I’m so excited for one of my coworkers– his sister, Leila Josefowicz, just won a MacArthur Fellowship (the “Genius Award”) for her pioneering work in violin performance.
She’s just 30, and she’s already achieved so much! My god…
We talked about her this morning, and about some of the work she’s been doing, and it got me all excited about classical music again, the same feeling I used to feel when I studied clarinet performance… But I left that era of my life in the dust of the past. It was so strange I barely remember it, like much of my earlier life.
It’s just so exciting– I can’t imagine the interesting stories she must have to tell. I hope she tells them all one day, to someone. I am sure there are interesting stories behind the violin she uses, but being lost in the past, they will never be told.
I think I might resume practicing clarinet. Maybe. It still kind of scares me. I vengefully put it away in 1998 and haven’t really touched it since. But working in the same office with someone related to a person who was able to push through what I tried to push through, someone who excelled where I failed (or where I chose to turn to a different path) was kind of like circumstance pushing a little touch on my brain, saying, “Well, why not?”
The cool thing about Leila is that she plays a lot of contemporary classical music. This reminded me that I could just play whatever I wanted, if I chose to go back to clarinet. I could just play chamber music. I could just work with ambient/experimental electronic music producers or something. That is cool and exciting to me.
Journal entry, 1995
(Note: KingCo was the countywide music competition that most high school music students participated in– I played clarinet. My stepmom read my diary sometimes. I guess this is when I got a locking box. I don’t remember having it. Why would I think that she would not be able to find the key, given as she was to snooping?)
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