Op.3 - Katrina Wreede, violist and composer

Katie Wreede, Viola
Violist and Composer / Founder, Composing Together

Besides creating the “Composing Together” and “My Goldfish Died-Blues for Strings” programs, Wreede is a founding faculty member of the John Adams Young Composer Program at the Crowden School, teaches Comprehensive Musicianship for the San Francisco Community Music Center, and is an accredited Teaching Artist for the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission.  She began her work bringing youth to composition in 1998, when she became “Composer in the Schools” for the American Composers Forum-San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, later creating their handbook for professional composers learning to work with young people.  She has provided teacher training for American String Teachers Association, the Montana String Teachers Association, Bronxville Unified School District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Nevada County School District, and has taught for Oakland Youth Symphony, Young People’s Youth Symphony, Berkeley Youth Symphony, California Youth Symphony, and many schools around the country. Visit Katie online at katrinawreede.com

On April 9, 2014 I sat down to chat with Oakland-based violist and composer Katrina Wreede at my Quartet's office in San Francisco, following up an interrupted attempt at an interview several months earlier. Here's what happened...

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Katie Wreede, we're back. We're going to pretend we didn't ever talk before.

Good, I had no idea what your project was for. I thought we were planning some new project (laughs)

Alright, so, basically, all I want to know is, how, going back – I don't wanna know all the cool stuff you're doing right now—I wanna know all the cool stuff you did back when you were a kid, that led you into music.

Oh!

What kind of activities were you involved in or interested in, what kind of stuff did you do—

Swim team!

Swim team?

I was—little girl ballet class, parks & rec...

Wait - remind me where you grew up.

Monrovia. And just in case anybody needs the information for, you know, identity theft—(laughs)

Oh, don't worry, it's all public record already.

It is. There's no privacy anywhere. I was playing a video game yesterday and it wanted some information, and I went to just get out of it, and it, like, auto-filled from something else without—yeah it's pretty creepy, scary...

So—my mom was an amateur clarinet player. Gramdpa played piano and zither. A Swiss guy who played zither.

He played at home?

No, it's just—he didn't play it that I remember hearing, but it was around. Mostly he was playing piano. And I remember going to his 90^th birthday party and his playing Claire de Lune at the senior center.

My dad was a farm boy, got into science—but my mom felt really strongly about, you know, doin' that kind of stuff. And the parks & recreation had all these classes, so I did ballet class—I tried to do tumbling but was terrible. I never did a cartwheel. I liked it, but, you know... Karate... stuff—I did a parks & rec piano, group piano thing, where mostly we played Go Fish with the little cards with notes on 'em.

Flash cards!

Yeah, so, the whole notes on the staff – “I have a G! I have a G!” (laughs)

Was that your first musical experience?

Well my mom used to take me along to concerts sometimes. She played with the Pasadena City College Orchestra. I remember sleeping with the blanket in the front seats—

On the way, on the way back?

No, during the concerts.

Like at a drive-in

Yeah (laughs)

Sort of.

(laughs) Yeah. Music in the home, we had a recording of Peter and the Wolf—the Disney recording. And we had Firebird [Suite by Stravinsky], and we had lots and lots of Disney records, because my Grandpa had a Gulf gas station, and they were giving away Disney records—“fill up and you get a free record.”

So I listened to a lot of Disney music (laughs). And a lot of daytime cartoons. 'Cause I worked really hard not to have to go to class very much—I was... sick, a lot (laughs). So, lots of Bugs Bunny—I heard all the classical stuff on Bugs Bunny and Heckle & Jeckyl, all that stuff.

Looney Toons!

Yeah! And then I think around when I was about 7 or 8—Mrs. Scott. Piano lessons.

Mrs. Scott was probably—let's see, she was 110 when she died. She died when I was about 30. So, she was like, pushin' 90, and that was—that was a good first training thing. You know, she didn't hit me! (smiles) but she made me march around to the metronome a lot.

Sounds like you did a lot of different kinds of motion stuff as a kid. Ballet and Karate and tumbling..

Yeah! And Purple People Eater! A lot of dancing to Purple People Eater. (laughs) Slumber party stuff. So then you know, 4^th grade: “What instrument are you gonna play” and they had the little aptitude test, and my mom saved the letter—the scholastic aptitude results—showing I had a perfect score on pitch recognition, something like that. So my mom hauls out her high school clarinet, says “You're going to play clarinet.”

So what's the farthest thing from (laughs) clarinet?—so, yeah, so... violin.

And I was a terrible violinist. I was really bad. I lasted about three weeks in the school program. The woman was such a witch, there was just no way I was going to spend time with her. So my mom hooked me up with Sue Rasmussen, and she was really sweet.

Tell me about Sue.

Local violin teacher—she was really sweet, and gentle, and let me get away with way too much, but it was nice.

Was it fun?

(tentatively) Yeah, I loved having lessons with her. I didn't practice enough. The thing that was really motivating was Saturday Conservatory, which was run by the guy I was studying with later—Mickey Fruchter—who I did private lessons with when I was kind of in that in-between—you know that time when you're deciding whether you're gonna go do other things, or maybe really commit to doing music?

Yeah, that's what we're getting to, isn't it?

Yeah, well he was that guy. The Saturday Conservatory was hundreds of kids and they took over Cal State LA every Saturday. We had group lessons, and we had chamber music, and that's the first time I played Eine Kleine [Nachtmusic]. And a full orchestra, I think they had, like, four full orchestras, and band... Huge, huge program.

I had lots of friends, and that's—you know, middle school, kind of, like fifth grade, sixth, seventh grade—when you're really starting to define yourself. And so I had this whole musical life, and—

Was it completely separate from your school life or did you have some friends from school who were also involved?

We had a couple friends that we carpooled with and the parents took turns, cause it was a schlep over there. But Mickey Fruchter was hilarious. He's the guy who taught me how to rub the bottom of the page to make it look like I'd been practicing (laughs). And he's the guy who said “Your parents paid for the whole bow” (laughs) You know, he was that kind of teacher. He made me laugh a lot. He drove a little dinky old Mini, it was very cool. He kept me entertained and intrigued at a time when I needed that.

This was still on violin?

This was still on violin, and when did I switch—no, I think I was playing viola by then. Let me think.... It's right around when I switched. Patty Greer moved to town—I was doing the middle school orchestra, which was really just five of us (laughs)—and she was just a whole lot better than I was. And I couldn't handle the competition. And nobody else was playing viola.

photo courtesy Katie Wreede

And at Saturday Conservatory all the viola players got all the attention. The violin players were like this sea of anonymous bodies, except for the first couple front ones. And the viola players were always the characters, you know. Yeah—Who would not wanna be the center of attention? In a good way. In a supportive, kind of, not-being-a-jerk kind of way.

So how did the switch happen?

David Stenski, who's a violinist in LA, was the teaching artist guy, the string guy for the school district. And he said “Well do you wanna play viola?” and he showed me the third position trick, and that was it—a couple hours and I was a viola player. There was no going back.

What was the main thing that drew you to the viola, other than 'no competition from other violinists?'

(laughs) Well, once you pick it up and you feel the vibrations, and you feel the C string and your whole lower half of your head (holds her jaw), just—your whole body responds to it. And then, violin, it just doesn't cut it, after you play the viola. (whispers secretively:) And you can play really loud. (laughs)

The school instrument I had, had no scroll. It was broken off and had this point (laughs), and boy I could make the C string go up like a major third, like vrrroooo! (laughs)

Did you start learning repertoire outside the orchestral and chamber music activities right away?

Well, we were playing pretty big string quartet stuff in middle school and high school, with David Stenski and Patty Greer. By then there were three of us. We were playing Mendelssohn Quartets, Beethoven... with David playing cello. (laughs)

OK, so that's Saturdays.

I was in Saint Gabriel Junior Symphony for a while, then I started playing with the American Youth Symphony, which is a paying gig. Not when you start, but there are union members, upper age limit's 30-ish, so everybody hung out till they got their professional symphony gig. That was with Mehli Mehta, Zubin's father. And he was Sir John Barbirolli's concertmaster. Big credentials.

So I got to play with Stern, Zuckerman, Barenboim, Lynn Harrell, a bunch of the MET singers. I don't think there's much of anybody I've accompanied in a professional orchestra that I didn't already play with in AYS.

I was one of the youngest people coming in, and I went all the way from last chair to principal.

How long did it take to... 'ladder up'?

(laughs) The whole time—I think the last two years I was in the front. You had to wait for the people in the front to leave. It was entirely up to him: everything was about Mehli, it was his puppy. My very first rehearsal—he used to scream and yell, and he'd sit on top of the piano, and he'd wave his arms around (demonstrates), and my very first rehearsal, some of the 2^nd violins were having trouble getting set up in the back. There weren't enough chairs back there. And he picked up a chair, and he heaved it all the way to the back of the room! (laughs) Yeah. This is the guy who told me I sounded like a moose.

How nice!

Yeah—

I'm sure that was inspiring, motivating.

Well, yeah—any attention from him was good! “He knows who I am!” (pretends to swoon) When I was with Turtle Island and we played at Royce Hall at UCLA and I called him from backstage—this was like 10 years after I'd left, and I still had his phone number memorized, because he would always yell his phone number at every rehearsal: “If you're not coming you have to call me, 472-2226, you have to call me!” (laughs)—

So I called him! And you know, I hadn't talked to the guy in—there were a hundred people in that orchestra and it'd been going for years and years and years, and so many people had big important jobs that came out of that orchestra—and first thing he said, “I suppose you want me to come to the concert now! You didn't tell me in advance!” He knew exactly what I was doing. He knew I was there that night, he knew what everybody was up to.

What else were you up to as a kid?

Well, I was really fat. Not much exercise. Smog in LA was really bad. I had pretty bad asthma. The asthma-bronchitis thing was one of my tools for getting out of going to school! (laughs) but I did have really bad asthma, and it was before the inhalers.

What would you do?

Try to be as still as possible and sip cold water. And, you know, (gasps a couple of times to demonstrate)

So the swimming helped, so I took Red Cross swim classes and eventually took water safety instructor, my teacher for that was a guy named Greg Bland, who had won a couple medals at the Olympics. Who had us practice mouth to mouth on him. (laughs) Things were different! (laughs) And he really encouraged my parents to have me do swim team. At which point I dropped like 25 pounds. Instantly. Which reminds me I should go swimming. (laughs) I should try it again!

So I got heavy into swim team. It was like, Swim Team. And I was actually a 14 year old, Southern California backstroke gold medalist.

Cool! Did you look forward to the swimming as much as your playing?

I would go to school and do my homework at school, and my mom would pick me up for a lesson or rehearsal or whatever it was, and then swim team, and then I'd either eat in the car or maybe go home for a little bit, and then have a rehearsal in the evening, you know, that was my life. My poor mom.

Would she be there at rehearsals or would she drop you off and come back?

Usually they'd work it out so one parent would do one thing and another parent would do another thing. The minute I was 16, I was the carpool driver.

So AYS—and Wildwood Music Camp, which was a brief split from Isomata, which is now run by USC. There was a schism between the management and the faculty. The faculty moved to the next camp down the road, and they ran Wildwood Music Camp as a separate thing. When I was the right age to do those things I was at Wildwood, and then the faculty got back together with management and they all moved back up the street. Wildwood Music Camp was a big deal.

Did you travel much?

I did Congress of Strings – the Musicians Union's answer to when all of the string programs were getting dropped and the band programs were still active and the quality of players coming out of high schools was weighted towards the wind players. They were trying to build up string stuff. I spent a horrible summer in Cincinnati, being kind of treated nastily by Gunther Schuller. There were some other famous people I got to work with, none of whom I can think of right now! He made an impression, though.

At what point did you feel like there was “no turning back” heading into music?

15. When I started practicing seriously on my own without getting nagged by my mom. It was really hard!

Was it a big decision to change your focus that way, or did you just realize you were there?

It was the combination of a lot of my social identity and something that was really hard that I really had to work at, to be even OK at—versus a lot of the academic stuff I was doing, which was—cause I went to a really crappy school that just wasn't very interesting—it wasn't hard enough. There's a lot of reward with music.

And the swimming thing, I really liked, and I had some really good coaches and I had some friends doing that too—one of my teammates was on the Olympic team that she ended up not getting to swim cause it was the one we boycotted. Good swimmers, but the music thing, I dunno...

Was it more chamber music or orchestral playing that really grabbed you?

source: crowden.org

I did a lot of orchestra training cause that's what Mehli Mehta did, prepare people for professional orchestras. I thought I was going to be a symphony musician, and chamber music was what you did for fun on the side, for artistic satisfaction and all that.

I did symphony for a while. I was temporarily ranked third in San Jose Symphony, I was principal in Fremont Philharmonic, I was principal in Santa Cruz Symphony. Played a lot of opera, and I was first call for Oakland Symphony. Similar in L.A. before I moved here.

What brought you north?

It was because I was living with this tuba player. (smiles knowingly) And he was sleeping around. And he got the job in San Jose and he was commuting back and forth, and I found out—oh, So if I just move to San Jose, um, he'll behave himself! (laughs)

I was also having major disputes with Louis Kievman, who I was studying with. He was one of the original NBC guys, he sat right behind Primrose.

It was bad with Kievman, it was really bad. I revolted, and he didn't like it. He was one of those “You WILL take this job, you will NOT take that job. You can NOT take this class”—he was really controlling. And he played us against each other. He'd be like (leans in) “you know, I heard Carrie play that same etude last week and when there's an orchestra job only one person's gonna get that job.” And he used to hit and kick us and stuff.

I was with him in the late 70s, early 80s. '78 I started with him. He was an old guy already. He was at Julliard in the twenties, and his teacher was an old guy then, Sasha Jacobson. You know, I'm like, two generations from the mid-1800's of teaching style. That's pretty amazing.

It's an amazing perspective to have access to, but it's also so alien from where you are today.

Yes. Mehli Mehta performed for Saint Saens. (laughs) That's a long thread!

So I was in San Jose and I started doing wedding gigs. I finished my degree at San Jose State—I had been at Northridge, and basically there are two tracks at Northridge, which were: actually take the academic classes and get a degree, or hang out until you land your symphony job. I was in the “hang out until you get your symphony job” crowd. The average age in that department when I was there was probably like 28, just people getting their bachelors.

So when I moved up here I went to San Jose State, and I filled in some holes and got the degree.

What was the chamber music scene like at that time in the Bay Area?

Well, gig-wise, for starting-out groups—I just put posters up and there was plenty of work (laughs) And also a lot more playing house concerts, the kind of actual paying stuff for quality performances.

Did you have to make a lot of calls to get your name out, or you'd really just put posters out?

I put posters out, had a couple newspaper ads. For a long time my main income was one ad in the Chronicle. Cost me forty bucks a month, ran four days a week, and by the time people called me they were already sold and I'd just fill up my calendar.

How did Turtle Island happen? You were one of the early members.

(side-stepping…) You know, yesterday one of my students was talking about that video that's going around about the Strad viola for sale. “Oh, he's so wonderful!” So I hauled out Maurice Riley's history of the viola books to see if that viola was in the book, and Kievman and Virginia Majewsky, who I'd also studied with, they and their Gaspar da Salos (Sali?) were in there. And I'm looking through and I was able to show the book to my student and say “This was one of my bucket list things: I'm listed there in the second volume.” But it also has all this bio stuff that has nothing to do with anything I'm doing now, including Turtle Island. (long pause, then laughs) And teaching at Santa Clara University. (laughs)

OK—what was Santa Clara University like?

I haven't been there since they upgraded the department. There's always been a big vocal thing. Organ, keyboard. They have a beautiful facility for everyone now.

Katie Wreede with the Instep Quartet playing jazz
at Santa Clara University

When were you teaching there?

I don't even remember. When I was living in San Jose. Maybe when I was living in the mountains, in the shack.

Wait, when were you in Turtle Island?

'89-91. I was after Irene Sazer. There was a woman named Laurie Moore who was the first, but she's not on any of the CDs so people forget about her. There have been so many now.

OK, so I'm doing a lot of wedding gigs, and Opera and Symphony and shows. And getting really burnt out. Mark Summer was new to the area, and really needing work, 'cause he'd just come to be in Turtle Island but Turtle Island hadn't hit yet. So I was using him in wedding gigs and I was doing cheesy arrangements of, like, Babyface and 20's and 30's music, and I had no idea what I was doing. I was just trying to lift it off of piano parts. But really needing to branch out from playing Mozart Divertimenti. And we were doing the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Quartet, stuff that's fun but really not right for weddings.

I needed a violinist and Mark says “Oh, we just—Irene Sazer just moved to town from Baltimore and you guys would really hit it off.” The three of us started doing trio stuff, and the deal was, I was paying them more than I was getting, and booking everything, and they were supposedly teaching me how to play jazz. (laughs)

The Skyline Trio, which is still in existence and has had about 80 people in it—that was going to be the moneymaker and Turtle Island was going to be their artistic thing. (laughs).

So we were doing concerts as Skyline Trio, gigs and stuff, and then Turtle Island's cranking up, they got more and more serious bookings. So they were still kinda doin' the trio thing, and I was doing a lot more arranging and I was taking jazz lessons with David Balakrishnan, and I had cut all my other work except for one opera gig, cold turkey—just quit everything to learn jazz.

Was that hard to do?

No. No, 'cause I was really burnt out. The symphony thing got to me—the symphony thing was not American Youth Symphony. It wasn't hanging out with my friends and playing good music. It was not that.

Did you think about that a lot, what you had expected, or what you missed?

Yeah! But it wasn't that. (smiles) It didn't have the freedom, or the friendships.

Not as inspiring as it had been.

Yeah.

So I was friends with Mark, I was friends with Irene. So she quit TISQ – the split happened, and they asked me to fill in on one concert because, how many jazz viola players are there? Even though I wasn't quite the right player—I was doing really avant garde stuff, not swing and bluegrass, that kind of thing. But I knew their repertoire.

So I played with them for a little while, and then they asked me to be a regular member because they weren't used to a viola player. Irene is a really great violinist who doubles. They hadn't had the experience of somebody who was happy to fill out the middle and support all the sides, you know... The whole inner voice thing. They'd had four stars and nobody for the the guts part. I had that trick—it's the viola mindset.

I got to tour and do all the fancy stuff, and I learned some things, and I learned some things I don't like. Artistically, the bluegrass thing didn't sit well...

You wanted something more—

I wanted things that drew from my strengths too. The other guys didn't have any of those sounds in their heads.

Did you feel like you lost too much of yourself to their sound world?

They were expecting me to have been in a garage band in high school, and I never did that. And they'd say “Oh we're gonna do Crossroads by Cream”—“Who's that? Eric Clapton? Huh?.. (sheepishly) I've been listening to Shostakovich, Walton, Bartok... Miles! Oscar Peterson! Monk!—Bartok and Monk...but not the other.

Now, though, it's kind of what I do for wedding gigs! Rock and pop on viola (laughs)

And you're busy teaching now?

I'm not teaching that much… about 5 private students and a couple classes at SF Community Music Center. I've got the composing thing going, although I haven't really had time to write music that I want to write, for a while. I thought that that Prelude sextet [from ViolaMANIA 2.0] was quite nice.

It was!

It was not campy. I thought it was very respectful of the piece, and it didn't—I felt really successful about that one. 'Cause, you know, it could have been bad. It should already be in the AVS free downloads library, and I'm gonna put it on my new website as a free download.

Have you been into Viola Society stuff for a long time? Were you a viola fan from early on, or were you just a violist?

I went to the Viola Congress with Tom Tatton, with the Southern California Viola Society, when I was 17, 18, something like that.

What was that like?

That was—“Whoa! There's William Primrose!!” He did a master class right before our group performed, and some kid got up and played a movement of Bach, and he said “What are you doing with these fingerings???” and the kid said “These are your fingerings from your edition!” (laughs)—so that was permission to play Bach any way you want.

So I did that, and then 10 years later I was there as a presenter, presenting C String Blues: blues for mass violas. Not as good as My Goldfish Died Blues workshop, but basically the same concept.

Had you been doing that kind of thing previously, or was that a sort of experiment for you at the time?

That was probably my first time, because we were sort of doing that kind of thing with Turtle Island, but I was the only one with actual educational experience. This is why I'm enjoying hand-picking who I do Composing Together with, because there are still some people who think doing a school program is getting up in front of the kids and saying “Hey look at us, we're so wonderful”. You guys [the Cypress String Quartet] don't do that, you have the whole thing that integrates beforehand and everything. But not everybody has that attitude. The idea is, making a music program that gives people new skills and connects them on a human level. I like that.

Well, I think you are doing amazing work as an educator for all ages.

Composing Together! I'm going to try to get a grant from NASA. You guys should check this out—after my application's in [smiles]. I really want to do a big project that relates to STEM (science, technology, engineering, math). I hope a lot of the organizations that are applying to NASA don't have anything like music composition and they're looking for pre-formed kind of projects that they can just slip in [to the application]. And I really want to work with kids to write music to communicate with space aliens.

Katie Wreede with a group of Composing Together participants
source: arkenews.net

I'm doing a Fibonacci theme this year—Fibonacci: the numbers in music—so it's not that far afield. It's systems and sets of numbers, and finding patterns in sounds and lengths and pitches, and that's STEM all over the place! Finding patterns is finding patterns.

Good luck! When's the deadline?

The date just passed but it's a regular thing. So I just have to get it done for the next round.

Well, what are you busy with now?

Going forward? Performing, composing, and sharing that with other people, and just finding ways to make those all kind of work together. I'm developing an incarcerated youth program.

Yeah that's just what I was going to ask next, if you're working with prison youth!

I am working on that, inspired by California Arts Council—not funded by it.

So how does that work?

Stanislaus, Contra Costa, Fresno County, Sacramento County are all interested so far—so here's my scam for between now and November. I'm working with a therapist who works with troubled teens, and who's also done stuff at San Quentin. We're putting together the basic show.

source: katrinawreede.com

It's gonna be music, talking about how music is created and how communication happens in music- combined with exercises and using breathing to calm down, and communicating with “I” statements, and probably some other stuff involving improvisation and feelings.

I'm going to hire Jan, the therapist, to do a workshop with all of the Composing Together musicians and composers who will be involved in the prison thing, and have her coach us on how to talk, and what to expect. And then we'll have a fundraiser where we test out the show on non-incarcerated people with checkbooks. Hopefully people will actually show up!

I have contacts from people who manage these facilities—sounds like as many as 100 kids at a time. A hundred kids locked up! That's really, yeah... I wanna try it, and hopefully we'll be protected—emotionally—enough, by having Jan Sells there, she's gonna be the facilitator.

I'll be discussing the music part an she'll be doing the stand-up-in-front thing—she'll be the buffer. If we're 'fore-armed' enough I think it could be really cool work. 'Cause when you talk about, you know, under-served populations—I don't know if I told you, I called one place and she says “Oh we'd really love to have you but we have no money, not all the kids even have blankets.” Isn't that heavy? Getting locked up, for acting out, you know. You're like 14 years old and there's no blanket for you.

All these places—'cause all the money is going to these giant for-profit prisons, and everything is set up to funnel kids through school directly into jail, and then directly into prison. —But that doesn't mean that I want any of these kids knowing where I live...

Right – it's a terrible conflict of wanting to help but also needing to keep your distance.

Yeah, but they're people. And maybe a few of them... maybe...

It's a lot like any outreach – most of them will just go on with their lives after you've played for them, but every once in a while you'll really make an impact on one, or some—

Or even a little bit, even just a 60 minute respite. Just—a little moment of peace, or a little moment of organization in their lives. As long as I, and anybody I bring with me—as long as none of us are damaged... Isn't that valuable?