Rebecca Hein

When WyoHistory.org published its history of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra in October 2021, the editors realized that there were many more people available to contribute their thoughts and memories of that organization. The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming was also interested, and offered to contribute funding to support an oral history project to capture more information on the history of the symphony.

The Casper College Western History Center transcribed most of these interviews. In addition to being available here, at WyoHistory.org, the audio files plus transcripts are also available at the Western History Center and the American Heritage Center.

Thanks to the interviewees for donating their time; to the Casper College Western History Center for transcribing the audio files; to Kylie McCormick for transcribing some of the audio files; to the American Heritage Center for funding the project; and to the trustees of the George Fox Fund, Inc. for donating the use of its Zoom account.

Part 1: Wyoming Symphony Oral History Project

Tom Rea interviewing Rebecca Hein, September 21, 2022

Date transcribed: February 17, 2023

Tom Rea interviewing Rebecca Hein, September 26, 2022

Date transcribed: February 24, 2023

Tom: So, Becky, could you tell us about your, when-when did you first start playing with the with the, was it the Casper Civic Symphony still when you started?

Rebecca: Yeah, I had been playing the cello since fourth grade 'cause that was when we had the chance to join orchestra or band and choose our instrument. And, during at least some of that time, I'd been taking private lessons.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: And I guess the the string teachers in town kind of knew who might be ready to play in the Civic Symphony. I'd been playing in the Youth Symphony. Well, I don't know, maybe I joined the same year, my sophomore year? Anyway, I was invited to play in the Civic Symphony, and my interest in the cello and music was at kind of a low point. And what I was really on fire about at the beginning of that year was a possible trip to Spain that my second year Spanish teacher was talking about. So my mother, who of course didn't want to see me quit music, sort of—and I wasn't going to be able to earn enough money for this trip just working at the family business. I was going to have to find some other source of money, so she very casually pointed out, since I had declined to play in the symphony, that they paid. So of course I joined.

Tom: (chuckles)

Rebecca: And played the first concert, I think it was probably in September. And Rex Eggleston was conducting at that time. He was the conductor, I think Curtis Peacock came to town that year. That would have been the fall of ... 1971?

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: And he [Peacock] was, I think the the assistant conductor or something like that. Rex Eggleston, E-G-G-L-E-S-T-O-N, was, at that time, the head of the public school strings in Casper. A really excellent violist, principal viola in the symphony when he wasn't conducting, and a really wonderful guy-

Tom: Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca: So, I had a really great start, playing under Rex that year.

Tom: Oh, okay. And who did you, before we get into the symphony, so who who did you have for a teacher? Before, you know, before then? Who did you take lessons from?

Rebecca: Well, I remember studying with Dorotha Becker, who was also concertmaster [first chair, first violin, and also leader of the entire string section] of the Civic Symphony at that time, and kind of the mainstay of string teaching in town.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: I remember she taught orchestra at Grant School when I was in fourth grade, and when it was time for me to take private lessons, that was, I think she was the only person in town who could really do that, until a cello teacher came to town whose name was Rebecca Rennecker. I'm not sure how her last name was spelled. And she became principal cello of the symphony. There was a little bit of trouble over that because the existing principal cellist, who had served long and well and was quite competent, his name was Sidney Wallingford. Was kind of pushed aside, I felt, and he felt, and I think he continued to play for a few years before he quit. Anyway, Rebecca Rennecker was my teacher through the rest of high school until I switched, I must have switched at the beginning of my senior year to driving down to Laramie to study with the cello professor there, David Tomatz T-O-M-A-T-Z. So all through the winter, Sid Wallingford and I drove down to Laramie together, we would take turns driving, to take our lessons.

Tom: Did you spend the night down there?

Rebecca: No, I think we drove home the same day.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: I'm sure we did.

Tom: I remember listening to you play the cello in Barbara Dobos' living room when you were about 18.

Rebecca: I remember doing that, yeah.

Tom: You were a wonderful cello player for a long time. We'll get to that later, so. Where was, there, when you were in, at Grant School, when you were in the schools in Casper, was there, was there music instruction in the schools? Just orchestra, not private lessons through the schools, right? But the kids could be in bands and was that part of the instructional day? Or was that like a after school activity like sports?

Rebecca: No, that was a class during the day, as I recall.

Tom: Right, so you could be in a orchestra class or a band? Yeah, that's sort of the, I guess, when our kids were there, too. And so, you started with Rex and then Curtis comes in when you're still in high school, were there are very many other high school kids? And you were in the cello section. You were not yet principal cellist. Is that right?

Rebecca: Correct.

Tom: And were there any other high school kids in the symphony then?

Rebecca: Yeah, I recall Debbie Johnson, who's now Debbie Bovie.

Tom: Oh.

Rebecca: She's about my age, and she went to Kelly Walsh [high school in Casper].

Tom: Yeah, I know her, uh-huh.

Rebecca: And John Niethamer, N-I-E-T-H-A-M-E-R, he was a year older than I was, but he was in the symphony.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: And I’m trying to think what other cellists, there was a principal bass for a while, a very nice man named Joe Corrigan, and Joe had a younger brother named Gaylen. I think G-A-Y-L-E-N, who was around my age, and I'm sure Gaylen must have played [cello] in the symphony at some time 'cause I remember playing with him and it wouldn't have been in high school orchestra, I know that. So it had to have been either Youth or Civic Symphony, or, more likely, both.

Tom: So these were all cello players or these were a variety of instruments?

Rebecca: Cellists. I had plenty of violinist friends as well, whose names I recall, if you want me to mention them.

Tom: Sure.

Rebecca: OK, well, there was a student at Casper College whose name was Carol Tumbleson. She was really good. There was a, I don't know if she was a student at Casper College or older, but she wasn't that old. Her name was Lynette Ketcham, K-E-T-C-H-A-M. I'm seeing the photo of the symphony from this time, I think it was from when I was a senior in high school and I'm just seeing their faces. There was Jane Gerberding. Her husband or excuse me, her father was a Lutheran pastor in town, and he used to review symphony performances in the ‘80s [for the Casper Star-Tribune]. That was later on. But Jane was a good friend of mine. She was a year older than me. Susan Cheney, I looked at the math and I figured she must be either a younger sister of Dick Cheney or maybe a cousin. I don't know.

Tom: Hm.

Rebecca: She went to Kelly Walsh. There was a girl who was really talented; her name was Sharon Street. She was a violist. A really excellent violist, just one of these people, it's like, it seems like they never practice and they're always better than you are. And maybe she did practice and I just didn't know it, but she was extremely talented. And then also in that photo, I saw somebody in the trombone section by the name of Brian Brown, who was my age. And I can't think of who else.

Tom: That's a lot. I wonder what they're all doing. That's interesting. And your mom was in the orchestra, right?

Rebecca: Correct. She played viola. She took up viola in mid-life because, expressly because, orchestras never have enough violas, and she knew she was not going to be able to get really good if she took up the instrument, you know, not as a child. And so of course, she indeed had the opportunity to play in the symphony, because it's quite true that there's kind of a chronic shortage of good viola players.

Tom: And so, had she-she never played strings before taking this instrument up when she was in her mid-life?

Rebecca: I don't know. In her late 40s probably. Let me think, she played piano forever. She had played piano since she was a little girl, so she was a musician already. But it's a pretty big jump from piano to a stringed instrument.

Tom: Yeah, I'll say wow. When I knew your mom, she was playing in the symphony. So what was it like being in the symphony with your mom?

Rebecca: Oh, it was fine. It was great. I was so happy that she had a way to enjoy herself by playing in the orchestra, 'cause she, she and my father were very supportive of the orchestra and would house import players and sell season tickets at their family business, Lange's Bookshop, and contribute. At least, well, their names in the program are pretty high-up in terms of the list of donors, so they were contributing in that way. At a higher proportion of their income than a lot of people. But you have to remember that a lot of those people that showed up at sort of modest levels of contribution, some of them showed up at the symphony balls and the other fundraisers and spent a lot of money at the auctions and things, and that didn't really show up in the list of contributors in the program, and those lists were sorted according to how much money the people gave.

Tom: Yeah, different levels of, yeah, right. That's interesting. And was ... [there] already a symphony ball every year by then?

Rebecca: I think probably, yeah.

Tom: And were there any other adults in the symphony who you knew through your parents, or who were friends or parents of your friends or anything like that, you know? I'm trying to see if, you know, if it felt like these were people you knew anyway, some of them. You know what I mean?

Rebecca: Well, of course I knew Sid Wallingford. Rick Rongstad would come up from Colorado. He wasn't that many years older than me, but I suppose he qualified as an adult. I guess, at that point, there was a woman named Mildred Brehm. B-R-E-H-M, I believe. She, I think, was principal second violin for quite a while. And of course, Rex. When he wasn't conducting, he was right there at the head of the viola section. And I just cannot overemphasize what a wonderful man he was. He was such a good teacher and so encouraging and so good-natured. He was a real asset to the musical scene in Casper, I think.

Tom: That's nice. Yeah. I knew him years later when I was the school's reporter for the [Casper] Star-Tribune and Rex was the head of I think not just music, but all arts stuff for the district, for the school district.

Rebecca: Oh.

Tom: Yeah, Mildred Brehm. B-R-E-H-M?

Rebecca: That's correct.

Tom: I wonder if she might have been the husband of the guy that my father-in-law, Derb Scott, worked for in the oil business? The wife? Did I say husband? Okay, that's interesting.

Rebecca: Oh, and Rex’s wife, Connie, played principal bassoon for a while.

Tom: Okay. So, you started your sophomore year, junior year, senior year. And then you went to and so, did the orchestra change at all or you did? Were you feeling you were getting better During that time?

Rebecca: Well, let me tell you what happened to me at the end of my sophomore year. First of all, throughout the year I became so in love with playing in an orchestra that I pretty much forgot about the trip to Spain. And all year long, every Sunday afternoon, I would play string quartets [two violins, viola and cello] with friends of mine from the Youth Symphony in my parents’ basement. Every Sunday afternoon as I recall, and we would play for hours and hours and hours and we had our fun pieces, our favorite pieces that we played every week, so you can imagine we got pretty good at them. Especially with Susan Cheney on first violin, she was quite good. So there was a particular Mozart quartet, I do not remember which one, but we were playing it one day. We’d been playing it for weeks, and there was a moment at which it was perfect. We-we were all together. There was no effort involved. We were all feeling the beat together and the sound we were putting out was perfectly blended. I swear it just was just one of those moments where everything comes together and and I was, I was struck. I don't know how else to put it. It felt like the sky had opened up, and a beam of light had come down and focused itself on the top of my head. And I was, I was like the Ancient Mariner or something, you know? [Referring to the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the Ancient Mariner had one story to tell, and had to tell it to everyone he met.] I couldn't think about anything else. Suddenly I had this moment of wanting moments of beauty like that, as many as I could have for the rest of my life.

Tom: Yeah.

Rebecca: And-and I, and my-my brain put it into a sort of a mathematical statement, like, "Okay, you want more of these beautiful moments? This particular beautiful moment happened because our collective skill had reached a certain point." So the way to predispose or, you know, raise the odds, for more of those beautiful moments is to increase my skill, and the way to increase my skill is to practice as much as I can, and and literally overnight I became a practicing dynamo and I kind of pushed aside my, um, studies. For the next few years of high school, I didn't flunk out, but my grades probably could have been better than they were. And every spare minute I had, I practiced. And that, in practical terms, that meant for my last two years of high school, I would go to school and then I would walk downtown and work at the family business until closing time, come home, eat supper, help with chores, practice the cello till bedtime, not do my homework. Yeah. Because I-I wanted a career in music, in performance, and I knew I was really far behind to have that ambition. You're supposed to start when you're 5 or whatever. Here I was, 17 years old, or 16, I guess, and I knew I had to catch up and so I was both inspired, and I was also, I guess you could say, worried or knew how hard I was going to have to work. So in that moment of perfection in the string quartets, I think basically I got my vision for my life, even though I hadn't been conscious of being on a vision quest or anything like that.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: So I ... just had to major in cello performance.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: And a lot of people. Not a lot, a few, including my teacher at UW [University of Wyoming], they sort of tried to talk me, not exactly out of majoring in cello performance, but into adding teacher certification.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: So that as my teacher said, "Suppose you get married and your husband moves to a little town and there aren't any playing opportunities, what are you going to do? If you have your teacher certification at least then you'd be able to teach in the schools." Well, I knew I would be miserable teaching in the public schools, so I said no, I want to perform. I held to that for a very long time. Well, and I never did teach in the public schools. And there are very few performers who don't teach, both because they, I think, to some degree get pulled into it 'cause it's interesting and they want to share what they know, and to some degree because it's additional income.

Tom: Sure. Ah, that's- thank you for telling me that story. That's how wonderful and so um. You went to UW?

Rebecca: That's correct, for three years. And during those three years, I came back to the Civic Symphony as an import for many concerts, maybe all of them.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: That was fun.

Tom: And were you majoring in cello performance at UW?

Rebecca: I was.

Tom: And who was your teacher there?

Rebecca: David Tomatz T-O-M-A-T-Z. He was also head of the department.

Tom: Oh yeah, you mean? Yeah, I think you mentioned him in your Casper article, [article published on WyoHistory.org about the history of the symphony]. Was he a conductor in Casper? For a while also? No?

Rebecca: No, he was conductor of the University Symphony.

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: The main things he did was teach the cello lessons, play in the Western Arts Trio, which was the faculty piano trio at UW, and teach a few students. [a piano trio is piano, violin and cello]

Tom: So you were a-

Rebecca: And fair amount-go ahead.

Tom: You were a private student of his as well, or you were, or you were, or that was part of your ... regular UW education?

Rebecca: Yeah, that was part of my, you could take it as a class, basically. Private lessons, well, they’re one-on-one. I forget what they-applied, that was it, [they called them] applied lessons, for a certain number of credits.

Tom: Uh-huh. And was he a good teacher?

Rebecca: He was all right. I think his mind was elsewhere than teaching and performing. He was okay, but at the end of three years, I was frustrated by two things. I felt like I wasn't learning enough in my lessons and I was, I think, the only cellist of any ability in the department, so I didn't really have colleagues.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: And I wanted to be in a situation where I was surrounded by student cellists who were better than I was.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: So [that] I had room to learn and a teacher who was a better teacher and a better performer than David Tomatz was. He was really made for schmoozing money out of little, old- rich, little old ladies. That's really what he was made for. And that's really what he did best. Probably, you know, raised quite a lot of money for the department and the university orchestra. He was a very good looking man and he was charming and you know, I'm sure he knew how to schmooze money out of people. So he was divided. So at at the end of three years I transferred to the University of Oregon.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: Because in the region, I'd been to music camps in Montana, and I'd heard about the cello teacher at Oregon and been impressed with what I'd heard. And actually, I think it was during my sophomore year at UW, that I flew out there, spent my own money to do it. I had a friend that I'd gone to high school with who I’d been corresponding with, who was going to the University of Oregon, who met me at the airport, put me up in her apartment, gave me a ride to the university so I could do my audition to be admitted to the School of Music and so on.

Tom: So the man that taught cello out there?

Rebecca: Robert Hladky. H-L-A-D-K-Y. (pronounced Lad-kee) Wanted me to be with him for two years. So he admitted me as a junior rather than a senior and I could see his point. He really couldn't do much with me for just one year. So I it took me five years to do my undergraduate degree and I had to finance the last year myself 'cause my parents had told me and my sisters that they would put us through four years of undergrad school and support us during that time.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: So they did that and then I had to finance that last year. But it was a really good move because, um, Dr. Hladky had studied with some really good teachers and had a really organized approach to playing and technique, and that's what I felt like I needed was, how do I play better, not, how do I be a better musician. That didn't worry me so much, it was, how do I get the notes to come out sounding in tune and on time and so on?

Tom: Why isn't that a better musician? Why is? I don't understand the difference.

Rebecca: Well, the difference is, you can have, you can know your way around the fingerboard and you can play in tune, and you can play on time, and you can play well with other people, 'cause your sense of rhythm is good and your sound is good and you know how to blend, and so on. But there's this added ingredient of, what would you call it, heart.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: Soul, swing.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: I know Swing is a Jazz term, but it's been co-opted by classical musicians to mean that little extra special something that makes you want to listen to somebody and they-how they handle the music, like let's say the [Johann Sebastian] Bach unaccompanied suites for cello. There are six of them. Each suite has, let me think, a Prelude and then stylized dances, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and then a pair of Minuets, or in some cases a pair of Boureés and then basically uh, a Gigue, G-I-G-G-U-E.

Tom: Right.

Rebecca: So all six of the Bach Suites have those and Bach, he could do so much with so little. He was all about chords, basically. And he would break up the chords for the cello, which you can't play all four notes at once-

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: -like you can on a keyboard or a guitar.

Rebecca: And he would write these wonderful, wonderful pieces based on really nothing but-but chord progressions.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: And so, you know, if if you're a good musician, you can play those, conveying to the audience by how you play them, where the important parts are, where the sections begin and end, where the chords change. Well, what's the melodic line and what's the bass line and things like that. And all I can do is share a story about, this was a cello festival I went to in Evanston, Illinois, where I lived for three years, when I went to Northwestern University for one of those years to get my master's in performance. So this cello festival was put on and there was a hotshot guy from Champaign Urbana. I guess that would have been the University of Illinois. And of course, because he was so good, he'd gotten this job, and he played, he performed for us, the attendees, at this little festival. And I had, I was in Evanston, not 'cause I-no, I didn't live there then, I had traveled down, that's right, 'cause I traveled to take a lesson with the new cello instructor at Northwestern. I was up in Wisconsin at that time, teaching at the university and in their Suzuki program. Anyway, I was down there for this-the weekend. So this guy played and he played one of the harder Bach Suites, one of the later ones. And just kind of, you know, knocked out the notes really good and really fast and really clear, but without an iota of understanding of where the melodic line was, where the bass line was, what the chord progressions were, what-what the music was. He he had technique. He could play all the notes, but-but I just. ... I was kind of offended. I don't know. He was so good and so looked up to and selected to play this solo and I knew I was not his equal as a cellist in terms of getting around the instrument. So when I went to have my lesson with this new teacher at Northwestern, I said, "Was that as bad as I thought it was, musically?" And he shook his head, and he said "There's somebody who had no idea at all what he was doing."

Tom: Hm.

Rebecca: So, I think non-musicians pick these things up. They know it, whether they can articulate it or not, I don't know. But we all have music in our soul and I think, on some level, we know the difference between somebody who's basically a very good gymnast and somebody who's really taking the music up to the level of music. Music making. I don't know if that clarifies the question at all.

Tom: You know, let's say that, that's really, I think I know what you mean. Yeah.

Rebecca: It it makes you want to come back and listen to them again and again and again, yeah.

Tom: Right. Right. Yeah.

Rebecca: No, I had. Even if they miss a few notes, they're still going to call you back by how they play.

Tom: Okay. So you went to UW for three years, you went to University of Oregon, Eugene, I guess, right for-

Rebecca: Correct. Yeah.

Tom: Two more years, you had a bachelors in music performance and then you went to Northwestern to go to graduate school?

Rebecca: Well, something happened in the meantime. Let me look at my notes here. Oh, there was a summer internship orchestra. It wasn't quite the great gig that getting a fellowship to the Aspen Festival, Aspen Music Festival was. [high-powered summer music festival in Aspen, Colorado] If you got a fellowship to the Aspen Music Festival, you got full room and board and a pretty good stipend and you were at the Aspen Music Festival. Which, you know, the luminary musicians that were there and the things that went on, it was just incredible. So I auditioned for the Aspen Music Festival and did not make it. But this other summer internship orchestra, based in Evergreen, Colorado, was called at that time the Colorado Philharmonic. I think before that, for a while had been called the National Repertory Orchestra.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: Most of the time musicians, when they play auditions, they have to pay the expense of traveling to where the audition is held. So anytime you can drive, you know, 100 miles, or down the street or around the corner or whatever to take an audition, you do it whether you're ready to or not.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: So I knew about the Colorado Philharmonic and I auditioned for it. And I got in. Kind of an interesting, I have always thought it was an interesting story. I was at the audition. There were two people traveling around the country holding auditions. And this-this is kind of a story of getting in over my head musically, which I have a couple of things about that to say, but I-I was sitting there and I played some of the required excerpts that we knew we would have to play, they sent out the list. And I played about two notes of one of them. I'd been working really, really hard on tone production and in this slow excerpt, I think it was the slow movement of Brahms Second Symphony, which is standard, was a standard at that time for a lot of audition lists. [Johannes Brahms, 19th century German composer] And both of them, both of these auditioners did a double take. I started playing, they looked up from their notes and stared at me. So that was interesting. And then when it came to doing the sight reading [playing a piece of music you've never seen before], I was really mentally engaged. I looked very carefully, the way my teachers had told me, to [indistinguishable] the music before I started to play it. I mentally played the first few measures to know what I was about to do. And I noticed that in this particular excerpt there was a a subtle difference in the notation between one phrase and another. And I wanted to make sure to make that difference very, very clear when I played it, so that they would know that I had seen that difference in the printed music. So I did that and got another double take.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: So what happened was, and they based, they seated the sections, the string sections according to the auditions, was that I got fourth chair in this really good orchestra. Which, there was probably a ten-cello section, a very good string section, really excellent, and found myself rehearsing a piece by Claude Debussy, the [19th and 20th century French] Impressionist composer. The piece [was] La Mer, The Sea. It's a beautiful piece and it's got a cello quartet in it, where the rest of the section does not play, and the first four chairs of the cello section do. I had never seen the piece before. I had never heard it before. There I was, having to play the part. Uh, it was, it was scary. It was stressful. I did okay, but that's sort of a borderline case of having landed myself in hot water. Anyway, that-that was what I did. The summer after my two years at University of Oregon no, wait

Tom: Hm.

Rebecca: Yeah, I was supposedly going to come back and do a masters. And then I made it [in]to the Colorado Philharmonic. And then we had guest conductors at Colorado Philharmonic. We're going to probably run more than an hour. Is that alright with you? I've got a whole page of notes.

Tom: I have somewhere [I] have to be at, I have to leave at about, well, I was thinking maybe we should do a second session.

Rebecca: We could.

Tom: Let's see where we are by 3:00 and then make sure.

Rebecca: Yeah, well, let's see. Colorado Philharmonic, let me think.

Tom: So what happened next?

Rebecca: Oh, right. We had guest conductors all summer long and and many of them were from professional orchestras. It was just wonderful, and one person got a job offer. Because of how well he played principal viola in the Colorado Philharmonic.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: And they [the guest conductors] would hold audition seminars in the afternoon. See, we had a really compressed schedule. We performed every other night. In Evergreen, Colorado. We had, I think, Sundays off. I can't remember, but the rehearsal schedule was rehearse in the morning, rehearse in the afternoon. And then the day, the concert, rehearsal in the afternoon, perform in the evening. Or it might have been sometimes we did a matinee, in which case we would rehearse in the morning and perform in the afternoon. So, you know, very few rehearsals, very, very hard music, very high powered. So conductors would come through and guest-conduct concerts and hold these audition seminars. On the, in the chunk of time during the concert weekend when we weren't rehearsing and the better players in the orchestra would play their prepared auditions for, they were preparing for professional orchestras, and the conductor would critique. Well, I was never good enough or prepared enough to play these excerpts. So I would listen and, you know, take it all in. But then one conductor, he did not conduct the orchestra, but he was on a tour of the United States, well the upper 48, he had just been hired to conduct the national symphony of Puerto Rico 'cause they wanted a, basically a European-standard national orchestra, even though they didn't have enough Puerto Ricans, so he was having to come up here and audition people, so I auditioned for him and they offered me a contract.

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: As this was my life ambition to play the cello for a living,

Tom: Right.

Rebecca: I didn't hesitate at all. So that was at the end of the first Colorado Philharmonic season. At the end of that summer, I went down and played for nine months for a season basically in the Colorado or excuse me, the Puerto Rico Symphony in the section.

Tom: I remember. I learned that a couple years ago that you had played in the Puerto Rico Symphony, and what was-what was it like there?

Rebecca: Well, uhm.

Tom: You were there for nine months and then you came back?

Rebecca: Yeah, uhm. It was okay. It was well within my ability. It was a lot like playing in the Civic Symphony, although it was a better orchestra, I think, than the Civic Symphony was, somewhat better, good enough to do Beethoven's Ninth. And other Beethoven symphonies. It was fine. I always felt like I was living in a foreign culture. Just because Puerto Rico is part of the United States, politically, they're a commonwealth, I learned, when I lived there, but it's, culturally, of course it's part of Latin America.

Tom: Sure, yeah.

Rebecca: And I would have experiences, like I would address people on the street for directions or whatever. Or my colleagues in the orchestra. There were some really sweet older men. And I would-I would try my Spanish on them and ... I made such terrible mistakes. And they would, they were so patient. And-and, whimsical with me about it. It was really cool. Uhm, but I had a good stand partner, which is very important in an orchestra.

Tom: Ah, and was it a new orchestra?

Rebecca: No, I think they'd been going for a while.

Tom: Okay. And did you get a chance to, did you, did you not want to stay a second year, or did they not offer you a job for the second year or?

Rebecca: Well, what happened was, I thought for sure I was going to stay more than one year. The money wasn't. It was enough to live on playing in the orchestra, but I also had many opportunities to play in the recording studios in San Juan, and that's where the real money is. I mean, recordings paid pretty well. And then there was the occasional one where it takes you ten minutes to record a jingle for a commercial, and you get paid $200. So that was fine. But then near the end of the year there was a the usual, I found, every year the orchestra as a whole negotiated with management for a better contract. I had learned and observed throughout the year that there were, as a whole in the in the population ... of Puerto Rico, people who wanted to continue as a commonwealth, people who wanted Puerto Rico to become a state, and people who wantedPuerto Rico to be an independent country.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: And I guess there's a lot of history about the commonwealth situation that was quite distasteful to the Independentistas. I never really knew the details or if I did, I've forgotten them. But we had some Independentistas in the orchestra, one man in particular I'm thinking of, who really resented the presence of the ‘gringos.’ Resented us, I mean absolutely could not stand that we were in the orchestra. So when the time came to negotiate, he told us right out - it was a meeting, an orchestra meeting - told all of us 'gringos’ that we had no right to have any voice in this because it was not our orchestra. So, that was the first time in my life had I ever been or felt dismissed and hated and stereotyped because, really, of the color of my skin and where I was from.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: And it was, I didn't think I could work with him. He wasn't the only one. He was just the most outspoken one. And I started feeling like there might be better places for me to be. So I originally spent the whole year thinking I would spend another year there at least, and at the very end of the year I decided, no, I'm gonna go back somewhere, move to a big city where there are many teachers and many orchestras and a good professional orchestra for me to listen to and learn from and so on. So that's what I did. I moved to Evanston, Illinois, to be near the Chicago area.

Tom: Okay. And so did you have a job in Evanston or did you go back to school?

Rebecca: Uhm, Okay, you've asked me some questions about Evanston. I wanna jump back to high school,

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: 'cause I was in early college 'cause there were some things I wanted to say.

Tom: Okay. All right.

Rebecca: The first thing I want to say is that as a senior, I competed in a young artist competition in Casper and Cheyenne. And I was beaten by the same person, a pianist, who was pretty good. I was okay too, for my age and my level. And what to me is the interesting thing, and what was the beneficial thing to me about this was that all the string teachers who were concerned, that being the violin professor at University of Wyoming, who was one of the judges in Cheyenne, my teacher at University of Wyoming, uh, Curtis Peacock in Casper, who was not only the conductor of the Civic Symphony, but also the string instructor at Casper College. And maybe some other string teachers that I don't remember, said, they all said the same [thing]: "A pianist at the same level will always sound better than a string player because the string player at that level is still learning to play in tune. Still learning tone production." And while pianists do have to work on tone production, they don't have anything to say about whether they're in tune or not. They don't have to learn that. For obvious reasons.

Tom: Right.

Rebecca: So they all kind of felt that at least I should have been, should have won, or I don't know how it would have been worked. Anyway, I lost to this person. Curtis said to me, "Uhm, you worked really hard on your concerto. How would you like to play it, perform it with the Casper College Baroque ensemble?", which was really, you know, their chamber orchestra. "Furthermore, how would you like to perform it here in Casper and on tour?" So of course I said yes, I'd love to. And so I got a better deal than the winner. I didn't have the prestige of playing with the symphony, but in terms of practical experience, it's a wonderful opportunity to be able to, if you're being a soloist, to have more than one crack at it. [A concerto is a composition for one or more solo instruments with orchestral accompaniment]

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: So, you know, we played on tour and we played in Casper and I still remember playing in some little tiny town up in the northwest part of the state like Frannie or Deaver, or one of those. I just have this very clear memory of sitting on some stage with a tiny handful of people in the audience and-and performing my concerto. So it worked out really well for me.

Tom: So the concerto was you and not the whole, and the Casper College orchestra.

Rebecca: Correct. Yeah.

Tom: Huh. Great.

Rebecca: Yeah, and there was another opportunity I had that I'll just add, many string students [in Casper] also have had. Let me think, Rick Rongstad; cello and bass, Dale Bohren; bass, Andrea Reynolds DiGregorio; cello. And a few violinists, probably, whose names I can't recall now, we all went to this music camp called Congress of Strings. It was a national effort. I think it was probably one string player from each of the 50 states. A huge string orchestra, a really big deal, really very high level of music making.

Tom: Where was this?

Rebecca: Well, it was held at UCLA for quite a while, and then the year that I went, it was held at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: And it was a full scholarship. And they may also even have paid our transportation. I don't remember. I just know that I got to go and it didn't cost my parents anything. And it was eight weeks long. And it was um, a tremendous opportunity 'cause you're there with some really amazing performers. I remember one of the cellists that was there, he ended up in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Saint Paul, Minnesota. That's one of the premiere orchestras in the world. And he ended up in that cello section. So I was of course very low on the totem pole, but I didn't really notice 'cause the music we played was so wonderful. We played, I mean you're restricted as a string orchestra to just a few pieces. And one of them is the [19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, which is just one of the most lush, showy, beautiful pieces in the world. And then Mahler, Gustav Mahler, a German composer of the late 1900s. His Fifth Symphony, the slow movement is for strings and harp. And they dredged up a good harp player from somewhere. At Congress of Strings. And we played that, and there's nothing like Mahler. He's he was just drunk with the beauty of music, and you could tell by the way he composed.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: So I will never forget playing those two pieces. It was really something and the local, there's a Musicians' Union Chapter [in Casper, the American Federation of Musicians] provided the scholarship. So because, as a direct result of my involvement with the symphony as a high school student, although I was at the end of my sophomore year in college, or was a freshman-freshman year of college when I went, I still got the benefit of that scholarship.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: So that was-that was something.

Tom: When you mentioned, I just wanted to ask, did you ever know John Stovall?

Rebecca: Yes, he ended up with the Boston Symphony.

Tom: Yeah, right was. He's younger than you probably, right?

Rebecca: About a year or two, yeah. Well, let’s see, you wanted to know what I did after Puerto Rico, right?

Tom: Yeah.

Rebecca: Well, I moved to Evanston, Illinois, so that I could go to the Chicago Symphony [concerts]. And I found out once I moved there that they had what they called was a training orchestra for the Chicago Symphony. It was actually a very excellent youth orchestra. I auditioned and got into that. I got an office job in Evanston part time so that I could work till about 2:00 in the afternoon, take the elevated train that turns into a subway partway there downtown, get to orchestra hall, rehearse, come home, eat supper, practice. Uhm, do it all over again. I did that for a semester till Christmas I think, and then I was just too tired. So I went full time at the office that I was working, and quit the Civic Orchestra and just took lessons and practiced. And then that year I applied for some graduate programs and got into the masters program at Northwestern, right there in Evanston.

Tom: Yeah, Okay.

Rebecca: Well, that's what I did. The second year I was in Evanston, that would have been, let me think, ’79- ‘80 was Puerto Rico, ‘80- ‘81 was being in Evanston [the] first year, ‘81- ‘82 was the year I did my masters.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: That was great.

Tom: So you got a masters in cello performance at Northwestern?

Rebecca: Correct.

Tom: That’s a one year program?

Rebecca: Right. They had, they were so expensive they had to do something. So that's what they did. They reduced their requirements to the scope of a year.

Tom: And then you spent another year in Chicago?

Rebecca: I did. Um, I have to tell a story about my masters degree recital. I had a really fun teacher at Northwestern and he and I both knew that some of the music I was going to perform at my recital was a little beyond me, so I was lamenting to him, you know, everybody’s gonna hear that it was, uh, by Tchaikovsky, the Rococo Variations, this very showy, highly difficult piece. I said, "They're going to hear that my technique is not up to this piece. It's not going to be a perfect, note perfect recital." And he agreed. No, not quite. But yeah, you're here to learn. He tried. And I said, "Okay, as long as it's not boring, you know, it can be anything. I can miss some notes. Not many, but as many as I'm going to. It can't be boring." So then, I don't remember if he told me this before or after my recital, but he told me he had a terrible tussle with himself how he was going to break it to me that my playing was boring. (laughs)

Tom: Really?

Rebecca: I have always been glad that he was honest with me. Because one does not want to be a boring performer. So now I have to jump ahead. Now let's see the third one. I'm not going to jump ahead. There's just a continuation of this "boring" story. So then I completed my master's degree and the office that I'd been working at, I ended up working there during spring break and summer and things like that. So they were-they found room for me when I graduated and I went part-time. The year after my masters. Thinking I'd wasted time and money, 'cause I all I had was two little tiny teaching jobs at community schools of music in the area. And I was sure neither of them would ever go anywhere. One of them was a Suzuki teaching job. And one of them was a regular, just regular non-Suzuki, and the Dean of the School of Music at Northwestern had said to me, when I had started there, that my chances of getting a college teaching job were greatly increased if I had some Suzuki experience, because at that time the Suzuki movement was really taking off.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: So, you know, I took this little dinky job that had like three students for which I had to drive an hour one way. Figuring it would never go anywhere, and also feeling like I didn't know enough, so I took a Suzuki pedagogy class on my own initiative, paying out of my own pocket, down at DePaul University, which I had to take the El, [elevated train] I don't know, 45 minutes south to Loyola University. It wasn't that far, I guess, but a fair way to take part in a Suzuki pedagogy class. Which, to make a long story short, I ended up with a job at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh teaching University students and Suzuki students combined to make a full time position for me because I took that said ... pedagogy course. And the other community school of music, for which I traveled an hour one way and taught a few more students. It turns out that that was a very respected community school. It was called the Jack Benny Center for the Arts and about more than 50 percent of the music faculty at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Music Department - when I went up there to audition and interview for the job - more than 50 percent of them had first of all, gone to Northwestern. Had nostalgic feelings about that. Second of all, had taught at the Jack Benny Center, and also had nostalgic feelings about that, which certainly didn't hurt me.

Tom: Yeah.

Rebecca: At this interview. So it was great. I spent that whole year feeling like a failure and like I'd wasted my time and was I ever going to be any sort of professional. I dropped the idea of trying to play in an orchestra because, there were kind of two reasons. Playing in an orchestra as a string player, it's kind of bad for your playing as a as a rule, if you do too much of it, 'cause you can't hear yourself the way you can if you're playing chamber music, for example, or playing as a soloist. And I discovered that, playing in the Colorado Philharmonic after University of Oregon, then in the Puerto Rico Symphony. And then again in the Colorado Philharmonic before I moved to Evanston. So more than a year of playing just in an orchestra or mostly in an orchestra. I could tell it was starting to hurt my playing, but the real reason was, to audition for orchestras you have to practice certain orchestral excerpts, just like you would practice a concerto until you have every single note perfect. Well, that's not so bad for excerpts from Beethoven's Ninth, excerpts from Brahms symphonies and things like that. [Johannes Brahms, 19th century German composer] But when it comes to tone poems by Richard Strauss, those things, it's not just that they're hard, they're just not very rewarding musically. [Richard Strauss, 19th and 20th century German composer and conductor (son of Johann Strauss of “Blue Danube” fame.)]The cello parts that you have to learn, at least I found them not rewarding, and I discovered that I just didn't have the motivation to spend the hours and hours and hours and hours preparing those kinds of excerpts and, I don't know, I noticed that it was a really competitive thing. I mean, I always knew it was, but I had a friend in the Puerto Rico Symphony. She was a gringo. She had been in the orchestra for quite a while and she had been trying to get back to the upper 48 for quite a while and she was really good and she was one of these people that could make herself practice these excerpts and she flew, of course, at her own expense, to Texas. I forget, to audition for which major professional orchestra there, and she told me she played a note perfect audition. I mean, she didn't miss a single note, and did not get the job, and that was when she learned that something more was needed. So that, I think that gave me pause, along with the fact that what I really wanted to play was Beethoven quartets and, I don't know. Chamber music was very attractive to me, and the only way you can really play chamber music is if you're part of a university faculty.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: Unless you get really lucky and you're really, really, really good and you get a place in a professional string quartet. But they often also have teaching positions somewhere. So I applied for this, well, the person that was in this Suzuki pedagogy course that I got to know, was commuting up to Oshkosh to teach in their brand new [Suzuki] cello program. They were paying for her to rent a car and drive up on Saturday morning, teach all day Saturday, and then drive home. Well, I just wasn't going to do that. I just, was not going to do that. And she was thinking of stopping. And I contacted them and I said, you know, I know this woman who's been coming up to teach your students. If you can offer me a full-time job where I can become a resident of the community and live on what you pay me, I'm interested. Well, lo and behold, there was a fireball up there. Who was in charge of the Suzuki program, who went to the university people, who [the Suzuki program] ... was housed in the university music department at that point, and said let's get together. You guys need a cello professor, and you don't have enough students. And we need a cello teacher and we don't have enough students. But together, can we put together a position? And they did. They came up with the money, they came up with, it was a University of Wisconsin system faculty job I had. They had to advertise it. And I had to audition and interview. And there was one other person who was also selected to audition and interview, and I got the job.

Tom: And that's in Oshkosh, not Madison, right?

Rebecca: That was. There are so many campuses of the University of Wisconsin. It was just incredible [to me at the time], how many. There are little centers all throughout the state in little areas and four-year branches. Many in many places. I told that to my mother, she said, Yeah, Wisconsin is a very progressive state.

Tom: Yeah, that's true. That's been. I hope it gets back to that. Okay. So you were in. So how long did you have? Maybe we should. Let's see. How much notes do you have left there, Becky? I got somewhere I need to be about 3:30.

Rebecca: Oh, we might be able to wrap up by 3:15 maybe?

Tom: Okay, alright.

Rebecca: Should we try?

Tom: Yeah, let's. Okay, so where did you go after that?

Rebecca: Well, let's, I want to tell one story about being at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: Well, it was, I began playing regular faculty recitals. I'd been doing this for a few years and people always come backstage afterwards, and congratulate you and so on, and tell you how much they enjoyed it. Well, one person said, "There are two kinds of recitals, one where you're sitting there looking at your watch, wishing it would be over, and another one where you don't want it to end. And your performance was the second kind."

Tom: That's nice.

Rebecca: So I knew that the practicing I had been doing in the interim had been working.

Tom: So not boring?

Rebecca: Evidently not. I mean, that person had no reason to schmooze me. No reason at all.

Tom: Good.

Rebecca: Okay.

Tom: I'm sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead.

Rebecca: No. So we're done with University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Uhm, I want to say yeah, go ahead.

Tom: How long were you there?

Rebecca: Seven years.

Tom: Oh, I didn't know that, okay.

Rebecca: So yeah.

Tom: And did you work that? Was it a tenure track position?

Rebecca: No, no. It was a one year renewable contract. It was adjunct. Well, I don't know. I guess I was an adjunct faculty. I don't know what they called it because I was a hybrid. I was, the Suzuki program was not part of the university, administratively. They just used their offices. So I don't [know]. All I know is my contract ran a year and then was renewed.

Tom: Been talking a lot there. Do you need to get a drink of water or something?

Rebecca: I don't know. I'll try to manage, I can. I want to say something about, something I faced as principal cellist of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. I became principal cellist in the fall of 1992. And what I faced, of course, was having to share the stage with Mark O'Connor, playing a piece that I'd never seen before and it was really hard.

Tom: Right.

Rebecca: -but I want to go back to something that I did, I'm not sure what year it would have been. I got married and my husband got teacher certification in natural science. And we ended up in Tecumseh, Nebraska. He was teaching science at their combined middle school and high school. ... So it's not that far from Lincoln and Omaha. I decided I would try to get into some of those orchestras that were up there. So I got some audition music and I looked at the deadline and started learning it, and we decided that I if I did any work outside the home, it would be playing the cello. So, I got this audition music and I ran into a piece that I'd never seen before on an audition list. And it was unbelievably hard. And there are two ways of tackling something like that. One is, you learn the notes and then you sort of beat it up to tempo. You set the metronome at the tempo you can play it at and you play it, then you up the metronome one click which is, I don't know ... but it's a few more beats per second [indistinguishable]. Yeah, and you play it again, and then you up the metronome again. You play [it] again. You work it up to speed as best you can that way or you change your technique so that you can play better and more easily. And that changing of technique is a long process, long and intensive. And I looked at the deadline for that audition and I decided I would rather change my technique than play that audition. So I did. I engaged in some very focused, very intensive practicing. One of the things I worked on was my sitting posture where, you know, you sit, you pick up the cello. Your back might be really good, your back muscles might be great, you know, and you start to play and everything starts twisting up and tightening up in bad ways. You have to have some muscle support when you play, so you can't talk about being completely relaxed 'cause then you wouldn't even be able to push the strings down or hold the bow, but managing your muscles so you don't distort what they're best for. That's what I tackled in that practice session with no knowledge of the future, you understand? No, no crystal ball that told me I was going to be onstage with Mark O'Connor about, I don't know, eight years later or something. Facing a piece that was nearly too hard for me. So that was very satisfying practicing and it really put my playing- headed me in a different direction. So that I was a much better player. And playing was much more easy, and my sound was better, and a whole bunch of other things were better. Playing fast was easier. So that when I landed in Casper as the principal cellist of the symphony, I was ready for it. The principal cello ... solos that you have to play, things like the William Tell Overture by Rossini. [19th century Italian composer Gioachino Rossini's Overture to his opera, William Tell] That's best known, of course, as The Lone Ranger theme. But the opening is slow and it's a cello quartet, and the principal cello has the most wonderful and hardest part of the four cellos. I enjoyed that so much. I enjoyed playing that solo and I did it really well and I know I did. So I wasn't in over my head at all. It was comfortable, it was a comfortable job and we did a Brahms Piano Concerto. I ... [think] the second one? John Browning, who is a world class pianist, was our soloist. We played that in Oshkosh too. I was principal of the Oshkosh Symphony. And there's a very, very beautiful principal cello solo in the slow movement of that piece, I'd played it before. There is an easy part of it and then there's a harder part of it and it's just gorgeous and I played it. And then you sort of hand over to the piano after you play the second part of the solo. So I looked at John Browning when I was done, and he nodded at me and smiled, when he started playing, so I knew I had done a really good job. That, moments like that, were just wonderful and I never felt like I was over my head. Okay, so. Are we going till 3:15 'cause I think, probably, we can finish up in that time.

Tom: What? Okay. Ah, alright, I have some-

Rebecca: Will that work for you?

Tom: Some, I'll have some questions, but maybe we could have a second session for those. I don't know that they'll take much time. So how did you end up? Are you going to tell me how it is you came to leave Nebraska and come back to Casper?

Rebecca: Oh yeah, well, so my husband, Ellis, was teaching science and there were some unbelievable behavior problems in his classroom. You wouldn't think of it in a little town, but it was the case. And he had a very unsupportive principal who just didn't back him up in discipline. So he quit. He-he burned out faster than I've ever seen anybody burn out on teaching. He quit in March of that year, just broke his contract, and we moved. I'd been in touch with my father. My mother had died in ‘84, and this was ‘92, spring of 1992, and he told me they didn't have a principal cellist in the symphony, and that they were paying more or less a professional rate they'd had to cut down on what they were paying, but it was sort of our only safety net because Ellis was not going to teach school again. That was a very bad experience. He lost thirty pounds. He had insomnia for the only time he's ever in his life had insomnia. It was just terrible so we couldn't wait to get away. So we moved to Casper and I auditioned for the principal cello position and got it. And Ellis started remodeling houses and all that. Being a former farmer, he had a lot of carpenter skills and things like that. Maybe your questions are more important than what I have in my notes, except about O'Connor.

Tom: Do that. Yeah, no. Okay, tell me about Mark O'Connor.

Rebecca: May of 1997, I had never heard of Mark O'Connor. I just knew he was our guest artist, and the music librarian whose job it was to get our music into our folders and let us know when we could come to the symphony office to pick them up, said, “Guess what? You're playing a duo with this guy, just you and him. And he supplied a tape recording.” Okay well, shrug. I was conscientious so I always picked up my folder as soon as it was ready and got busy on the music. So I got my music and I looked at this part and I played through it and it didn't look so bad. And I played the tape, and the tempo was so fast on the tape that I didn't recognize it, didn't realize it was the piece until I did, suddenly realize how fast I was going to have to play this piece. And the problem of course, which I couldn't help but notice [was] the length of the fiddle fingerboard, or the violin, is about half the length of the cello fingerboard. And I pretty much had to match Mark O'Connor note-for-note in this piece, "Limerock" was the name of the piece. So it's like he had to run the 50 yard dash and I had to run the 100 yard dash, and I had to come to the finish line at the same time that he got to the finish line.

Tom: Right.

Rebecca: -and he was by far the better player, in addition. ... and I had, the style was alien. So we get to the dress rehearsal.

Tom: Had he, had he never performed this before with a cello, did he?

Rebecca: Oh, many times. He had performed it with Yo-Yo Ma. They often programmed it.

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: So we played it at the dress rehearsal and I was sweating. Of course, I was just sweating it because it was so hard. I was pushing to the very outer limits of what I could do. So I played it note-for-note at the dress rehearsal. He stopped and he looked at me, looked kind of puzzled and said, "you know, Yo-Yo had trouble with this piece." And my reaction was, well, as if I didn't. Just 'cause you can't see it. So Holly Turner was the manager, the executive director of the orchestra at that time, and it was her job to make sure that the guest artist got where he or she needed to go at the right time, so she was driving him around and taking him out for meals and things like that. And he told her a bunch of stories about past performances of this piece, or past attempted performances, including somebody, some principal cellist somewhere, who had been unable to play the piece and had - they had to take it off the program. And I think it must have been a case of not practicing it hard enough.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: As this person was way above me in the profession, and you don't get to the point that she was at without being really good and auditioning successfully, and a bunch of other things. So sort of a case of the tortoise and the hare.

Tom: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Rebecca: So that was, that was not comfortable. It was too scary, too stressful, [to be comfortable] but it was worth doing.

Tom: Yeah, yeah. ... That's great. [indistinguishable]

Rebecca: Now I have a couple of associated stories, but I don't know if I try to tell them now, should I? They're short.

Tom: Yeah, sure. Okay.

Rebecca: After I was done, that is, had played "Limerock," there was more of the concert, including Mark O'Connor's Fiddle Concerto for Fiddle and Orchestra. And in that, the last movement of the concerto, there was a cadenza. And for the non musicians, I'll just say that the cadenza is the part where in a concerto where everything stops and the soloist has a chance to show off, and in the 19th century, cadenzas were improvised. Classical soloists improvised cadenzas. But then that got out of fashion and cadenzas started being written out, and the soloists just played the cadenza that was written into the music. Well, Mark O'Connor, of course he improvised his cadenza. And of course I could enjoy it completely because I was done with the hot-water part of it and it was one of the most memorable musical experiences of my life to sit, what, ten feet away from him, and watch him, and listen to him improvise this amazing cadenza. So one more O'Connor story, if you have time. And then a couple of post-concert, post-Mark O'Connor's concert stories could have stayed with me. First of all, Mark O'Connor was in Laramie, oh four, five, six, years after he was in Casper, and of course I went down to hear him, took my children. And he takes care of his fans. He sits out in the lobby after the concert and signs CDS, signs programs, and so on. For as long a line as there is. So I got in line. I didn't want a signature, but I wanted to ask him what he was thinking, programming "Limerock" in a community orchestra. What was he thinking that he did that to me? That was sort of the purport, and he looked kind of blank. He said, "Well, community musicians play well." I said, "yeah, but do we play that well?" That was his firm belief that in spite of having, not having every cellist that he played with be able to play it. I mean, Yo-Yo Ma could play it. He just had a little trouble with one section. When I saw the YouTube uhm, video of them, I saw what he did to to solve that problem. And it made sense. So I was invited to the reception after the concert.

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: Yeah, and somebody at that reception said something. Maybe it was a board member that said it, I don't know. I didn't know the members of the board, and they didn't hold receptions for the whole orchestra at that point. I was invited at the last minute 'cause I was a kind of soloist at that concert. Anyway, uhm, this person said "You know, I noticed that you didn't smile until it was all over." And I didn't say it, but I thought, "it's not my job to smile." (laughs) "It's my job to play the cello. Don't expect me to smile" 'Cause it was scary and stressful.

Tom: Yeah.

Rebecca: I was thrilled that I had done it, but I can't say that it was fun like playing [the] William Tell solo or something like that.

Tom: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

Rebecca: So the other thing, I'll be quick 'cause I know you have to go. Somebody at that reception congratulated me and said I had really, distinguished the whole symphony and the whole city and so on. And I said, "Well, great, how about, how about a raise? How about hazardous duty pay for work dangerous to my ego and reputation?" Yeah, I thought it was a harmless quip. Well, you never experienced such a chilly tide of disapproval as swept that room.

Tom: So this was, this was after you played the "Limerock" or this was six years later in Laramie?

Rebecca: No, it was after, was at the reception.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: -for that concert. It-it was a joke, I thought a harmless little quip.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: But apparently to some people money is so important that you do not joke about it.

Tom: Yeah.

Rebecca: I don't know. It was a major social gaffe, that I just did not see coming and didn't understand after it had happened.

Tom: Well, that's really interesting. I'd like to, maybe if we could have another conversation, ask you some more about your departure from the symphony, and about your feeling of the symphony as an organ, as a institution over all that time. I mean, you were connected with it off and on for a long time. And that's really, that's rare.

Rebecca: Sure.

Tom: So if we could maybe talk more about some of those things.

Rebecca: That’d be fine.

Tom: Other time I don't 'cause I don't want to squish them up now and I know you have a lot more stories you could tell me too. So this stuff is really interesting. Thank you so much, and I'm learning so much that I didn't know, which is always fun. So thanks. Maybe off the tape we can talk about another time when we can both do this again.

Rebecca: Yeah, I don't know how to end the meeting and keep us talking. I suppose you could call me.

Tom: Yeah, why don't we? Or maybe just?

Rebecca: To end the recording. I'm not sure how to stop the recording and continue the meeting. You want me to try? Alright, let me see. Recording…

Part 2: Wyoming Symphony Oral History Project

Date transcribed: February 24, 2023

Tom: Okay. So here we are again for Part Two, and it's now September 26th. So Becky, that was, thanks for telling me everything you did last time, and that was such a interesting look at so many years of so many events in the in the orchestra and in your life and I also wanted to ask you, so you were principal cellist by when?

Rebecca: 1992.

Tom: Okay, and had you been for a few years before that, after you got back from Casper, was that after you got back from the Midwest or…?

Rebecca: [Tecumseh], Nebraska. Yeah, we moved to Casper in, about March of 1992. I auditioned for the principal cello position sometime I think later that spring, it must have been.

Tom: Okay, and that was a paying position, right?

Rebecca: Yeah, Curtis Peacock, the conductor at the time, had pioneered, I think he called it the "core artist concept,” where principal chairs of some of the string sections, which it ended up only being concertmaster and principal cello, were specially funded and paid a much higher rate than the rank and file of the orchestra. To attract professional-caliber people, to provide leadership for those sections.

Tom: Uh-huh. And so how long did you stay in that? How long did you keep playing?

Rebecca: In the symphony?

Tom: No, well, yeah, in the symphony.

Rebecca: Until the spring of 1999.

Tom: And you were principal cellist that whole time?

Rebecca: Yes.

Tom: Okay. Thank you. And then so was there something changing in the orchestra or did you just want to do something else with your life? Or why did you stop?

Rebecca: Well, I don't want to be too specific about this, but there was a situation in the orchestra that [was] a case of one person's unprofessional behavior. It was really getting me down because that person was allowed to behave in ways that no other person in the orchestra was allowed to behave. I just lost my morale and discovered, probably not for the first time in my life, that when I didn't have any morale, I couldn't continue with whatever I was doing that had that, whether it was a, you know, a job or some other situation, you have to have or I, I discovered that I had to have something to keep me committed, and I just completely lost that.

Tom: And was Curtis still the conductor?

Rebecca: He was. He conducted until, I think, the early 2000s.

Tom: Okay, right. Okay. Alright and then, thank you, and then, so did you stop playing the cello altogether after that?

Rebecca: No, no. That fall, the fall of 1999, Casper College did, Casper College Theater department did West Side Story. I played in the pit orchestra for that. That was a lot of fun. And hard. That score is really hard.

Tom: Yes, huh.

Rebecca: I mean, we had a lot of really good players in there, including Eric Unruh on the piano, Jim Mothersbaugh on violin. I forget who else. And the rumble, that famous street fight in the movie, yeah. Well that was, we all struggled with that. I remember that very clearly. Maybe it didn't sound like it to the audience. But now that was cool.

Tom: No, that is a great show, um. And then, was, did you keep playing after that?

Rebecca: Well, I had to stop playing with other people because I developed, or had been developing very severe reactions to perfume and hair spray and dry-cleaning chemicals and all the things that saturate concert halls and theaters and so forth, so you know, I would have had to quit anyway for other reasons not too long after that, but I kept playing the cello.

Tom: You did just by yourself, you mean?

Rebecca: Oh yeah, yeah, and with my children. They both play the cello and for a long time, well, we were homeschooling them. So, as part of their school day we would play the cello together or have a lesson or whatever until they were college-age. And even beyond that point, we would still play together quite a lot, just for fun.

Tom: Uh-huh. Okay. So do you miss your professional life as a cellist?

Rebecca: I did for a long time, but, um, here I want to bring up Mark O'Connor again.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: Something I forgot to mention last time, that exposure to him and his art exposed me, really, to folk music and country music. Not to be confused with country western. He played country fiddle music. Uh, I got really interested in folk music and got some books of sheet music, of folk tunes and cowboy tunes and miscellaneous jazz, all sorts of different non-classical music, and my children, who were still at home at the time, and I started exploring that, and found it so rewarding that I, for one, quit playing classical music. I think my children still play a little bit of classical music, but when we play together, we play folk music. And it's a good thing because there's not very much classical repertoire for multiple cellos.

Tom: (chuckles) Yeah, that’s right, true.

Rebecca: And with folk music we can just improvise a bass line or, you know, some other kind of accompaniment. And all the tunes are very easy and simple, and the harmonic progressions are very obvious. And even somebody like me, who with, I mean, classical musicians do not learn to improvise bass lines. We just don't.

Tom: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: Or improvise at all. A classical cellist doesn't learn that, but I had a good enough ear and enough training that it wasn't too difficult for me to learn to make up a bass line that would go with a a very short, simple, beautiful folk tune. So you know, I had this profound shift to folk music because of a direct result of being exposed to Mark O'Connor.

Tom: Oh, that's interesting.

Rebecca: And it was great. I mean, it is great.

Tom: Yeha. Okay, that's really what I wanted to know, and so it wasn't really any- except for something about the way Curtis was running the ... orchestra. Which affected you personally, which I could understand. It wasn't really the institution itself that you had a problem with. Yeah?

Rebecca: No, except I did take my concerns to a president of the (symphony) board at the time while the problem was brewing. I was still in the orchestra, and either I didn't state my case forcefully enough or she didn't want to be the “bad guy.” Nobody wants to be the person that steps forward and says, "This is the problem; we need to address it."

Tom: Right, right.

Rebecca: And I knew, see, I had a conversation with Holly Turner about this. She was executive director at the time, and I told her the direction I was heading, that I just did not think I could continue, and she said, well, not unless you want a big battle. And I envisioned that sort of public, it would have to have ended up being a public battle. And I knew I would come off second-best. I just knew it. I knew it to the point where, when a board member and longtime supporter of the symphony, Marta Stroock, um,

Tom: Yeah.

Rebecca: Asked me, I ran into her at Park School [Park Elementary School in Casper] for some reason or other, some parent meeting I was involved in for their gifted parent support group—parents of gifted children support group. Anyway, that would have been the only reason I was at Park. I ran into her and she asked me why I quit. And I didn't really give her an answer. I said, “Because of politics,” which of course was a non-answer, but even then I felt, I knew who would come off looking really bad and second-best, and I just, that would have been me. I didn't want to go there, so I kind of made a decision. I was not going to talk about it.

Tom: Uh-huh. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Is there anything else about the whole symphony that you'd like to add or about anything?

Rebecca: Yeah, I've got a number of notes here. Give me time to think and I'll always come up with more to say, I guess. Let's see. I guess I'll start with my opportunity to be a local soloist, which from time to time the symphony features, or did feature, local people as featured guest artists. So I got to play a concerto with the orchestra in the spring of 1998. [A concerto is a composition for one or more solo instruments with orchestral accompaniment] That would have been a year after the Mark O'Connor concert, and I played the Saint-Säens Cello Concerto. That's a [19th and 20th century] French composer, S-A-I-N-T hyphen S-A-E-N-S. And the first name of the composer is Camille. So I got to play that piece. It was a really great opportunity, of course, and I played from memory and didn't have any memory slips. But I'd been playing from memory ever since I was a freshman in college, so that was just how I did things when I was a soloist, and I have what I think is a really great story connected with this. Let's see, I will say that I didn't quite play a note-perfect performance. There's one place, the the hardest place in the piece, I muffed just a little tiny bit. But that's how it goes, especially when you have only one shot. I mean, it's not like being an international soloist who goes on tour with the same concerto, and plays it with multiple orchestras for two years running or something like that. Maybe not that long, but certainly they have many chances to to be a soloist and you know, to practice that, really, and I didn't. That's what you accept when you're a community musician. Anyway, the Saint-Säens Cello Concerto. I'd been practicing and practicing and practicing and practicing and I was sweating it 'cause there were some parts of it, I mean, it's not that hard a piece. There are other cello concertos that are harder, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have hard sections, so I was worried about this one section. And I had a very amusing exchange with one of my students, which illustrates my relationship, my great relationships, with most of my students, especially this student. Okay, so this requires me to jump aside for some background. What I have to talk about is a technique that I taught, that many [string] teachers teach. But I kind of had a flash of insight about it that helped me teach it my way, and that's finger patterns. You can reduce just about everything the left hand has to do on the fingerboard to three patterns. That's leaving out just a very few instances, so 99% of what the left hand has to do. So, how this began for me and my teaching was that, in my own development, well, sometime after we moved to Casper, I remember that I suddenly had a moment when I could see the fingerboard. Mentally, I could see all the notes. And of course that jumped my technique way ahead. I had to have that sort of mental ability 'cause it really directed my left hand in very accurate ways. And along with that moment of ability came the insight where it had come from. Well, where it had come from was that for the past, let's see, 30 years or something since I started in fourth grade? No, 40 years 'cause. That wouldn’t have been right. 30 years. I was about 8 when I started. Okay, I had been looking at a piece of music, seeing the note, placing my finger according to what the music said. And after having done that enough times, my brain had obviously worn a track that was so deep and so clear that, I mean, it felt like a sudden event that I could see the fingerboard, but of course it was just the cumulative effect of all those years of looking at music, placing the finger and playing the note. But what was really important was that I had a flash of insight about how to make this process much more organized and much shorter. So I was really excited. And I told my students about how they could learn the fingerboard in much less time than it had taken me, by practicing these patterns, these three patterns that comprise almost everything they will ever have to do with their left hand. So, they played the three patterns, and I started doing this too for my own warm up and exercise. You play the three patterns and then you slide your hand back 1/2 step, which is the smallest interval that we have in Western European or European classical music, what has commonly been called “Western music.” You slide your hand back 1/2 step. You play the three patterns again. You start up kind of aways from the open string. If you were out of space, you slide your hand back, you play them again, you slide your hand, and so on. And I was able to convey this to my students in such a way that they understood that mastering this was the very beginning, and the repetition of it for months or years on end was the point, and I think it helped them quite a lot, because they knew I was doing it too, just to keep my hand practiced at all the spaces and all the reaches that I had to have. I'll just say that one teacher that I studied with, studied cello [with], he said, Yeah, you really have to practice at least an hour a day just to stay where you are, never mind progressing. So that made a deep impression on me and I think that's probably true. So that was for me to stay where I was. So my students were diligently doing finger patterns, to the point where one of my brighter students who was in the symphony, she got really excited, uh, and told her stand partner in the middle of a rehearsal, "Look at this passage. There's finger pattern #1. There's finger pattern #3." [etc.] It was really cool that she could make that leap. Anyway-so this one student, Jeremy, I'd been helping him with his All State orchestra [music]. [All State Orchestra, comprising all the students in the state who have auditioned successfully for the group. All State meets over a weekend, under a guest conductor, rehearsing intensively and usually performing on the Sunday of that weekend] And of course, he was sweating it, because that's a little bit harder than what you run into in your high school orchestra. And I kept saying, “now look, it's just finger patterns, see? Here and here and here.” Okay, so I told him in one of his lessons, a long time after that, maybe six months. Sometime around the last month or so before my performance of the Saint-Säens Concerto, I told him that I was really worried about these passages. He looked at me with this sort of a mischievous twinkle in his eye, and he said, "it's just finger patterns."

Tom: Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca: I felt like I had it coming. I deserved it. Anyway, so, I will say that one of the things that I really love-loved about being a community musician. This was true in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where I was teaching at the university for a while and was principal cello of their pretty good community orchestra. It's really fun to be able to supply the cello section. That there was a time in Oshkosh and in the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra, when about 90 percent of the section was my students, and they were good enough to play. It wasn't just a case of kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel. They were really ready to do it. So that was really cool because it ended up being a, kind of a continuation of my teaching. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.

Tom: Something else happened. So you had students? All through the 90s? Private students?

Rebecca: I did, and through part of the 2000s.

Tom: And then you stopped doing that as well?

Rebecca: Well, things sort of trickled off when I quit the symphony. I lost my visibility, of course, in the community, and and eventually I quit getting students. And there was another teacher in town by then who was attracting a lot of students. And we also moved out of town at that time and I would’ve had to commute to Casper, to teach at Hill Music or somewhere where I could rent space.

Tom: Right.

Rebecca: And you know, the weather being an issue, we live a mile off the pavement and in the winter time it would have been dicey and it was getting harder and harder to be around people at all because of the ubiquity of perfume or hair spray or whatever or dryer sheets. People might not perfume themselves, but if they perfume their clothing, they might as well have perfumed themselves from my point of view, so.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: You know, that all had to stop and it was okay.

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: I mean, it was a difficult transition, but I got over it.

Tom: Uh-huh. I see. Okay. Thank you. Was there something else you wanted to say?

Rebecca: Well, about being a community musician. This was even more true in Casper than it was in Oshkosh, but being in the principal chair to set a higher standard for the cello section than otherwise would have occurred if if there hadn't been a professional-level person in that position, it meant that there weren't extremely high demands on me in terms of what I was able to do. I could relax into the job and do it very well and not strain, except of course, unless Mark O'Connor comes to town. Or of course when I had principal cello solos, I was comfortable with those, but of course I had to work on them very hard, and I was exposed and uh, you know that. But they were well within my ability, and I really enjoyed the William Tell Overture opening and the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, as I mentioned on our last interview. Those were, I could relax and play those. They weren't a source of major stress. They were fun. So, it's fun. I found it to be very, very enjoyable to be in the leadership position in a situation where I could, in-at times be completely on track of the rehearsal and [still] spare attention for my own technique and whether I was really relaxing and settling in or whether I was kind of not playing in my best - I don't know, with with cello playing, well with every instrument you have to master certain things, but things like your sitting position and how your back muscles are behaving and whether you're using your bow arm to the best advantage of that. I mean, there's a way to get sound without working really hard, a way to get a lot of sound, a way to play fast without working really hard. There's a way to get your left hand to work really well without working. So continuing to hone those skills while providing the leadership that I was hired to provide, that was deeply satisfying.

Tom: Uh-huh.

Rebecca: Especially after some of the things in my past, some of the episodes where I'd more or less been in very hot water, and over my head, even. There's a story about that I haven't told yet, but we'll see.

Tom: Okay. Good. Thanks. Thank you. I'm out of questions. Is there more you'd like to say?

Rebecca: Well, this business about landing myself in over my head. This sort of happened in two ways. One, I'll start chronologically, I guess, when I was a freshman at the University of Wyoming. And I was principal cello of the University Symphony. And we were performing the Requiem Mass in D minor by Giuseppe Verdi. [Giuseppe Verdi, 19th century Italian composer. A Requiem is the Latin text of the Catholic Mass for the Dead] An absolutely gorgeous piece, it's just, just about every musician I've talked to who mentions it has a performance they remember wherever they performed it. So I was a freshman, and I think I said on my last call, that my teacher was a man of many jobs, and so I don't think his entire mind was on his cello teaching the way it would be at a larger place where it was actually a school of music like it was at University of Oregon, where my teacher's job was to teach the cello and play in the faculty chamber group. And that was about it. Well, my teacher at UW was conductor of the symphony [University Orchestra]. He was head of the department. He was probably the major fundraiser for the department and so on. So here I am playing a piece I've never encountered before, the Verdi Requiem. Without any knowledge that one of these movements; it's all the parts of the Mass for the Dead. It's a Latin Catholic Mass, so the “Offertorio” is what it's called. Opens with a cello section solo. I think I wrote about this in a blog. I know I did, in a blog post for WyoHistory[.org]. [It's a] beautiful, beautiful solo. Very difficult. I didn't even grasp the implications at the time of what I went through then, but the section couldn't play it. Well, that's when, when the section can't play it, then the principal player has to play it. So it was my job to play this solo. And it went very well in rehearsals. We had a guest conductor, I remember that, coming up, Antonia Brico, she came up from Denver. She had the reputation for being a “dragon lady.” I was just terrified. She wasn't so bad to us. I didn't feel that it was so terrible playing under her, but playing the Offertorio, the opening to the Offertorio; I did fine at rehearsals. And then there's a spot that you kind of have to watch, that had gone so well in rehearsals that I didn't realize until I muffed it in performance that it was a little bit harder than the rest of it. And one of my professors (chuckles) took me aside after the concert. He said, "I could tell you were castigating yourself after that passage, and you didn't need to be." He was very kind. I thought of another story about my days at UW. Anyway, so I really didn't realize what I had gone through, playing the Offertorio without any help or support from my teacher or any prior experience or anything like that. It was probably beyond the Casper Civic Symphony at that point. So anyway, until I went to the Third International Cello Congress in Bloomington, Indiana, at the university, at Indiana University, it's a huge music department, one of the best in the world, and an absolutely enormous and prestigious cello department, in particular, was headed for years by Janos Starker, who was a Hungarian American cellist, the very top of the soloists in the world. So Ronald Leonard was there. He was principal cello of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which the whole classical music world knows that if you have a principal chair in a major orchestra, you are good enough to have had a solo, an international solo career. So that's the caliber of Ronald Leonard and he was up on stage doing some sort of talk or, you know, clinic or something. So, somebody in the audience, it was probably me. He was, oh yeah, it was on orchestral excerpts and auditions. I think it was me. I asked him about the Offertorio section of the Verdi Requiem, which is on audition lists a lot, and no wonder. And yeah, he said, “Yeah, that's a frequent excerpt,” I said, “Would you be willing to demonstrate it?” “No. Nu-uh.” And that was when I realized what a - I know this is a cliche, but what a cutthroat world it is, 'cause there were many, many cellists in that audience that were at the top of the profession. Quartet cellists, other principal cellists of major orchestras. There was a woman, a young woman, from Canada. She played for us. She played a solo. So I'll never, never forget that performance. It was just a jaw-dropper. It was incredible. She was about 25 or something. It was amazing. Anyway, so that's the people that were in the audience. And there's this man who, everybody in that room knew could play the cello, knew he could play the cello, refusing to demonstrate this excerpt. Then I had my moment of realizing, “Apparently that's a lot harder than I thought it was, if he's refusing to demonstrate it." So that happened to me when I was a freshman at University of Wyoming. That was a case of being in over my head, yeah.

Tom: Like this, like a a summer of music camp or something you were at or a conference in Indiana?

Rebecca: Uh, Third International Cello Congress.

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: Cellists from all over the world. And a lot of students and whatnot. So that's [the Verdi Requiem performance at the University of Wyoming] an example of, I was in over my head, but I didn't really do anything, you might say, to get myself there, but there was another episode. This would have been not that many years later I was in Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra their season of 1979-80 and I was a freshman at UW in 1974. No, I was a sophomore. That's when we did it [the Verdi], in 1975. The fall of 1975. Anyway, so I'd been playing in the Puerto Rico Symphony for their 1999-2000; [no,] 1979-1980 season. Excuse me. And there was a festival there to honor Pablo Casals, the Catalan cellist, who was very famous. [He] had settled there when Franco took over Spain. Yeah, he couldn't stand to live in Spain, in Fascist Spain. So he exiled himself, and so he conducted the Casals Festival for a long time until he died, and then the Casals Festival continued after that, so auditions were held for that orchestra during the spring of the year I was in the Puerto Rico Symphony. And of course I took the audition. Now on this audition was a very standard, extremely difficult excerpt, which was the opening to the Overture to Mozart's opera, The Marriage of Figaro. So in this overture to the Marriage of Figaro, I believe the strings play in unison. And it's very fast and you have to play it absolutely cleanly. And with absolute accuracy and your hand just has to function like little hammers that move around the fingerboard on demand. It's just so hard, and I knew it was way beyond me, but I was going to take this audition anyway. So I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced this excerpt the best ways I knew how. And I had some coaching by then on good ways to practice and I did everything I knew how to do. And I played it perfectly in the audition. It was just, I think it must have been adrenaline or something, I don't know. I played way above my normal ability, and just shot every note out of my fingers. It was great and I got into the orchestra. And I was 23, I believe. Yeah. Nearly 24, so. This orchestra was a very, very good orchestra, comprised a lot of, say, top freelancers in New York City, [some of them were] people that played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Very, very high-caliber musicians and little me. Well, I wasn't ready for that caliber of an orchestra and I just struggled like you would not believe. It was a very stressful experience. So I didn't know that about my playing that, after I worked really hard, when put to the test as it were, sometimes I could shoot way up to where it was necessary that I be.

And it's a good thing that that's a trait of my playing or I would never have gotten through playing with Mark O'Connor otherwise.

Tom: And so this Casals orchestra, that was a, how long did that continue? Was that just a one-summer thing or something or?

Rebecca: Oh no, it had been going on for quite a while and it was only a few days.

Tom: I mean your participation in it, 'cause you were up-.

Rebecca: Oh, I only did it once, yeah.

Tom: In one, one concert?

Rebecca: Yeah.

Tom: Okay, I see. And as well you were in Puerto Rico. I see. And the Casals Orchestra was in, he was in Puerto Rico? I never knew that about him. That’s interesting.

Rebecca: Yeah, it's in his autobiography, I think it is. "Joys and Sorrows.” I learned it somewhere. I heard so much about Casals and his wife Marta after I got there. ... People didn't say good things about his wife, but whatever. Who knows?

He had been deceased for a number of years by the time I got there.

Tom: Oh, I see. So this was a - okay, right.

Rebecca: Pretty much continued to be held in his memory.

Tom: Mhm. I think I heard him play once when I was about 12 in Pittsburgh. My mom took me.

Rebecca: Oh.

Tom: I'm not sure if it was him or if it was Andrés Segovia the guitar player, but my memory is folding these events together. It's very strange. Okay, thank you. Anything else?

Rebecca: Yeah, I have a few more notes. What time do you have to stop this?

Tom: Well, let's, I'd like to stop here in about five minutes. So I can ask you a little bit about that other item.

Rebecca: Okay, I'll try to keep what I have to say to five minutes. First of all, when I moved, when I left Puerto Rico, I moved to Evanston, Illinois. I may have said this during the last interview, because I wanted to be in a metro area, have my pick of teachers and schools and go to professional orchestra concerts. The Chicago Symphony is one of the best in the world. I wanted to go to their concerts a lot and so on. So I had to live somehow, and so I got an office job. And a friend of the family that had known me since I was a teenager, pretty much, she knew my work history. I don't think she knew all about [it]. She knew that my main job in high school and college, and until my father closed the family business, was working at the family business. Lange's Bookshop, an independent bookshop in downtown Casper, so she knew that, and I don't think she knew that for about half a summer I worked [at] The Eugene Register-Guard, which was the newspaper in Eugene, Oregon. But when I got this job at the office, she said - this was the year after I'd been playing in Puerto Rico, she said, "Well, you've never had a real job, so it will be very interesting to see how you do." And she didn't - it was not a malicious remark, it was just sort of an offhand remark. And I thought about what it had taken to be in a professional orchestra, and what it took to be in that office job. And, you know, playing in a professional orchestra, you have to show up early to warm up so that when the orchestra begins, you're ready for the rehearsal. So you can't - like in an office job, if you're just a, you know, a pay per hour employee, you have to show up at 9:00. You do not have to show up at 8:45 to warm up. I mean, maybe you should show up at 8:55 to get your coat off and [indistinguishable] whatever, but it wasn't comparable. And also for my office job, once I left, I didn't have, I mean, left for the day, I didn't have to think about it anymore. There was no outside of hours preparation. Well, in the Puerto Rico Symphony and any other orchestra, you have to come having spent time outside of rehearsal learning your part. So I thought about that viewpoint quite a lot. What's a real job? Apparently, you know, a real job is not playing in a professional orchestra. Possibly it would have been considered a real job to teach at a university, which I did later, but it- that was not the only time I ranted about [that] mentality, but it was kind of, I was struck down. I didn't try to explain to her what I did as a professional musician. It didn't seem to be worthwhile.

Tom: Right, right.

Rebecca: Okay, I think I want to say one more thing about being a cellist.

Tom: Okay.

Rebecca: And then I'll, then we can stop. Or you can ask your other questions. It's commonly thought. I don't know by whom exactly, but that the really important part of a piece of music is the melody. Or in the case of [Johann Sebastian] Bach and other Baroque composers, there's not really a melody exactly. It's what's called counterpoint, where you have a line of music and then you have another line of music that is just as important as the first line, and then you have some kind of underpinning of chords, as opposed to a clear single melody and an underpinning of some kind of accompaniment. Okay, so the cellos don't often have, I mean, it's not unheard of, but we're not usually the ones with the melody. If we are, it's great, but we're more often playing the bass line. So, one of the things that you have as the person playing the bass line is the power to steer the whole orchestra. Well, it wouldn't work [very well] with an orchestra, it would work with a string orchestra. [Steering the string orchestra] into something, and into territory that the composer did not compose it to go. As a kind of practical joke, I did this once. I conspired with the double bass player, I think it was a small chamber orchestra, and there were two cellos; myself and another person; and a double bass player, and we could easily drown out the harpsichord player by what we did. So, I'll launch into a little bit of a musical explanation. When you hear the end of a piece of music, piece of classical music, there's a very satisfying, well, it's not just classical music, it's just about every piece of music that has a tune. There's a very satisfying moment when you know it's the end. And that's because of the chord progressions that lead you back to the keynote, or the note that the whole composition is based on. Well, there's one particular chord in all the different chords that you can build out of three notes, that if only the bottom note is changed, it makes a very weak moment instead of a strong moment. It's sort of like slipping on a banana peel.

And all it takes is for the lower strings and anybody else that’s playing the bass line to play a different note, so I did that once. We pulled a joke on everybody else and ended it [the piece] that way, and got away with it. The conductor thought it was funny. That's the main person that had to think it was funny in order for it to come off. So that that's just how important the bass line really is, and if the cello player in a string quartet for example, is not playing in tune? Nobody else sounds in tune, no matter how well in tune they're playing.

Tom: Yeah. Right. That's the thing about stringed instruments. Yep. Well, that's really cool. Thank you. Thanks, this is a lot. Thanks for your time. Okay, should we turn off the recording?

Rebecca: Okay. So you just asked the question you wanted to ask, and we're done?

Tom: Yeah, I have no questions. That's it.

Rebecca: Alright, let me stop the recording. Thanks for this opportunity, by the way.

Tom: Yeah, I'm glad we added you to the mix here.