Scratching and winning
How two young Canadian violinists teamed up with a DJ and made it all the way to Carnegie Hall
In the Manitoba Mennonite community where Rosemary Siemens grew up, singing was encouraged but instruments were considered “too worldly.” Toronto’s Julia Koo, raised on a strict diet of classical music, didn’t even know other genres of music existed until she left home.
Strange then that these two young Canadian violinists would find themselves on the stage of Carnegie Hall in New York City, playing to the accompaniment of a DJ’s turntables.
“This is how you get new genres, by mixing them together,” said Siemens, 27, at a rehearsal space in mid- town Manhattan last week.
She and Koo, 26, were invited to play as the sole Canadian participants in the Red Bull Artsehcro, a concert featuring 65 young classical musicians, one world- renowned club DJ and a new composition commissioned for the event called Concerto for Turntable.
The concert was organized by the energy drink Red Bull — part of its corporate promotion of unusual cultural and athletic events — at the request of DJ Radar, a “turntable soloist” who is known for the creation of scratch notation, a system of translating DJ techniques into Western musical notation.
Before the New York concert, Siemens had never seen a DJ perform up close, but was not naive to the possibilities of fusing diverse musical influences.
As a child, her Mennonite community of Plum Coulee, Man., frowned on dancing, drinking and metropolitan influences, and many of her neighbours had never heard a violin until they were invited to her parents’ farmhouse for a private concert. But she took the love of music instilled by the Mennonite Children’s Choir and applied it to her violin studies at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, the University of British Columbia and the University of Miami.
In her solo and collaborative work, she has experimented with gospel and jazz influences and recently met with Manitoba-born composer Victor Davies to discuss a composition drawing on Mennonite hymns.
Koo, on the other hand, approached the concert as a way to educate the masses to the wonders of classical music. She worries that the genre is dying, and wishes more young people attended classical concerts.
“I think it’s so sad,” she said. “Classical music is just about the greatest thing in the world.”
A graduate of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Koo lives in New York, where she is attending teachers’ college at Columbia University. But even though she is more traditionally influenced than some of the Red Bull Artsehcro group, Koo still has an impressive résumé of artistic experimentation.
“I’ve dabbled,” she said. “I did an independent film score that was almost entirely improvised.”
Koo, Siemens and the other Artsehcro members may have graduated from some of the finest music schools in the world, but they look more like the finalists of American Classical Idol. There is a violinist with a tattoo on her bicep, tapping her flip-flops to keep time. There is a tuxedoed musician with a pink paperclip stuck through his ear.
Siemens wears sparkling Chanel earrings and pink faux-snakeskin shoes. Koo carries her violin in a modern white carrying case and has a bruise on her neck that she swears is not a hickey but a result of pressing her instrument against her neck.
The Concerto for Turntable performance itself, attended by possibly the youngest crowd ever to fill Carnegie Hall, sounded like the score of a James Bond movie composed by Eminem. The classical musicians were not attempting to play hip-hop music, which would have been as disastrous as Celine Dion trying to rap. Instead, a tuxedoed DJ Radar became an extension of the orchestra, using his turntables to scratch and spin sounds and styles that mimicked classical instruments.
His integration was so technically precise and mucically complementary that by the end of the performance it seemed strange that every orchestra doesn’t include a DJ.
The other musicians had not heard the entire concerto until Sunday’s dress rehearsal, and Koo said afterward that she was impressed by the sophistication and complexity of his contribution to the piece.
“It’s pretty easy to get up and go boom, boom, boom with the bass,” she said. “ This was much more than that, and I think it could be really big if more DJs got into it.”
Even Siemens’ mother, who made the trip from Manitoba, seemed to enjoy the show.
“ She really liked it,” Siemens said. “ I mean, it’s not her kind of music so she wasn’t gushing or anything, but she thought it was interesting.”