22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY september 7-13, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com home, eating at restaurants, like normal people,” Wu says. “In all of my own projects, respectful musicians’ fees will be my top priority. I am a musician’s musician.” Each concert Wu organizes has a central theme and a storyline. One of the concerts in the upcoming season (which starts Sunday, Sept. 17) is titled “Smile, Chuckle and Laugh.” “It is a program with music that will evoke different humorous reactions from people,” Wu says. “And at the concert, I introduce each piece before performing. A combination of stories about the music, the composer, us musicians, and all human beings—with a heavy touch of comedy.” It was Ludwig van Beethoven, Wu says, who was a tireless concert organizer determined to create opportunities for fellow-musicians. He had to be; in the early 19th century, musicians built a world for themselves by taking financial risks. “He organized concerts regularly where every piece, every musician was his artistic curation,” Wu says. “And they were the most important concerts to see, because it was the vision of the greatest musician on the planet.” ~ When we talk about world-class musicians in classical music, we’re talking about a very small group of people. Only very few make it into top conservatories and even fewer can translate conservatory education into a performing career that will take them to stages such as Lincoln Center. Wu is one of them, which automatically means that she is also an educator, responsible for passing the craft to the next generation. “Labels like excellent, master, and even world-class get thrown around quite a bit when it comes to music,” she says. She adds that labels typically relate to nothing more than whatever experience the listener had, “used so irresponsibly as if music and art is something anyone can randomly decide to claim.” Being a world-class chamber musician is like being a top athlete and a lifelong researcher, Wu says. “I think very few can imagine the discipline it takes to keep yourself at your best game whether it’s precision, speed, versatility, leadership, teamwork or whatever the repertoire calls for.” In the summer, Wu spends almost every week performing in a different chamber music festival. Every single concert takes an average three days of rehearsals. Every festival comes with an artistic director and the musicians who are hired to fulfill his or her vision. Pieces get assigned from the existing, always expanding canon that opens with Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Dvorák. Wu ends up playing about 40-50 pieces each summer. There are lots of days when she plays as many as 10 hours per day. With all of that comes travel and being away from home. Speaking from Chestnut Hill, Connecticut, before her final concert of the season in Portland, Maine, her husband, Goodfellow has joined her for nine days. “Otherwise,” Wu says, “we would have not seen each other since the second week of June.” Since she departed from Monterey in June, Wu managed to drive to Menlo Park (Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival), fly to the Hamptons, fly back to Menlo, then to leave for Connecticut. Not every musician can handle that much repertoire plus the traveling. Wu is not only capable of that but typically also brings loads of positive energy; her enthusiasm is constant and contagious. There are so many things that can go wrong in a day. Musicians get sick and exhausted like everybody else, instruments get locked up in hotels, a mattress one night just feels wrong. “The bottom line is that your bottom line is always above a certain level,” Wu says. And that’s what she tells her students because in her profession, each musician becomes both a student and teacher. Not only does Wu have regular and less-regular violin students, but she also continues to mentor former students. “They text me all the time,” she says. “I was at the [most recent] concert of Youth Music Monterey County, and the whole front row was my students.” After her move to Monterey County, Wu was quickly approached by Hidden Valley Music Seminars, as well as Chamber Music Monterey Bay, where she became artistic director in late 2022. She has since parted ways with the CMMB, but has been running the Emerging Composers Intensive program at Hidden Valley for two years now. “Many elements of the complete skillset [of a young composer] are often overlooked in conservatory education,” Wu says, “like relationships, communication, public presentation, and even charm, which is unexpectedly but undoubtedly essential as a musician. The Emerging Composers Intensive focuses on completing the skill set for young composers to step into the professional world.” Lasting nine days, the intensive is essentially a festival, where 10 young, promising chamber music composers have a chance to premiere their pieces and have them performed by musicians like Wu. Composition teachers are composer and piano prodigy Wang Jie and Nick DiBerardino, the dean of the Curtis Institute of Music. The performing faculty includes Eunice Kim (violin), Mihai Marica (cello), David Samuel (viola) and Drew Petersen (piano). Actual final concerts of the Emerging Composers Intensive are preceded with open rehearsals that are in many ways even more interesting to watch than the final concerts. In the dark belly of the 300-seat theater at Hidden Valley, composers and musicians take the first and second row to themselves. In assigned time slots, Jie—in white T-shirt and a half-shaved hairstyle—is sitting at the front central spot with her laptop open. She looks like a casting director, with composers at her side changing every 20 minutes or so. The performThe Emerging Composers Intensive festival at Hidden Valley in 2023. Across from Wu are “emerging” composers Kian Ravaei, Yurui “Rain” Hou and Jonathan Wu. Wu and pianist Drew Petersen during the Emerging Composers Intensive. Petersen is the recipient of the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and 2017 American Pianists Award, and is the Christel DeHaan Fellow of the American Pianists Association. “I am a musician’s musician.” Chamber music moved from the houses of aristocracy to those of the bourgeoisie.
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