The annual Rushmore Music Festival is underway in the Black Hills, where dozens of students and faculty artists from around the world focus on music education, performance, and community.
This year’s distinguished guest artist-in-residence is international cellist and chamber musician Colin Carr, who brings decades of experience to the young musicians.
Get to know Carr and the festival’s artistic director, Ismar Gomes.
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The following transcript was auto generated and edited for clarity.
Colin Carr:
I started cello when I was five years old, not because I particularly wanted to, but because I had a mother that particularly wanted me to.
When I was eight, I went to the Yehudi Menuhin School in England, which is a boarding school for musicians. Again, not because I wanted to, but guided, shall we say, by parents. And stayed there for eight years and it was just a wonderful, wonderful experience for me. I played chamber music when I was 14-, 15-, 16-years-old with some of the greatest musicians alive.
And then I was just very, very lucky. I left the school when I was 16 and quite unusually, that was the end of my formal education—well the end of any education. And I was fortunate to win a couple of prizes in competitions and two or three of them were quite important.
And I was ridiculously pleased with myself to have a career and to be independent of my family and to be, as we say, 'tearing up the pea patch'... 'painting the town red or however you want to describe it. I had a lot of concerts and so that's how it went.
And then, this cello that I'll be playing on when I'm with you, that showed itself to me in 1983. So, I was 25 years old, but I decided to buy it without really knowing quite how I was going to pay for it. And then, just one of those moments that was fate, I was offered the job teaching at the New England Conservatory, so that solved that problem.
That was the beginning of a long teaching career, which for the last over 40 years, I've been teaching in the States at the college university conservatory level—for the last 20-plus years at Stony Brook.
Krystal Miga:
So you started out at the age of five as a reluctant participant. What's your status now?
Colin Carr:
Well, over 60 years on, I'm obsessed. I'm an addict. I'm always thinking about it and always trying to play better.
Krystal Miga:
And when did that transition happen for you?
Colin Carr:
With absolute certainty, along with puberty.
Krystal Miga:
I feel like I need to know more.
Colin Carr:
Around the age of 12, then I absolutely became fixated and began practicing very, very seriously. Then, this became clear to me that this was my vocation and I think I practiced more than was good for me, actually, in terms of what the body can take. So, all sorts of little pains crept in that have to be ironed out during the course of life.
Cellists have back issues very often from bad posture. It's not usually fingers, it's more likely to be arms. Ismar, you had a thing, didn't you?
Ismar Gomes:
Actually, it was one of my last doctoral recitals. I tore a ligament in my thumb, in my right thumb. I've had tendinitis in both hands. I think anyone who plays a lot has to come up with a sort of regimen things to keep their body in good shape.
Colin Carr:
Learning preventative measures that can be taken, just to keep the body in sync and to stay centered and grounded, it's quite important.
Ismar Gomes:
There are so many hours we have to put in and, as professional musicians and even as students, we have many, many overlapping projects that need attention at any given time.
So, actually, part of what we do at the Rushmore Music Festival for our students is, we offer a course of classes that we call 'audience engagement' and actually, Colin will be teaching this class for us while he's in town.
Part of why we have them teaching our kids, is to help them understand how they can use the fullness of themselves to better express what they're trying to express. So, we have Uri Vardi, who's another wonderful cellist. He's going to be doing a week of Feldenkrais, which is a modality of of body awareness, you might call it.
We have other guests who are going to be working with our students on aspects of movement, even public speaking. We try to have a pretty holistic approach to how we teach these students. And so the kids are able to do a lot of things, whether it's chamber orchestra or these audience engagement classes together, en masse, so they can really have these unifying experiences. We eat all of our meals with the students. It means there's a great deal of relating that can happen.
With relation to Colin's week here, on campus, our students are extraordinarily lucky to be working with him. He's going to be, through his audience engagement, teaching quite a broad scope of skills and discussing with our students, many aspects of life as a musician.
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The Rushmore Music Festival runs through July 31, with several performances open to the public. Carr performs July 1-2.