all the Italian musicians started going to England during the reign of the Hanoverian kings, and you see this change in English music, it becomes less that homegrown, that indigenous kind of English music with their unique harmonies and becomes much more Italianate.
(00:29:55):
A friend of mine who studies that particular period causes the greatest tragedy in the history of English music is when the Italians came. And so it's a similar thing. The composer starts out writing in a very, very French way, very informed by viol music. And then he goes to Italy for a while and he lives and he works and he studies in Italy and he comes back and his music has completely changed. It's much, much more Italian; that devil cello has finally triumphed. And all this happens within 25 years, which is absolutely incredible to think about that kind of change happening in that comparatively short amount of time. And again, that for the French, this was a real moment of cultural crisis. So what we think we're going through today is honestly nothing new. Everything old is new again.
Leah Roseman (00:30:55):
So I'm curious about, you said people considered some of this music unplayable. So did it have to do with the tuning of the strings being closer together intervalically on a gamba, or what made it easier to play from that perspective?
Juliana Soltis (00:31:09):
There are ways in which you, you'll understand this as a violinist, we are taught to play a certain way when we play violin family instruments. There's a lot of finger independence, and we very rarely bar our finger across the string because let's face it, the intonation's not going to be super accurate. And the next thing you know, you're kind of trying to twist your way to get that one note of the two. That's not in tune, in tune, but in vial playing, it's incredibly common. The fingerboard's a little bit flatter. You have frets and barring your fingers across. And in fact, preparing those chords, sometimes several notes ahead of time is considered to be extremely good viol playing technique. Whereas on a string violin family instrument, if you don't need that finger down, don't put it down. You're wasting your energy, right? And you're risking tendonitis because you're expending all this extra force. But it's very common in viol playing. And one of the things that can be most difficult for cellist in playing some of this French repertoire is that there are just fistfuls of notes. And if you don't prepare them in the same way that a viol player would prepare those chords, there's no way that you are going to catch them in time or that they will be in tune. So the minute that I started thinking less like a cellist and more like a viol player, it was like the music just completely opened up to me. And what before had been a physical struggle was suddenly quite easy. It was amazing. I mean, I can't possibly be this simple, and yet it was.
Leah Roseman (00:32:52):
Well, it's a beautiful album and I encourage people to check it out.
Juliana Soltis (00:32:55):
Well, thank you.
Leah Roseman (00:32:56):
And your Bach album, it just absolutely blew my mind, so incredible.
Juliana Soltis (00:33:03):
Oh, thank you so much. The Bach album, people either love it or they hate it, but I'm okay with that because at least they're having a strong reaction to it. I think my greatest fears are performers for people to be like, "ehh"
Leah Roseman (00:33:18):
Yeah
Juliana Soltis (00:33:18):
No, it's okay. It's like, I'd really rather you hate it than just be kind of like, ehh, about it. So I'm glad that you loved it. I loved making it, and I love playing Bach that way. I wish that more performers would take that risk. But I do think that there's still a considerable taboo about improvising on Bach, even though it is most likely what he himself would've expected his performers to do.
Leah Roseman (00:33:49):
This is the Courante from J.S. Bach, Solo Suite number one in G Major. You'll find all Juliana's albums linked on her website in the show notes. (Music)
Juliana Soltis (00:37:14):
I put that album out on my own imprint because nobody wanted to publish it, and I felt very strongly about it. They're like, nobody's going to want that. It's like everybody plays Bach. Nobody wants another Bach album. And I kept telling people it's like, this is not going to be a Bach album like you've ever heard before. And no one wanted to take that risk. And I was, okay, I'm going to do it myself. And I did, and I'm so glad that I did and that I followed my gut and I trusted my instincts.
Leah Roseman (00:37:43):
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with pianist and historian Samantha Ege, cellist Julia MacLaine, cellist Dorothy Lawson of ETHEL, bassist Edwin Barker, and the Euclid Quartet, among so many. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the links to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend. Thanks.
(00:38:36):
Well, can we talk a little bit about the art of ornamentation, what this album is all about?
Juliana Soltis (00:38:40):
Yes. Oh, absolutely. It's got to be the most difficult thing. I think when you start to explore the world of historically informed performance. To one, wrap your head around the idea that the notes on the page aren't all others to the music. When you're looking at baroque music, classical music, even I would say music from the Renaissance, what's on the page isn't music. It's a recipe for making music. And the music is what happens in the moment when you're playing, when you're performing, when you're sharing that moment with the audience and the music isn't complete until you as a performer add in these little improvised interpolations that we call ornamentation. Now, as you know, particularly I think as string players, we are brought up now in this post 19th century pedagogical tradition post 1945. We've all read Milton Babbitt, Who Cares If You Listen, we are supposed to play what is on the page exactly as it is written on the page. Do not deviate from what is on the page. I have been, or in my younger days, I was chewed out by more than one composer who just felt that I was not showing adequate to what was on the page. But with baroque music, what is on the page is just the beginning. I love to say the Bach is only the beginning, and it's thrilling. The minute that you realize there's so much more to it, and that every time that you play it, it can be a different experience, not just for you, but for your audience, so that you're sharing this special never to be repeated moment, which takes on even greater meaning. I think in the digital world where there are footprints of everything and we can repeat or discard at a whim, here's this thing that's so ephemeral, and you get to share it with however many perfect strangers are in that room with you in that moment, in that performance. And it's something that will bind you together for the rest of your lives, even if you never see each other ever again, you had this beautiful experience together, but it's terrifying when you've been told to play what's on the page. And suddenly somebody says, okay, what's on the page is, it's like somebody giving you a recipe for chocolate cake instead of a cake. If you just play the notes on the page, you're just reading a recipe to someone. And quite frankly, if I've been promised chocolate cake, I really expect chocolate cake.
Leah Roseman (00:41:31):
So I'm just curious, when you recorded that album, you would've had to, I'm imagining you tried to do complete takes or in terms of the ornamentation in your choices.
Juliana Soltis (00:41:42):
It was tricky, and I had a really wonderful producer on the Bach album, Dan Mercurio, who was thankfully willing to let me experiment as much as I wanted to because when you're recording, obviously the goal is to, because you're going to edit. The goal is to give people the best possible version of a performance. It's a performance for everybody who can't hear you live. That's the way I think of a recording. But so often the producer will be great, one more just like that,
(00:42:16):
And you're like, oh boy, man, I really hope I can remember what I just did. But you want them to line up as well as possible so that then of course when you go to edit that it's as seamless as possible and then you don't have to edit as much. So here I am doing this kind of absolutely antithetical to the whole, Hey, one more, just like that approach to recording. And we ended up essentially with probably 10 Bach albums, it was a lot of material, and it was difficult to then go through and say, alright, what version of this do I want to put down for this moment?
(00:42:59):
Somebody said to me, oh, well, it's completely cross purposes to record something that's supposed to be improvised. It's like, well, yeah, but do we not want a world with the album Kind of Blue in it or anything else by Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, I mean, those are all jazz musicians. Jazz is improvised. Are we going to say never record jazz just because it's antithetical to the spirit of the music? No, again, a recording is a performance for people who can't hear you live. I love recording because I think it's in many ways just incredibly democratic. It gives anyone anywhere access to this wonderful music, and I think that that's incredibly important.
Leah Roseman (00:43:45):
So in terms of your teachers and mentors, you had mentioned Catharina. What do you think was the main thing you remember from those lessons?
Juliana Soltis (00:43:54):
I think of Cathy, and I think that what I took most from my lessons with her was the kind of woman that I wanted to be and the kind of musician that I wanted to be. Cathy Meints is one of these women who just doesn't take lip off of anybody. And we've all said that, certainly I'm sure about some kind of female figure in our lives, but that's a difficult thing to do in classical music. It is still very much a man's world, and certainly it was when Cathy was playing with the Cleveland Orchestra and when she was getting involved with historically informed performance, and I admired the degree to which she insisted that she be taken seriously. It's very easy to, I laugh a lot, but that's just kind of my personality. But there can be a certain pressure as women in classical music to act a certain way, to be a little bit softer, to giggle sometimes at the incredibly inappropriate comments that still get made.
(00:45:08):
And she just wasn't going to have any of that. And I thought, you know what? This is the kind of person I want to be. I want to be someone who enters the room and says, I deserve your respect. And as a musician, Cathy is fearless. She's really fearless. And I'll never forget this one lesson. She was not somebody who handed out compliments. It's that old school of teaching where they're like, it is not my job to compliment you. It is my job to figure out what you can do better so that you can be the best possible musician that you can be. And then they toughen you up a little bit because it's not the easiest life if this is what you want to do. In my lesson, she says, "Juliana, every note you play is so beautiful". And I was like, oh, oh my God. Is she going to actually say something nice to me? Am I dying? Is she dying? What's going on here? And I'm stunned. I'm sitting there in my chair and she goes, "every note is a perfect pearl, and it's so boring. I just can't stand it." And it was like, ah, there it is. The insult that I was waiting for. But she had a point, which was that every note I was playing was equally beautiful. It's a little like speaking a monotone sentence. If you speak every word with the exact same kind of inflection or volume or tone, then it would sound like this all the time and nobody would want to listen to you talk. And that's how I was playing without variation in my dynamics or in my tone color and playing every note. It was equally important, and it hurt. And I like to tell this story because people always react with horror.
(00:47:13):
I can laugh about it now, but she did have a point. And so when I'm playing now and when I'm practicing, I'm always looking at, am I really capturing the music? Am I using everything at my disposal to convey whatever it is the composer put on this page to get that out there for the audience? Because it's not about me. If I just wanted to play the cello and please myself, I could have another job that I paid more and then just play for fun. But you're there because I'm there on stage because the people in the audience need something, and I don't necessarily know what it is. Maybe they've had the best day of their life and they're there to celebrate. Maybe they've had the worst day of their life and they're looking for consolation. Maybe the piece I'm playing unbeknownst to me was on a record that their father would play every night when he came home from the plant. And that was the only time that they got to spend together when someone was a child. But they're there for a reason, and it's my job to provide whatever it is that they're searching for.
Leah Roseman (00:48:33):
Yeah, interesting perspectives. I wanted to ask you, I noticed you stayed off social media for a long time, but then with this album, you're actually very active in it, really making connections with your audience. So that's the flip side, right?
Juliana Soltis (00:48:49):
I do have kind of a love hate relationship with social media. I have to admit that I find that spending time on social media can be very bad for my mental health. It's just too tempting to start comparing yourself to what you perceive other people are putting out there. And that's not a good use of my time. It's not useful to worry about what other people are doing or not doing or getting or not getting when I could be doing my own work and worrying about what it is that I'm putting out into the world. But I do love that social media gives us, as performers a very unique opportunity to connect with people who love our music. Certainly, I think that's something very new for people in classical music where there's always been kind of this remove between performer and audience that you don't see as much in other genres of music like pop or hip hop, where in the concerts they're standing on stage, they're reaching out into the audience, they're pulling audience members out on stage during grunge, they're jumping into the mosh pits. That's not really something we do as classical artists. So it does let me share my work and share a little behind the scenes kind of part of my process with people, and I do enjoy that. But it's been a struggle to find a balance between that community engagement and yet not going down the darker path that social media so very easily can offer to all of us. Doom scrolling is not my friend.
Leah Roseman (00:50:40):
Yeah. Well, if we could go back to your album American Woman. So Dorothy Rudd Moore, powerful composer. You recorded her 1971 Dirge and Deliverance. So I noticed she died in 2022. Did you ever meet her?
Juliana Soltis (00:50:59):
I discovered her in her music for myself. Obviously she was already a known quantity, I think a month after she died. And I had that same reaction. It was like, oh, if I had just started looking sooner, I would've had that opportunity to ask her about her work, to ask her how she felt about it, to ask questions about the music as I was playing it. And I did feel as a woman I've never met, but I felt this very profound sense of loss as an artist in this missed opportunity to engage with a living composer and to ask those questions that we so often wish we could ask when we're dealing with composers, the works of composers who are no longer with us, working with living composers can sometimes be frustrating. I mean, it's another kind of human interaction, and it's always fraught with equal opportunity for peril and joy. But good Lord, what I wouldn't give to be able to ask Bach a question or two about the Suites or to ask Dvorak about, did you really need to make that change there in the cello concerto? And we don't have that opportunity. But when you work with a living composer, you can ask them all the questions that you want, and usually they're quite a amenable. They want performers to engage with their music. And so having just missed that opportunity with Dorothy Rudd Moore, whose music really resonates with me, it was devastating.
Leah Roseman (00:52:43):
So she's founded the Society for Black Composers. Her husband was a cellist. And also it really, I read that none of her works were published?
Juliana Soltis (00:52:54):
Well, they were not published by say, a publishing house. But if you're interested in the music of Dorothy Rudd Moore, which I thoroughly recommend, her scores are available through the American Composer's Alliance, and you do have to pay for them, but they're all available after payment as downloads. So her music is very easily accessible. And yes, it is all in manuscript form, but I find that her handwriting is quite tidy, and I had no problems in deciphering the score, which is a nice change. But the American Composers Alliance does absolutely phenomenal work. Again, much like the library for the performing arts in preserving and protecting the legacies, the works, the scores, it's stewardship, posthumous stewardship for so many of these composers whose works might again otherwise just be lost to history. And that's a terrible loss for us, not just as musicians I think, but for the culture in general. Anytime it's like biodiversity, when we lose species, the planet is worse off as a whole. When we lose music, when we lose composers, when we lose those voices, we are certainly none the better.
Leah Roseman (00:54:10):
So we'll be including an excerpt from this recording of Dirge and Deliverance. Can you speak to the work a little bit?
Juliana Soltis (00:54:18):
Dirge and Deliverance, Dorothy Rudd Moore described as being one of her most intensely personal works, and it divides into two sections. There's an opening dirge, which is characterized by these pounding chords in the piano. And for me, I had images of Israel in Egypt marching through the desert, looking for the promised land, and there is this motivic cell in the cello. It's three notes that is constantly struggling to break free of these oppressive piano chords, and yet is constantly being dragged back down into this sort of inexorable, unending pounding motion of these cords. That is until the second section Deliverance, which begins with a very huge dissonant cord in the cello. And then there's sort of a battle that is happening between the cello and the piano. The cello is struggling to break free. And I think some of this, I think she did because her husband, Kermit Moore was this fantastic cellist.
(00:55:28):
The last third of the piece, the whole piece, and a large part of that Deliverance section is actually an extended cadenza for unaccompanied cello, and it's like a soliloquy of sorts. The cello is on the verge of this independence, and it's asking, but what does this independence mean? And are we ever really free? But then the piano comes back in and they sort of battle it out till the end. The cello event eventually emerges victorious, which I find interesting because Dorothy Rudd Moore, in more than one interview, kind of expressed a fairly pessimistic worldview, but at the same time, she admitted that there was still something in her that didn't to be defeated. And I think that that really comes through here in her music and certainly in this piece.
Leah Roseman (00:56:31):
This is an excerpt from Dirge and Deliverance by Dorothy Rudd Moore.(Music) So her husband, that was the same cellist to asked Margaret Bonds to write an arrangement of Troubled Water?
Juliana Soltis (00:58:06):
It was Kermit Moore was a powerhouse, very much an overlooked powerhouse of 20th century American music. He is a fantastic cellist. He's a conductor. He's a composer himself. And so yes, he is commissioning Margaret Bonds to do that transcription of Troubled Water. Also, another piece which is as far as we know, been lost, I'm still looking for it. That's based on her Montgomery Variations. And he and Dorothy Rudd Moore both spent quite a bit of time with Margaret Bonds. I think she was a mentor to them when they were first married and living in New York City. And it's wonderful. Like you said, there is a racial divide amongst American women composers, the Society of American women composers. It's all white women, but within the Black community as well. There is community, there is family, there is support. All of the Black women composers on the album are connected in some way from Florence Price to Margaret Bonds to Dorothy Rudd Moore. And it's wonderful again, to see that lineage and to see that tradition, that heritage, that unbroken thread running through American music history.
Leah Roseman (00:59:22):
And I'll link my conversation with Samantha Ege to this one. I always suggest some episodes people will enjoy, and we talked about how in the Bonds, Florence Price after she was going through this terrible divorce, and she's a single mom. She moves in with the Bonds, actually.
Juliana Soltis (00:59:37):
Yes.
Leah Roseman (00:59:38):
And so yeah, it was a very personal connection, often.
Juliana Soltis (00:59:41):
Very personal connection. I think it's important for us as performers to know these things about the composers. I suppose you could argue that it doesn't affect our interpretation of their music in any way, but I think that our experiences as human beings inevitably find their way into our art. People often just say, Florence Price moved from Little Rock to Chicago. Very simple, right? Except they don't tell you why. And she moves because there is a plot to kidnap and murder her youngest daughter in retaliation for the death of a white child. So it's not that she's just moving to Chicago. She and her family are fleeing for their lives. And at the time in Chicago, when she is first coming to national attention, she is essentially rebuilding her life from scratch because she's had to leave everything behind. And then the young Margaret Bonds is a part of that. Margaret Bonds wrote about how she was always helping Florence Price prepare parts and prepare his scores because she always needed help. And so again, that sense of community, that personal connection, and I think those things must in some way inform our performance to know what the composers went through, just to write the music, just to get those notes down on the page so that we could play them.
Leah Roseman (01:01:05):
And we talked briefly about Amy Beach. She was prevented. She had pushback from her husband, from society.
Juliana Soltis (01:01:14):
It's interesting because Amy Beach's parents were just terrified of her musical abilities when she was a child. And I call her the American Mozart because she is a wunderkind. She's possessed of such fantastic musical gifts. But her parents worry that if she becomes a performing virtuoso that she's not going to be able to secure a good marriage match, which in a sort of neo feminist lens, we're like, oh my gosh, her parents are worried about the marriage match. But the truth is is that in Amy Beach's world without a male family member or a husband to look after, you had very few options for making your way in the world, and you were often in great social peril. So her parents' concern to some degree, is founded. They were worried about what was going to happen to their daughter. Her husband, Henry Harris Aubrey Beach admires her musical skills. But when he marries her, he says, okay, performing's off the table because it's just unseemly for a society lady to be performing the piano on stage. And he suggests that she compose, which that's pretty progressive for a Victorian man to suggest that his wife continue doing anything in music and not just be a society, society housewife wife, but he then denies her a teacher.
(01:02:42):
You get a lot of kind of conflicting messages here about do this thing, but I'm not going to help you. So Beach in a very sort of old tradition, teaches herself. Bach taught himself to some degree by studying the manuscripts of other composers, those famous moonlight manuscripts that he was extracting from that cabinet in the middle of the night and copying down. He got into quite a bit of trouble as a young man for doing that. But Beach is studying the works of other composers, so to better understand how to compose. And I think it's for that reason that her early works in particular often sound a little like other composers. They might sound a little like Brahms or Fauré some of them sound quasi impressionistic. She may have even had a Debussy score in her collection. And she's essentially, I think, trying on these styles to see how they work, to see how she likes them. But there's still, if you really listen, if you listen to the Beach pieces on the album, the three pieces, Opus 40, there's always this song like quality and this wonderfully expressive harmony that doesn't sound like Brahms or Fauré or Debussy. And I think that it's very authentically her own and is her own unique voice gradually coming into its own. And you have to admire Amy Beach for being just absolutely irrepressible.
Leah Roseman (01:04:16):
This is the Berceuse by Amy Beach from her Opus 40 in the version for cello and piano. (Music)
(01:07:54):
So these various women you got to know through research and getting to know their music so well. If there was only one you could have met with, do you know who you'd pick?
Juliana Soltis (01:08:06):
I think it would be a toss up for me between Margaret Bonds who I think I would just love to hang out with because to be honest, we have the same favorite poet. Margaret Bonds really loved the works of Langston Hughes. She actually had a lifelong collaboration of friendship with Langston Hughes. A great deal of their correspondence still survives, and she sent many of his poems to music, which is just, they're wonderful. They're so good. So I think maybe we could get together and just talk about how awesome his poems are. My other choice would be Helen Crane, because we know so little about her. And because I had to go to such great lengths to try and piece together any kind of sense of her life, just from fragments scattered across the globe, it can be difficult when you're engaging in that kind of research to get a sense of the person as a person. You get all the facts, you get the birth certificates, the passport applications, a letter or two that has survived. Sometimes just talking about very mundane household things with family members. And you wonder what kind of a person was she? Was she feisty? Was she defiant? Did she feel that she had difficulty making her way in the world, or was it fairly easy? Did she feel she faced discrimination as a woman or did she not feel that it was something that touched her? Again, all these questions you would love to ask a composer who is no longer here, and as soon as they start building time machines into DeLorean, I'm right there.
Leah Roseman (01:09:58):
Yeah, these Six Idylls is very beautiful work. And I like that kind of format too, as opposed to a Sonata. It's interesting to have
Juliana Soltis (01:10:07):
The little micro miniature, do you know there's actually a set for violin and piano?
Leah Roseman (01:10:11):
Okay, good to know.
Juliana Soltis (01:10:12):
That's at the library in case they're interested. I'm sure they're equally, equally cool.
Leah Roseman (01:10:17):
This is the third Idyll by Helen Crane from her Opus 51 Collection of Six Idylls. (Music)
(01:12:24):
So Juliana you must have unearthed so much music to have plans for a second American Woman album.
Juliana Soltis (01:12:29):
I initially hadn't planned on doing a Second American woman. I thought it would just be sort of repertoire fatigue for my audience. But since the album came out, there have been a number of listeners and even critics who are like, so when's American Woman, part two, volume two, the next Generation coming out? And I think that I might focus instead of on historical composers though I thought about focusing on American women composers who are working now and how exploring how that unbroken tradition of women in American classical music continues to this day and exploring all of the unique voices, everything that those composers are bringing from their own cultures and their own experiences into this wider world of American music, I think could be absolutely fascinating and a lot of fun to play.
Leah Roseman (01:13:32):
That's wonderful. So you grew up in West Virginia, so were you playing traditional music as well?
Juliana Soltis (01:13:39):
I did not play a lot of traditional Appalachian music, certainly fiddle players do, but I think I might have suggested it once or twice. And the pushback was that, oh, we don't really use cello. Maybe if you want to play the upright bass, the bass fiddle. And I was like, no, I'm going to skip it. But I love that kind of music, and I think someday I really do want to spend some time exploring that part of my own musical heritage. I mean, certainly it was something wonderful to grow up with that freedom of expression and that constant melding of very old and very new traditions. You don't find it anywhere else.
Leah Roseman (01:14:23):
We just talked about some of your teachers. I was curious, you had a teacher, Yeesun Kim, who has a chamber music career, and when I looked her up, it said she has a cello that's one of the oldest in existence from 1576. And I was thinking about the stories that instruments could tell.
Juliana Soltis (01:14:44):
We used to just get all dewy eyed and doe-eyed over her cello, which is just even beautiful to look at instrument. It comes from that era when instruments were actually often painted and there are these beautiful dragons painted onto the back of the instrument. And it's amazing when you think about how old it is that all that detail has survived. And there is something special about an old instrument. My primary baroque cello is made by the man who made Mozart's violin. And you think about, as you said, all the stories that an instrument, if it could talk, that it would tell about the composers that it may have encountered or the famous performers or the moments in history that it might have witnessed. And when you own an instrument like that mean you aren't so much an owner as you are a guardian, you're a steward. You are fortunate enough to add to the story of that instrument, to safeguard it, to maintain it, and then to pass it on to the next generation. And there is almost a sense of immortality in that, in being a part of this greater human story.
Leah Roseman (01:16:13):
Yeah. We talked at the beginning of this about legacy and your purpose and how the pandemic shut down performing, and you're such a devoted performer. You love connecting with audiences. What did it feel like when you're able to go back and perform again?
Juliana Soltis (01:16:28):
It was overwhelming. I don't usually suffer from nerves. I will say some of that I think is because when I was a little kid, I actually did sports. I was a student athlete, I was a varsity swimmer in high school, if you can believe it. But you learn to deal through with your nerves and to perform when you're all kind of keyed up when you do sports. So I don't often find that it's something that affects me when I'm playing the cello. But that first show back after the pandemic, I thought I was sure people could see my heart pounding in my chest. I felt like it was just going to leap out of my body. And I don't know if it was nervousness or if it was just that thrill of being in front of an audience. Again, I think that not purposely, but inadvertently, many of us as performers had kind of taken performing for granted. I mean, especially we're doing it from the time we're children. I started playing the cello when I was nine, and you do it for such a long time that it kind of just becomes almost habit for you. And you take it for granted that there will be a stage and there will be a show and there will be an audience and there will be applause, and then you will go home and feed the greyhounds.
(01:17:54):
When it all just went away, it was almost like a death, this presence in your life that had been there and you just assumed it was always going to be there and it was suddenly gone. And unlike when someone passes away, suddenly it was back. And you had this incredible sense of I'm never going to take this for granted. Ever, ever again, I didn't realize how fragile it really all was. I had always appreciated my audience. I had always loved connecting with them, communicating with them, sharing our love of music, but it became that much more special when I realized just how tenuous it all really was, and I hope that that's something that I can carry forward with me for the rest of my life and for the rest of my career, because I don't want to lose that feeling.
Leah Roseman (01:18:55):
Yeah. I completely agree with you, Juliana. This beautifully expressed. I was going to close this out, but I really want to follow up with this comment you made about being a competitive swimmer and how that helps you with stage fright. So if you could talk about that.
Juliana Soltis (01:19:09):
The thing is, I think in music performance, we tend to see nerves as a weakness. If you're nervous, obviously you're not cut out for doing this. Nobody ever wants to admit that they're nervous or that they're scared before a show, but in sports it's different. You talk about performance anxiety, you talk about the nervousness of getting ready. You talk about preparing in such a way so that when it comes down to gain time, it's just doing what we did in practice. It's nothing different. When I was younger as a cellist, I always had this feeling kind of like, okay, yeah, I've practiced, but now I'm supposed to do something I've never done before. I should be today who I should be 10 years from now when obviously you can't be who you're going to be 10 years from now until 10 years from now, and I started that.
(01:20:08):
Musicians, we are like athletes in many ways. We start doing what we're doing at a very young age. It's very physically demanding. It requires an intense amount of training and preparation. So why wasn't I just thinking about playing and performing the same way that I would about getting ready to swim a meet? You have a very set routine, a set way that you warm up and you have a way that you get ready. You approach the block, the diving block, you get up on the block, you take your mark, everything is okay. You're sort of checking in little checkpoints here, here, here, and then the shot goes off and you're in the water and you just do what it is that you've been practicing the whole entire time. You focus on that, it's like, I'm just going to do what I've practiced doing. It gives you something to hang on, rather than engaging with all of those scary thoughts like, oh God, here comes the high note.
(01:21:08):
Oh, I hope I don't miss the high note. Oh, if I miss the high note, everybody's going to notice that I missed this high note. So I do encourage when I do have a chance to talk to the parents of younger players, and if the kids are interested in sports, it's like as long as it's not something that's going to damage your hands. Yeah, go ahead. There's a lot to be learned and for kids who play sports and the parents are all about the sports that the kid wants to play music, it's like the two things compliment each other very well, and even if you're never a professional athlete or never a professional musician, there are life skills and life lessons that you can take forward with you and that hopefully make us all better people.
Leah Roseman (01:21:46):
Yeah, so great. Well, just a pleasure to meet you and have this talk today.
Juliana Soltis (01:21:52):
Likewise. Thank you so much for having me.
Leah Roseman (01:21:55):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
