HARMONIOUS MEMORIES
Retirees at Milwaukee Symphony step away from a lifetime of music
The Milwaukee Symphony will lose 315 years of institutional memory in the coming weeks, as eight veteran musicians retire from the orchestra. These are musicians who have toured abroad with the orchestra, as well as to New York for performances in Carnegie Hall. They also have traveled the state of Wisconsin playing for audiences that might otherwise never have heard the orchestra. After winning competitive auditions for jobs in the orchestra, these musicians moved to Milwaukee, bringing with them many years of training as well as professional experience, and for some, multiple degrees in music.
They’ve spent most of their adult lives here. Many have raised families here and still have children and grandchildren in the area.
So what do people who are used to warming up and practicing every day and performing every weekend plan to do now that they have weekends off?
Anne de Vroome Kamerling, a native of Grand Rapids, Mich., came to the Milwaukee Symphony as a first violin in 1973. She won the associate concertmaster spot in 1975, at a time when very few orchestras were even considering women for such posts.
“It was very unusual in those days to have a woman on first stand,” she said. Pointing out that the audition was held behind a screen to prevent discrimination of any kind, she added, “I remember that I wore tennis shoes for the audition because I didn’t want them to (hear) any ‘womanly’ clicking of heels from behind the screen.”
Now, more than 40 years later, de Vroome Kamerling is hoping to ease, rather than rush, into retirement.
“Since I’ve been finding it difficult to give it up,” she said, “the personnel manager said that at least for the first year they would be happy to hire me back for the big concerts. This will let me ease my way out.”
She said she agreed to the arrangement, but only so long as she would be playing in the first violin section.
“I’ve never played second violin in my life and I don’t want to have to learn new parts now,” she said.
De Vroome Kamerling is also a pianist, and is “looking for a volunteer work in a school — a situation where I can use my piano skills,” in retirement.
She also looks forward to travels with her husband, including an upcoming Amazon River cruise. When we talked, she was about to literally dig into tending her one-thirdacre garden, which won a national prize a few years ago. She said it contains “flowers, unusual shrubs, perennials and some herbs, along with the weeds.”
But the biggest plans de Vroome Kamerling has for her retirement revolve around spending time with her husband, children and grandchildren.
Andrea Wagoner, who grew up in Springfield, Ohio, near Dayton, can’t remember when or how she decided on the violin, just that she has always loved it.
“I loved it even before I played it,” she said. “As a child, I loved watching violinists and liked to pretend I was playing it before I did play it.”
Wagoner, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Cleveland Institute of Music, said that if she had not become a violinist, her second career choice would have been “anything that could have gotten me working in the out-of-doors and knowing more about the natural world — maybe something in the Forest Service.”
Instead, she won a job in the Birmingham (Alabama) Symphony for two years and then moved to Philadelphia, where she freelanced
for three years. There, she played a lot of chamber music, including working in a quartet.
“I really furthered my violin studies through that situation in Philly,” she said, adding that she also took some auditions during those years, one of which won her the Milwaukee Symphony job.
“I really liked Milwaukee when I got here and I immediately had a good set of friends,” she said.
Among Wagoner’s retirement plans are traveling and hearing concerts, “I love attending concerts,” she said.
She is also eager to start volunteering; she hopes to return to previous volunteer work with Literacy Services of Wisconsin.
Cellist Elizabeth Tuma, who grew up in Farmington Hills, Mich., chose the cello because “I just fell in love with the ways looks — and of course the sound. But really it was so visual for me. I looked at it and thought it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen. It’s a good thing I didn’t get a look at a bass.”
Tuma attended the University of Michigan and graduated from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with an artist diploma, studying with members of the Guarneri and Budapest Quartets.
Tuma was freelancing in Washington, D.C., when she took the Milwaukee Symphony audition on her way to a vacation in Minnesota. “If I hadn’t studied music, I think I could have been some kind of scientist,” she said. “I’m really interested in earth sciences.”
After a brief pause she added, “Really I have lots of loves. I love French too. I thought at one time that I might become a translator for the U.N. But what I really fell in love with was playing chamber music and orchestra playing.”
Tuma says she enjoys the fact that her first performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 occurred in her first season with the Milwaukee Symphony and then she got to repeat the piece with the orchestra in the final weeks of her last season.
All three women commented on the physical demands of years of constant practicing and performing, with de Vroome Kamerling saying, “People are always amazed at the injury level we experience,” and Wagoner adding that retirement will offer her the time to “practice properly.”
Wagoner and Tuma will continue being colleagues in the coming months, spending some time in northern Wisconsin studying to become Wisconsin
Master Naturalists. Their new titles will open up volunteering opportunities for them in parks and at nature centers.
Other retiring Milwaukee Symphony musicians include Jeani Foster, assistant principal flute; Les Kalkhof, and Taik-ki Kim, second violins; Wilanna Kalkhof, Melitta S. Pick Endowed Chair of piano; and Margaret Wunsch, cello.