{"id":13886,"date":"2022-07-01T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2022-07-01T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=13886"},"modified":"2022-07-01T12:00:46","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T11:00:46","slug":"musician-of-the-month-dan-trueman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2022\/07\/01\/musician-of-the-month-dan-trueman\/","title":{"rendered":"Musician of the Month: Dan Trueman"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my studio here, I have a clavichord, built by my parents in 1971, with a somewhat rococo and amusing backdrop painted by my mother (who otherwise has left us with a stunning body of mostly modernist artwork).<\/span><\/p>\n

I grew up with this painfully quiet clavichord, along with a gorgeous harpsichord (also built by my parents, and which I learned to tune by ear, a sign of things to come), countless recorders of various shapes and sizes (both parents were avid and accomplished players), lutes, oboes, guitars, baritone horns, and of course a piano (my older sister, annoyingly, plays pretty much\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0of these instruments with ease, though piano is her main instrument, so I grew up hearing that repertoire through her practice).<\/p>\n

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Clavichord<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The basement of my childhood home on Long Island was filled with various tools, wood scraps, and other evidence of my parent\u2019s instrument building habits (both were amateurs, by the way: during business hours, my father was a theoretical physicist, my mother a painter), and our evenings and weekends were filled with making music together with these instruments (ok, maybe that is a bit of revisionist history there, but we did make a lot of music together with these instruments as a family).<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t realize at the time that this wasn\u2019t particularly normal. And one of the things that it marked me with is a love of musical instruments for their own sake, and a love of making music in an exploratory way with instruments at the heart of the process, performance relegated to a secondary concern. I performed, for sure, but it wasn\u2019t the driving force behind the music making in my house, and we never performed together as a family.<\/p>\n

It also left me with a clear sense that the instruments themselves were\u00a0things we made<\/em>\u2014not immutable, given objects\u2014and thus were potential sites for exploration and revision.<\/p>\n

I loved my own instrument at the time\u2014a somewhat tetchy violin made by the engineer Norman Pickering, himself a researcher of instrument design\u2014though it took me a while to discover that the music I was learning with it\u2014European Classical music\u2014wasn\u2019t, for the most part, what I really wanted to play (the Bach Unaccompanied Sonatas aside, really). Indeed, trying to discover the music that I\u00a0do<\/em>\u00a0really want to play (and hear) has been the driving force behind my work ever since and has led to a number of explorations in musical instrument design itself.<\/p>\n

In my early 20\u2019s, I flailed about trying to find ways to escape the confines of the Classical violin\u2014its repertoire and technical training that leaves such a profound, embodied mark on anyone who goes deep with it\u2014which led to predictable explorations of jazz improvisation and rock music, both of which also felt not quite right, though I learned a lot, and in particular ended up spending time with, of all things, the Flying-V 6-string fretted electric violin by Mark Wood, and an unfretted version made by my father.<\/p>\n

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Hardanger fiddle<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ultimately, I found the\u00a0sound<\/em>\u00a0of the instrument unsatisfying\u2014in spite of my best efforts, including exploring multiple other electric violins, pick-up systems, amplifiers, equalization and signal processing units, and so on\u2014as well as the\u00a0feel<\/em>\u00a0of the instrument\u2014the solid-body electric violin is perversely rigid, and doesn\u2019t seem to actually absorb any of our physical efforts.<\/p>\n

In the midst of these experiences, a composer friend of mine (Gavin Borchert) wrote a piece for me, for the electric violin, and he was inspired by the traditional music of Norway, in particular the Hardanger fiddle; my experience listening to the cassette tape he gave me\u2014a recording of Anund Roheim playing music from Telemark in the 1950s\u2014was one of those I will never forget; I remember where I was sitting, the time of day, the color of the sky, and so on, when I first heard the sounds of this magical, beguiling instrument and its mesmerizing music.<\/p>\n