Julie Lyonn Lieberman: Transcript
Leah Roseman:
Hey, Julie Lyonn Lieberman. Thanks for joining me today.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
My pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
So I have to say, I was trying to think how to introduce you because you're such a creative force and you fulfill so many different roles in music. But I just find you so inspiring, and I think in our conversation today, people will hear about your perseverance and how all these wonderful creative ideas you've come up with, you've brought to fruition. And how many different angles there are for not just string players, but all musicians. So I often like to start with people's recent projects, and we're going to come around to some exciting stuff you're doing now. But I think to put things in perspective, it's nice to start earlier. So when you were growing up studying to be a classical violinist, I know that you took a fork in the road and what led to that? Can you talk about that?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
My family was extremely involved in producing folk festivals, booking tours for folk artists. My cousins booked The Boys of the Lough, which were the big deal before The Chieftains moved into the number one slot. And my parents and my cousins helped found the folk society of Northern and New Jersey. So I grew up listening to many different styles of music. We didn't call it world music back then we called it folk music. And I didn't understand the discrepancy between going to a folk festival or folk concert, and then jamming for hours and hours, if not all night afterward and being welcomed warmly, no matter what level you were performing at or playing at everyone, it was a community. Everyone was welcome, no matter what age and what level of expertise.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
And then I'd get to school orchestra where we had no say in the music that was chosen. And I didn't like the taste of the conductor. I didn't like any single piece that he assigned. And so it felt very squelching, it just did not feel like music to me. And I gradually, by the time I got to college, even though none of the faculty there understood me or my path, my second violin teacher, William Henry co-founder of the conductor-less, the first conductor-less chamber ensemble, the Orpheus ensemble really understood that I had a different calling. And so he was the first person in my life who was supportive. And I had no idea where, I was just exploring. And he constantly said that he believed in me that I would find my path in music. And he even flew in from a tour in Europe to hear my senior concert, whereas none of the other music faculty showed up, but they was supposed to.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
And so I left the formal training experience behind with a tremendous distaste for the condescension and narrow mindedness and vowed to try to change that in music education. I didn't want on other people to experience what I had. Because I love music.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. In your recent memoir, which we'll get into, you mentioned that you had this experience at the Philadelphia Folk Festival when you're quite young in a jam session with David Amram. It was like this moment for you. But I guess there were many more moments like that you're saying with these folk festivals.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yes, but that was a particularly special one because it came very early on in my experiences. And the fact that someone that famous, I had already read his autobiography in college, by the time I met him. That he remembered my name. Having only met me earlier that day and called me into a jam session and encouraged me and coached me. And then I didn't write about this in my memoir, but afterward he invited me numerous times to sit in with him at big clubs in New York city. And that I probably sounded awful, I don't remember what I sounded like back then, but, it meant so much to me that someone was willing to take me under their wing and that they were encouraging me. And he is a rather amazing musician, a kindred creative spirit.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. He is. We had an opportunity to work with him once here and I really remember that well. So you're a published author, 13 books, countless articles and major publications. And your very first book kind of took you down a very interesting path of research.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yeah. Well, I won't tell the whole story, because I wrote about that in my book, "The Roaring Brook Fiddler". But, no one had ever paid attention in the string world to the fact that the, well, first of all, every brand new style of music in America was invented by fiddlers. That, I mean, that's got to give you pause for thought, right? But most string teachers don't know this. And if we said that clarinetists were responsible for inventing so many different styles of music, wow, there's something going on with that instrument. But it's our bowed string instrument and the whole history of American music has, has been ignored in mainstream education for both string players. So researching African American fiddling tradition, and the fact that the style that we now call the blues was invented by African American slaves on fiddle, along with their vocal style, it was a natural extension of their vocal style.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
That's a really big deal because the blues influenced Bluegrass, Bill Monroe loved the blues and he incorporated the blue notes, the flat of third and the flat of fifth into his music slide technique, things like that. It developed into rhythm and blues swing and pop music, everything this picture of tree. And so the blues was at the roots. So the research was quite arduous. I sat in the Lincoln center library where the part that was glassed in and you couldn't bring anything except a pen and a pad, you even had to check your pocketbook into a locker. And I had really good vision back because I had to read and print the minuscule print was looking for "vln" next to every blues recording ever documented. And they had enormous resources.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
This took many, many weeks if not months. I even drove down to the library of Congress. I researched every thing I could get my hands on just to find a name here, a name there, a date here, a date there. And then I had to find blues collectors who actually owned these 78s. One of the amazing aspects of the history to this is that, these players after emancipation, the better players were able to get work for the silent films, because plantation owners weren't training them to play out of the kindness of their hearts. They were training them to play, to make money off of them. And like Sy Gilliat in Virginia you played all the Virginia state balls, he was very much in demand. He did not have his freedom, but he did not do hard labor in the fields. He was highly respected as a musician.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
And all of this impact on both string playing is so important to include in the education of string players, no matter what style they're interested in. The first addition of the book, I had a huge section of the discography of everything ever recorded. And I was lucky enough to find two blues collectors. In those days, there was no digital way of doing this. So I had a little Tandberg reel-to-reel audio tape recorder with a little cheap mic held next to restored 78 record player. And then my publisher Oak Publications, a subsidiary of music sales, told me that copyright wise, I couldn't just transcribe solos and publish them in the book. So I had to then rewrite everything in the style of each player.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
This was before CDs were included with books, even though I kept pressing that folks needed to hear stuff, they needed to have accompaniments. So when the publisher finally let go of the book, I published it myself with the CD, which is now on iTunes as well. And that has because of that recording, that has been a big sale item for me since this book came out originally in 1977, but its biggest sales were once I added the audio in of me demonstrating each tune and then taking it from there. Rather lengthy answer but, hopefully you covered what you were looking for.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And I have to say, you're on your website, you have these string archives and I've been doing a deep dive into this and it's just an amazing resource. It's like you have this amazing museum for us of the history, mostly of jazz violin, I would say. And you've been given us such a gift in restoring some media that would've been lost. And I watched that video you did, I'm just going to get this right yet video improvised, improvised-
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Improvised violin.
Leah Roseman:
1988 with Leroy Jenkins and Billy Bang and John Blake. So, and they were talking about - they're Black violinists - about just knowing that history of the early blues fiddlers and the slave violinists, it was very empowering just to realize, oh, this has been in our community, it's not... And that people should really watch that video, was a really fascinating discussion between the four of you and hearing you all play as well. I'll have links to everything in the description of this interview. And that leads me, I was just thinking of another really amazing thing on available in the string archives people should know about. You had this NPR jazz profiles, the history of jazz violin that would've been lost, correct?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Well, the first series that I produced that was completely my idea, I wrote more grant proposals than I could count. And eventually was able to raise the funding for a five part series. I would not say that the series focuses, that five part series five hours focuses on jazz. It focuses on improvisation by both string players.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. That was separate. I meant the ones.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yeah. So that was the first one though, the talking violin. And I was lucky enough, I interviewed Dr. Billy Taylor, who was then the host of CBS Sunday morning news jazz segment. And realized that he would be the perfect host for the series because he had played with some of our historic African American jazz violinists. And I was right, he was fabulous as the host. The second series came about because I hired Steve Rathe as my co-producer for the first series. And because of his connections, he did the sound installation at Ellis Island. He did Jazz at Lincoln Center, all the radio roll offs from that, he's got a bio and radio that goes on and on and on. Because of his connections with NPR, we were able to then get it onto NPR. The second series came because of him and he then turned around and invited me to work on it with him, the jazz violin, jazz profiles, what we did the, one hour shows were a part of a very lengthy series covering each major instrument in jazz, hosted by Nancy Wilson.
Leah Roseman:
And you have a note on your website that those masters had been destroyed for that and that you had to remaster them. Maybe I'm misremembering this.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yeah. I don't remember having that posted there, but I have to look back at my own website. No, I think they aired it as a part of the series as scheduled and as promoted. And they put a certain number up available for the public to listen, but our two part series was not included. So I was able from Steve Rathe to get copies of that and permission to put that on my website. Because, obviously when you put that much work into something that I consider very important, you don't want it to be lost. But the talking violin I had on DAT and I was able once DAT became a thing in the past, I was able to get that digitized and put it up on my website.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think now people just take for granted that we have this thing called YouTube. But maybe people don't realize things that might be missing and also it's like looking for a needle in the haystack sometimes to find the best content. So it's just amazing to hear all these... You have so much music as part of these radios series. Very interesting history, but there's context for everything. So I hope people can really enjoy that. So let's go back to you as a player and also as a teacher. So coming out of the folk scene, how did you get into jazz and different types of improvisation?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
My sister was accepted into Berklee College of Music. And in her freshman year, she came home, she was working on the tune Lover Man and I really loved how that sounded. I was three years younger so, I believe I was a freshman in college at that point. And there were two other musicians in the music department who were interested in jazz and were studying off campus, because nothing was offered. Jazz was not offered, improvisation was not offered, I mean, it was a pretty traditional program. I remember getting into an argument with a theory teacher because he said, "Never compose using parallel fifths." And I was like, but Stéphane Grappelli does a great solo with parallel fifths. I love how it sounds, why can't I use it? And he had no answer for me so I dropped out of the class. I have a way of weaving things in and then forgetting the main question, can you give it to me again?
Leah Roseman:
Just how you got into jazz.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Oh how I got into jazz.
Leah Roseman:
And improvisation in general.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
They were studying with Sal Mosco off campus. And Sal Mosco was a protege of Lenny Tristano the blind jazz pianist who founded the cool jazz movement. And so I decided to also study with him. I was the first violinist to study with him. He taught the way Lenny Tristano did. The idea was not to improvise, letting your fingers do the walking, like what was being taught at Berkeley college of music practicing riffs over and over again, and then spitting them out. Riff number 432, Riff number five, that kind of thing. So I had not come up with Suzuki training and my first teacher was Samuel Applebaum. It was eyes to hands. I didn't have that development of my ears and studying with Sal was a huge learning curve for me in many ways. I was not good at practicing, but he was such a stickler. One of my first assignments was to play three active major skills in all 12 keys than harmonic minor and melodic minor at 40 as half notes with the metronome.
Leah Roseman:
Why?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Well then you gradually would notch it up and notch it up. But the idea was to be able to hear before you played each note and to know where you were, because the goal wasn't just to play a scale, the goal was how would this be of use to you when you're soloing? Now I have invented many, many more exercises that I think are actually more useful to this, I don't teach to the way he taught. But, he would sit smoking a cigarette, looking out the window. And when I first started, it would take me, it was a 45-minute lesson and it would probably take about 30, 35 minutes to get through this. And I think he wasn't listening to me. And then still at the window, without even turning to me, he'd say, "In the first octave of the key of D flat, your F was a little bit low. And in the..." And he would remember everything that I had just played and I had never experienced anything like this. I had no idea what I had just played.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
I was just like moment to moment to moment to moment. So one of the things I learned without being able to define it in my mind until much later, was that when you're improvising, if you cannot remember what you've already played, you can't do as good a solo. You need to be, I call it a third ear that's hanging right here with a little brain and a little mouth, and it says, "Ooh, go back to that cool idea and then put a new twist into it." Or, "You've been here before go someplace new." He said to me, at one point, once I picked up speed a little bit, he said, "What are those funny sounds when you go up high?" And I said, "What do you mean? I'm just playing the notes of the scale."
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
"No, I hear these funny sounds in there and I'm racking my brains." And then finally, "Oh, that's when I have to shift. That's common, you make little sounds when you shift." And he said, "That's not musical, get rid of them." I said, but I don't know how." He said, "I don't care. Figure it out. Don't come back to me making those sounds." So I called Bill Henry in New York city and went for a lesson with him and he taught me the Schumsky method of shifting and I was able to get rid of those sounds. So things that my classical teachers and I studied with quite a few of them. Allowed or criticized, but didn't give me the tools to change, he caught. And that's when I learned how to practice really, really well and listen in a whole new way.
Leah Roseman:
I'll just interrupt you because as a violin nerd, I mean, Oscar Schumsky was a great player, but I'm curious. His method of shifting, was it just to release? Like to make sure you release the shift?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
No, it was to accordionize—this is my language. It was to accordionize. So, you're getting ready, let's say you played an F sharp, a G and an A, and then you need a very flexible hand. So if you have tension in your hand, you can't do this, to get the first finger behind. So it flips through the pitcher on and then lands on where you need to go.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah, I've heard of that. Okay. Cool. And then, so finally you sort of proceeded out of just being able to master the fingerboard to actually learning the jazz language.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yeah. Well he didn't let me work on my first jazz tune until five years in.
Leah Roseman:
What? You have perseverance Julie. Wow.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Well, so did he, you weren't allowed to miss a lesson. If you were sick, you did a makeup. If there was a holiday you rescheduled in advance. It was a whole different, it was a very different learning situation than what I've been accustomed to. We worked on three part chords in all 12 keys, major, minor, diminished augmented. Then we worked on four part chords, all seven of them of the most important through all twelve keys was my first experience. Playing in all 12 keys with ownership. I had studied with a Romeo Teka who at that point had straight over from Galamian 10 years with Galamian, when I was at Manhattan school of music prep division.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
And yes Galamian included work in the 12 keys, but it wasn't about listening and making it your own, it was just about playing it correctly, so you're standing and looking and following his fingering system. But that's not the same as... It's a very different approach to practicing when you move from just trying to get the job done really, really well. And now I'm done and I can move on to the next exercise, to practicing such that you're listening into your own future and thinking and visualizing into your own future. How is this going to apply to when I'm soloing? And how do I need to practice this to make sure that it is applicable, that it is a part of me in that deeper way?
Leah Roseman:
And when you finally start to learn tunes with him, how did that go?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
I studied with him for eight years. So we started in year five, when I left him we had only worked on three tunes.
Leah Roseman:
No. Wow.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yep. I learned the chord changes. I learned to hold the root notes while singing the melody. I learned drop in, drop out on the melody, which I often teach in workshop so that you can audiate it and know where to come back in on it, like a piano role. He left no stone unturned and some of my friends had already been with him for 23, 24 years and continued after I left until he died.
Leah Roseman:
So it sounds like some of the lessons you learned with him, you definitely keep in your own teaching.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yeah. But I don't teach it the same way. Because I've done such extensive study of the brain and have also witnessed the results of his teaching method in my playing and the limitations as well as the assets. And then saw a mirror of that with my jazz students in New York city, that I had to really completely revamp how I taught. Because I started out teaching the way he did because I didn't know any other way. But then when you hear and experience certain repetitious behaviors on the instrument that don't provide new material, you realize, no, I have to change how I approach this, this is not working.
Leah Roseman:
So I first heard of you because of your book, You are Your Instrument, which many people will have heard of. And I have your old VHS tape of that as well. And it was really, really great resource when I discovered it back in the, I believe it was the late eighties. When did you publish that?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
It came out in 1991.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So yeah, early nineties. So what led you to write that book? Because it's so wonderful, it's kind of a classic. And it was new in the field. It's not like now there's so many books on injury prevention with mindset, but I think you were the first or one of the first.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yes I was the first. Yeah. I started feeling as though I was going deaf in my... It was my freshman year at Sarah Lawrence College. And I went to an ear doctor and he said, "There's nothing wrong with your ears." And then I began to realize that the teacher, the final teacher I'd worked with before I left for college, who had come through the Curtis Institute, Nancy Clarke. Nancy Clarke was good friends with Karen Tuttle because they went to Curtis Institute at the same time. And used Karen Tuttle's approach to supporting the instrument, which was just based on these thin pads regardless of your body type. And that is what caused injury for me personally, though I know it's worked well for other players.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
My first teacher at Sarah Lawrence was Stanley Ritchie.
Leah Roseman:
Oh really?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
I studied baroque violin with him.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yeah. He became so injured. I remember watching him perform maybe halfway into my freshman year and I saw like all the stuff like rippling across his face and his neck while he was playing. And then he described to me that he had reached a point where he couldn't even pick up a teacup without going into spasms. So he began to study Alexander technique. And for those of you who aren't familiar, it's body motion with the least amount of tension and learning how to maneuver.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
And he decided at the end of that year that he had to stop everything and really heal himself. And he's the one who chose William Henry to replace him for me. He told me that at our final lesson, that he had searched for someone who would understand. Because, we'd work on a piece of music and then I'd change some things. "No, you can't do that, you have to play it exactly as written." So he really looked around for someone who might be able to deal with me, I guess. I ended up then going to his Alexander teacher, Judah Kataloni, who had studied in London. And I realized what I was doing, he helped me get to that point and to correct it.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
And then I became rather incensed because I couldn't find any literature. Of course this was before the days of internet. But I searched bookstores, I asked around. I asked people in the music to department, been there for years and nobody knew of anything. And well, my grandmother was the musician in my family and she had a very deep influence on me. And she had told me, "If you want to see something change, do it yourself. Don't wait around." So I began doing research. I taught myself about anatomy. I studied from Alexander technique to Feldenkrais to Shiatsu to acupuncture, acupressure, not formal training, but workshops. I managed to study with Moshé Feldenkrais himself before he passed away. Big imprint on me, I read all his books and I left no stone and turned. I interviewed hand surgeons, I interviewed doctors, I did the whole thing.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
When it came time to publish the book, it was turned down by 45 publishers. And I went to the then librarian for the Boston symphony orchestra. I thought, well, if I get endorsement quotes from well respected musicians, maybe I could get a publishing contract and he not being a musician said, "Oh, Julie, everybody knows that to become a great musician, you pull down the shades, you close the door and you practice and practice no matter what." And I said to him, "But that's why I wrote the book. If you ignore what you're feeling, you end up paralyzed." And we already had two pianists who were just starting to do interviews about their paralysis. Leon Fleischer, I believe could no longer use his left hand. And then I can't remember the other pianist, but he thought it was a great idea to practice octaves instead of with the thumb and the pinky that he'd widen the span of his hands, the thumb and ring finger. And he ended up absolutely unable to play.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
So they were just starting to make the circuit and do interviews, I think, as a kind of warning, but without any tools for what do you do now? What do I need to know? And I realized, because I had such a long history of studying dance, I had gone to Connecticut College, American dance festival, a number of summers when I was in my early teens and was studying in both in New Jersey and New York city. I hadn't quite made the, it's going to be music yet. Right? Because I was also writing plays and directing and all that before I decided that I would focus on music.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
I thought, dancers learn everything about their bodies. You're not going to meet a dancer who says, "Oh, it's the ribcage that makes the jump." I mean, they know what the muscles do and what to turn to and then how to take care of them if they feel anything and catch it early and all of that. And I thought, well, we're just as athletic as they are and for us, both string players, well, particularly viola and violin, we're in this asymmetrical crazy position to play and we know nothing.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
I can tell you stories. I'm not going to go into all of them but, I've playing healthy workshops throughout the United States and Europe and in Canada. And I've worked with thousands of injured musicians at this point. One of my sessions was for Manhattan School of Music, master's degree, wind players. None of them knew where diaphragm was, I won't point to some of the places they pointed to when I asked them to point. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. They had no understanding of how everything worked together to produce sound. And so those, the players that were having problems, I learned, I didn't need to see them play or hear them play. When I do a workshop with a large group in particular, but now I even do this with individuals. I just have them mind playing because of muscle memory, the body remembers everything and we spend thousands of hours to get it into our motor cortices, it's called sensory engrams I call it barcodes just to modernize it.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
That, that information, every detail of it, if you hold your breath, when you're playing, that's what gets locked in. The step of teaching musicians about natural joint and muscle function and teaching teachers to teach based on body type using principles through an understanding of how everything works versus rules. I have been trying to change that now for decades. And it's still a pretty difficult journey in that sense. So that's, "You are Your Instrument" and then five spinoff DVDs, as I learned more and wanted to be able to share the new knowledge.
Leah Roseman:
And your DVDs, are they available now for streaming? You can rent them on your website.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yes, I have them on Vimeo on demand now. So they're digitized and far less expensive because of that. And actually you're reminding me that I have to make links to that on my website. I've been so busy for so many years, there's a long list of things that I've been meaning to get to, but you're jogging my, I better do that.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I was just thinking about Strings Without Boundaries, because I believe I saw that you had people can stream.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yes, well on Strings Without Boundaries, what I'm referring to are my spinoff DVDs that I created, that I then digitized. On Strings Without Boundaries, once COVID hit and we went online I decided to create a video library for people to access from some of the greatest players in our country and beyond because once you're online, you can access everybody. Tools to, and from different vantage points, how to improvise, how to amplify, why amplify or why know how to do that and have that available. How to play this style, how to play that style, how to... We've got over 150 video tutorials now on that website.
Leah Roseman:
That's really, really amazing. And in terms of like how the string world is now. Like it was interesting hearing that video from 1988, which I mentioned earlier in this conversation. And not necessarily the jazz world, but improvising string world, how do you think things have changed in those 30 years, 40 years?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Well, there's now a deluge of players who either call themselves multi-style players or jazz players or whatever. That doesn't mean that, that's exactly what they are, but the fact that it has become so recognized and popular is a big deal. And I can't claim sole responsibility for that, though I think I was the first to really... Every which way through the NPR series, through my books, through everything. Many of my colleagues have had an enormous influence on the players they've reached. And some of those players have become household names, which is a big deal for a violist to achieve that outside of the classical world.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
When I produced three jazz string summits in New York city, the press would not come the first time around. The second time around I think we got a couple of piddling reviews. The third time around weekend section of the New York times. And that was in the 1980s. So I think that certain things have gradually, gradually shifted, but where it really needs to shift is in the universities that offer teacher training certification. Because, I work with many string teachers who say I can't teach that because I never learned how to do it. And I don't accept that as an excuse. Our students can teach us actually. And I have met many young players in my travels around the country who have come to me and said, "My teacher doesn't accept anything other than my classical studies and won't support anything else I do and is even condescending and critical about anything else." I attribute that not to meanness, I believe that every string teacher is in love with music and with their instrument and means the best for their students.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
I feel that, that comes more a feeling of an aptitude outside of what they studied and not wanting to be revealed that they don't know what to do. So I've been very actively trying to change that. And as a long time artist with D'Addario Orchestral, the new head really recognized the importance of this for which I'm very grateful. And so now I'm doing their sponsoring for quarterly string teacher training sessions, which is how I met you. And that's a big deal because you were at the first, the second drew 85 string teachers from around the world. And I hope to keep expanding that and I'll keep shifting the topics and things like that.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
That training is really essential because first of all, when we don't embrace the cultures that our students come from and the musical tastes of our students, we lose them. I've been looking for somebody to do this research, so I'm just going to take a wild guess. But I think probably only three to 5% of students that study a bowed string instrument junior high and high school, or even earlier go on to continue playing. And one of the points I started making when I would be hired, when America's string teacher chapter would bring me out to work with their state string teachers, I loved opening the sessions saying, "Imagine if you said to your students that there's two doors and they get to choose which door they want to walk through, and that you have the skills to give them either."
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
"Behind door number one this would be you telling your student this, you will study the compositions of master composers across the centuries. And you won't probably won't remember the names of the pieces or the names of the composers. And by the time you get out of... Oh, and then you'll have to compete for where you sit and you'll feel bad a lot of the time, because if you make a mistake you'll just feel terrible. And then you'll be surrounded by other kids your age, who will be competing with you. And some of them might be snobby toward you, because I've seen this, I've done residencies and so many string programs. And then when you finish school, you'll never play again. Your instrument will go on the attic and then one day you'll meet somebody and you'll say, 'Oh, are you an active player? Oh, I kind of wish I'd continued, but I haven't.'"
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
"Behind door number two, you'll be a member of a community that will welcome you, no matter," I'm sorry, my dog is so loud right now, it isn't usually. "You'll become a member of a community that will welcome at whatever level you're on. And you'll get to learn from people who, by playing with them who are far more experienced than you, and then help people who are less experienced than you. And you will play your entire life and love it and enjoy it and make friends through it. Which door would you like?"
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Nobody's ever argued with me about. But yeah, but, but, but, but, but. But They didn't have the tools to offer door number two. And I include in door number two, you'll still learn the music of through this out the centuries and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it still can be a part of that. And one is nothing's mutually exclusive.
Leah Roseman:
Right. So I'm mindful of our time together. And there's two things I definitely want to cover. One of them is the way you sing while you play is so powerful. And so it feels so spontaneous and sometimes you sing in unison and sometimes you do something completely different. When did you start doing that? And what was that process for you?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
I wrote poems as a child starting at like age six. And that naturally morphed into composing songs. And so I had the schism, me as the studying classical violin, and then me as a composer, but originally as a composer for songs. Right? And somehow they just started, if you don't have access to a band, how are you going to accompany yourself? And so you write something and then you're like, okay what can I do here? Et cetera. And then you go on and sing and you've got this going on.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
And so being able to coordinate that took a lot of work and to be able to free up my throat. Experimenting with my setup system so that I had lots of flexibility and could go. This I learned from studying mime, he said he moved to Steinway grand piano when nobody was there, nine foot by shaking it. And then it easily moved across the stage. And I thought, oh, wait a minute. If I keep rotating the responsibility of the instrument, nothing gets tight or stiff. And while I'm singing there'll be points where I could go like that, which is not good, it leads to tendon nights, but for a moment it's fine. And other points where the hands take over and then points where I free up my neck to sing and all of that. So I called that the triangle of weightlessness in my violin and motion DVD.
Leah Roseman:
So do you have any final words of advice for players coming up?
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Yes. When people tell you that your ideas are not valid and that you should go the pathway that's already carved out, but you're hearing a different drum beat, follow your heart and soul because this is your life. And I've always said that when I reach the final moments of my life, I don't want to look back with any regrets about anything. I want to be able to look back and say that I created everything that was important to me. And this idea of you're supposed to do something that's distasteful for you so that later on, when you retire or later on in your life, you can get to the things that you really want to do, I don't abide by that. Yes, the going is harder when you are making your own pathway through the woods that never had a path. But, it's so deeply satisfying. Then you feel whole about what you came here in this lifetime to do.
Leah Roseman:
Beautifully expressed. Thanks for that.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
This is a tune that I learned from an Italian group with a French name, though, for the tune "Les Trois Rigodons" The Three Dances, but played Julie style. It's in 4/4 time, but I have created an accompaniment that is in 3 3 2. And I play the melody and then I improvise over it and then come back to the melody.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
This is a jazz tune, a standard called You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To. And after playing the melody, then I go on an unplanned venture, improvising across the tune, weaving in voice and violin.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
(Music).
Leah Roseman:
Thank you so much. I have to say at our wedding, which was held outside, You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To was played by a brass quartet and my husband Mark made the arrangement for them. So that's a great...
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Oh my goodness. I was going through all my tunes trying to figure out what to do and that's my Julie's whiskers, I guess it was one of the chances of my choosing a tune that you used for your wedding. I love it.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it's been really inspiring getting to meet you and hearing about some of your many projects. So thank you very much.
Julie Lyonn Lieberman:
Thank you for what you're doing. Appreciate it very much for the opportunity.
