The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 035 The Fischoff Effect: Lydia Rhea – former Kairos String Quartet

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger podcast, episode number 35, the fifth and last conversation discussing the Fischhoff effect. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now your host, Dr. Rene Paul Gaultier. Hi everyone, I hope this podcast finds you doing wonderfully well. If you've heard the last few conversations, you know by now that I will be on site at University of Notre Dame as one of the official podcasters covering the 46th annual Fischhoff

Starting point is 00:00:50 competition from May 10 to 12. And this week, I'm bringing you five former winners of the competition to talk about their experience preparing for the performances and competing at Fischhoff, and about the wonderful adventures and opportunities that have followed their win. In this series, you hear about the Fischhoff effects with my guests Blaise Magnet from the Avalon String Quartet, Dorival Puccini from Axiom Brass Quintet, Matt Landry from the Acropolis Reed Quintet, Christopher Whitley from the Talia String Quartet, and Lydia Ray from the former Cairo String Quartet. Whether you're a musician about to compete at the competition, or a music lover looking for a fresh approach to

Starting point is 00:01:32 practicing and preparing for a concert, make sure to subscribe and tune in every day because those conversations are bursting with inspiration and extremely useful information. Each group has a unique and motivating story, and my guests are so generous with their insightful tips and advice. And now, please meet Lydia Ray, cellist with the former Cairo String Quartet. Let's go to the show. Lydia Ray, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you so much for asking me to be on, I'm happy to be here. Lydia, I'd like to jump right in. So would you please introduce yourself, tell us who you are and also let us in on the information

Starting point is 00:02:26 of the name of your group, the year you attended Fish Off, and the prize that you guys won. Yes, of course. So as previously stated, my name is Lydia Ray, and I am a 19-year-old cellist from the United States, currently based in Cleveland, as I am a freshman at the Cleveland Institute of Music. And I attended Fish Off in 2018 in the junior division category with the Cairo String Quartet, and we won gold in the junior division. And would you please tell us a little bit about your group how you guys met and how your group came into existence and what your activities are like today so I attended the academy of the music institute of Chicago for four years and that is where my group was based so we are all put into chamber groups at that academy and our academy

Starting point is 00:03:15 is actually known for having a pretty intense chamber program that really prepares students really well for competitions and then also for college. And a lot of alumni of the program have gone on to be in professional chamber groups as well. So I was in it for four years. And I was in this group, the Cairo String Quartet, with Joshua Brown, Thompson Wang, and Julian Rhee, who are actually all three violinists. So we didn't actually have a real violist in our string quartet. And Josh and I had played together the year previously in a piano quartet. And we got along really well. We worked really well together. So we knew that we wanted to be in a group together for the next year, which was all of our senior year in high school. And so we went through,

Starting point is 00:03:59 we have a process where we can request we want to work with and what coaches that we want to work with. And so we knew we wanted a string quartet. We knew we wanted to work together. And we knew that we wanted to have our coach be Rodolfo Vieira, who's a fantastic violinist based in the Chicago area that works at Northwestern and is also a coach at the Academy. So we requested each other at the end of the year after we had played together in our piano quartet for a year and we weren't really sure who the other two members were going to be because as I said before we didn't actually have a real violist in our group because academy is a really small program the year that I graduated from it there were 21 students and there was actually only one real

Starting point is 00:04:37 violist in the program total that year so we knew that there was probably going to be some switching around with violinist versus violist and we weren't really sure what that was going to be Thompson had been in the year in the program for a year already and then it was actually like the year that Kairos was formed it was actually Julian's first full year in academy and so Josh and I knew we would be together we knew we'd have string quartet we knew Rodolfo would be our coach but we showed up on the first day of academy and we're put in a group with as I said before Thompson and Julian as well and it was kind of just I think match made in heaven for what we were working on at the time and um yeah so that's where we received our coachings

Starting point is 00:05:16 from we met every saturday at academy we had two hours of chamber music every week so one hour with a coach and one hour on our own for rehearsals um but because we knew that we wanted to be a competitive group and we knew that we had competitions that we wanted to prepare for we generally met outside of that those times as well so we would often rehearse on fridays sometimes we would rehearse on Saturdays after academy because we knew that we needed to get all the time and that we could and we played a lot of repertoire for a junior group actually the week before we did Fish Off we also competed in the M Prize Chamber Arts Competition at the University of Michigan and for that we brought six movements so six pieces that we competed with

Starting point is 00:05:55 and then for Fish Off we brought five which was I think two more than any other group brought to that competition there might have been a couple groups that brought four but we had much more repertoire than a lot of the other groups that were competing and we planned for that so in the first semester of the year we worked really hard to learn a lot of repertoire really quickly so our first performance as a group we played three movements of our piece which is if anybody's familiar with how junior string groups work or junior groups work in general that is kind of a lot of repertoire generally you start with one and then you build from that and we started with three because we just knew since we were all seniors we were going to be dealing with a lot of scheduling

Starting point is 00:06:33 stuff when college auditions were coming around so we kind of back-ended our preparation for it and learned as much as we could as soon as we could and then we actually barely rehearsed it through the months of February through March because our schedules were insane we were going all over the country every week so for our auditions and stuff so there were a lot of times that we'd have rehearsals with missing one member or missing two members and you know just working with what we could at the time and then our preparation going into M Prize and then fish off the week after was pretty intense for a couple weeks leading into that and for those who are not familiar with the process of the junior category at fish off can you talk to us a little bit about

Starting point is 00:07:14 that how many pieces did you have to prepare and is there do you have to send in a recording how does that work yeah so for the fish off competition and for a lot of competitions like this you do have to pass through a pre-screening round initially and so for this for the junior category they take 24 groups and for the quarterfinal round so to get into the quarterfinal round you have to i think you send in two contrasting pieces i believe is what they ask for and i think they ask for around 15 minutes of time we apply to so many competitions i'm kind of getting them mixed up but i'm pretty sure it's 50 around 15 minutes and it's two different um pieces like contrasting pieces so that the jury can kind of assess your abilities on different levels and when they say

Starting point is 00:07:56 two contrasting pieces they generally mean from different time periods so my quartet played everything from Haydn to Bartok to Mendelssohn and things like that so that you could really showcase your different strengths and things like that and as I said before because we were so busy and we knew we would be so busy coming into the spring semester we actually recorded really early we recorded in December tapes were due in it was I think it was beginning of February and or mid-February something like that and we recorded beginning of December because we were like we don't have any other time to do this and we want to get it done and that way also we could send in the tapes that we needed to send in for the quarterfinal round and to get into the live

Starting point is 00:08:37 rounds but then also we would start working on our other repertoire that we needed to learn if we had made it into the live round which thankfully we did so yeah we had to send in those and then once you get to the live audition round you find out in about I think it's March something like that and then you have to send in all of your scores and everything for everything that you're going to be playing. So you have to decide well in advance what you're going to be bringing to the competition. And you have to send in all your scores. They require original scores. I was carrying something around like 16 scores or something by the time the year was over, just with all of our library scores and our printed score parts off the computer, just

Starting point is 00:09:13 everything like that. So they take 24 groups for the quarterfinal round, and then they cut that down to half for the semifinal round into 12 groups, and then they take three into the final. Wow. And from listening to you, I can see that you guys had really great planning skills and also a lot of self-motivation and dedication and had to make many sacrifices. How did your group prepare for the competition? Can you talk to us a little bit about the rehearsal process and how you guys worked on that repertoire? are? Yeah, of course. So like I said, I think something that really made our group work well together was, first of all, the fact that Josh and I had worked together before and liked how we worked together. That definitely helped because we kind of knew how each other rehearsed and we were accustomed to playing with each other already. And a really unusual thing about my group, which is not common at all, because as I mentioned before, we didn't have a real violist. So we had

Starting point is 00:10:09 three violinists and a cellist me and we had our first violinist and our violist switch pieces for half of our repertoire so Josh played violin for three pieces and then viola for three pieces and then Julian played first violin for three pieces and viola for three pieces and Thompson was our second violinist so that definitely kind of throws a wrench into things it ended up our being our repertoire was that Julian ended up playing our modern repertoire which was our Bartok our Gina and we did a piece by Nielsen he played those on first violin and then uh Josh did our classical and our romantic which was what did we play Mendelssohn and Haydn and oh Dvorak we did a slow movement of a Dvorak quartet so that's kind of how we ended up splitting it up where it was

Starting point is 00:10:56 kind of like whichever new piece we were bringing into our repertoire we would just balance out and say okay you played violin on this one so you're gonna play viola on this one and it worked out that they had that julian had the modern and josh had the classical and romantic things but that also is a pretty big wrench to throw into a junior group especially because considering that at these rounds you don't just play one movement you play multiple movements and for our quarterfinal round the judges choose what order you play your pieces in and they chose it in an order that we had to do two switches so usually if we had to if we were able to choose our own order we would have one of up start on viola and then end on beat or then end on violin or vice versa so that we would have

Starting point is 00:11:36 one switch but for the quarterfinal round of fish off and it's everything is timed too so you are timed and they cut you off when you hit your I believe it's 10 minutes for the quarterfinal round it's either 10 or 15 and when you hit that limit like you're done you can't keep playing so we had to do switches really quickly which props to them I don't obviously I'm the cellist I don't play an instrument like that but I can't even imagine having to flip back and forth and when people hear that that's what we did, they're like, they're crazy. And I'm like, yeah, a little bit. But Josh had played viola the year before in my piano quartet. We also had the same similar situation where we had our violinist and our violist switching. But Julian had never picked

Starting point is 00:12:14 up a viola until September, when we were formed end of August, I believe. And yeah, we started rehearsing and becoming a quartet in September. And that's when he learned to read alto clef. so that was one thing that was one hurdle we had to go over and he learned really quickly picked it up really quickly and um had a great viola sound so it wasn't really a problem but that is something that we had to deal with just because also when you're finding your group sound and you're learning how each other work and how a first violinist cues is we had to learn that for two different people because we were switching and essentially had two different group makeups for our repertoire so a really big part I think of preparing is knowing how to rehearse which is

Starting point is 00:12:56 something that academy really stresses and really teaches us how to do I think that's a really big part of the program as I mentioned before is their chamber music so a lot of times because we were all really busy as I mentioned we were all seniors in high school and taking college auditions and doing college applications we would rehearse generally one other day a week sometimes two if we were really coming up on a competition or a big performance and those would be for the most part marathon rehearsals like we would be in a room for four hours learning our Bartok or learning our Ginastera we learned the Ginastera that we did which was the first movement of his first string quartet in two weeks so we learned we had to learn things really quickly for things that

Starting point is 00:13:38 were coming up and a really big part of learning music quickly and putting it together quickly is playing from scores and always having a score in the rehearsal when you're working on things because scores clear up so many discrepancies that you might have in your individual parts depending on what edition you're using but also playing off of scores just allows you to see what else is happening in the group at the time and what you need to be focusing on and you can be like okay here the cellist and the second violinist are together so let's work on that or here the violinists are together so we need to work on that and it can bring things to light in a way that if you were just playing it through and trying to pick things up just by hearing them

Starting point is 00:14:18 that it might not be super clear if you're trying to do that so we would always rehearse with scores and be able to pick things out and you know big thing too is if we were doing duo group or trio work having one person that's watching the score while that's happening and just making sure you know pitches are correct but then also the rhythms are correct that they're articulating everything the same way their bow strokes are the same way a big thing that we worked on just in terms of sound and you know how we were working on that was playing exactly together is really hard you know playing everything with the same amount of bow hair on the string and the exact same articulation and the same shift and things like that and being able to make decisions as to when

Starting point is 00:14:57 you want it to be the same and when you want it to be different it's kind of a big artistic leap that junior groups have to kind of figure out for themselves and with their coach how they're going to do that our coach drilled us really hard on how we came to play everything completely in unison and completely together so even if we were you know working on a section he was like okay let's start at measure 26 and if we didn't all start exactly the same way we would redo it and we would redo it and we would redo it and we would redo it just until it was completely together coming in every single time and he would also do this thing i refer to it as looping i don't even know if that's what he called it but where we would take say an opening phrase or something

Starting point is 00:15:34 or we would take a repeated bow stroke that we would all have and we would just play it over and over and over until it completely gelled and you couldn't distinguish the separate instruments so we would have say our opening phrase of the Haydn and if we weren't quite sure how we wanted to phrase it you can sit around and talk about things but at the same time sometimes you just need to play them and figure it out and you might find out that how it happens in reality is not quite how you heard it in your head and so we would play like the same four measures again and again and again so get to the end of the four measures and then just go right back and start them again without necessarily talking in between because sometimes when you're talking you will be like

Starting point is 00:16:10 okay so you came in a little bit early that time but chances are the person already heard it that time and they just need to try it again or you know say the bow stroke isn't completely matching and the best way to fix that is to just do it over and over until you hear exactly how the other person is leading it and another big part I think is not having a first violinist or one person in the group dictate everything because if one person is dictating everything it's just people don't work well together some people of the group might not feel heard and I will say that in our in our group dynamic or whatever you can have people that are more you know take more of a leadership role and people that take more of a I don't want to say a follower role but maybe aren't quite as

Starting point is 00:16:50 vocal but making sure that everybody is heard when they need to be heard is a really big thing I am considered the mom of the group if you ask any of them they will tell you that I'm the mom um so you know sometimes I would be a little bit more vocal and I'd be like okay that was really not good we really need to do that again but at the same time whenever we would stop and um somebody else had something to say we always took it into consideration and if we weren't quite sure if we agreed we would try it so try everything out that everybody brings to the table because you never know you half the time we would change our minds as to what we liked or as we were really going through things through the year and playing pieces that we had performed

Starting point is 00:17:24 over and over again by the time that we got to fish off you know we would change our minds and we'd be like, okay, so now since we're doing a repeat, let's do it the way that Josh suggested first, and then we'll do it Julian's way the second time. And sometimes we really liked it. And sometimes we were like, you know what, let's do Josh's way, but then change this about it the second time. So you really can kind of come to more of a consensus. And that means people agree on it more. And if people agree on it more, they are much more willing to do it. Lydia, these are so great. I love how you talk about knowing how to rehearse and prioritize and this tip about playing from scores that's so important very very important and I'm loving this technique of the

Starting point is 00:18:01 looping you talked about because it really helps I think a group develop an interpretation organically and in the way that probably would help a group find their own way of playing things because exactly like you say you can talk and intellectualize things but sometimes as four musicians come together, there's so much that comes with the nonsense and you just sit and play together and there is something that happens. And when all four people start listening and adjusting, there's really magical things that can happen there. And everything you mentioned about this respectful teamwork, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing all of these wonderful tips and ideas and concepts. Yeah, of course. Now, can you talk to us a little bit about

Starting point is 00:18:50 the experience during the competition itself? Yeah. So we all, Julian and his mom drove to the competition and then Thompson, Josh and I, and then Josh's mom and Josh's little sister all drove to the competition together. That's generally how it worked out just in terms of our carpooling situation. So we have a lot of fun road trip memories getting there. So we drove from Chicago to um Notre Dame which or Notre Dame since it's Indiana which is where the competition is and um another fun thing about the competition because academy or MIC academy which is what the school that we were representing and where we were from sends several groups to the competition every year as we generally all stay in the same hotel and so you get kind of get to hang out with your friends

Starting point is 00:19:38 at the same time and it's a really fun time just at the end of the year to kind of chill out with each other. And it's a way to sort of de-stress while the competition is happening. It's nice to have friends in your support group there. And our director from Academy was there as well as our coach from Academy. So you get, you know, a nice supportive group of people. And that can really help during the competition to have that to fall back on. So juniors compete, as I said, there are 24 groups, which is a huge amount of groups. So and we were J17. And so junior for 17. So the senior groups are referred to as s it's just how they distinguish um us and also because they don't use your names when they announce you at first and so you're just j17 because that's a way for

Starting point is 00:20:23 the judges to kind of keep it a little bit more anonymous if you will so we were j17 which means we played in the late afternoon because they go in numerical order and also this is random so you're assigned a random number we didn't get to pick what we were and so you are assigned a time and for the quarterfinals as I mentioned the judges pick everything but you don't know what they pick until you go backstage for your warm-up time 10 minutes beforehand so the judges pick everything and they tell you what order they want you to play it in and they give you the little runners backstage give you these little sticky tabs that you can use to mark your music because they would give us really weird cuts like they wanted us to play the first page and a half of

Starting point is 00:21:04 Bartok and then we just ended it and it was so weird and I was like I want to go on but here we are um so they choose that and i think they had us go from it was something like bartok to hide into divorce it was something it was a really weird order that if we had picked it i we definitely would not have chosen that so they picked i believe three pieces for our quarterfinal round it was three or four of our pieces that they heard in our quarterfinal round and yeah judges get to pick everything for that and the other thing that's kind of a disadvantage for the juniors is that the quarterfinal round doesn't happen on the stage that you see all the fish off photographs from you know the beautiful hall that they have there that is not where the juniors compete the

Starting point is 00:21:46 juniors compete in this little auditorium that is meant mostly for theater work and for spoken word so the acoustics are just very strange and you don't get to warm up in the hall beforehand either so you kind of are adjusting to the acoustics while it's happening it's really dry and so it can be really hard to like blend sound and to hear across the stage to your colleagues working with you. So that's kind of a, something that throws you for a loop a little bit when you first get out there, especially because in our group, Thompson and Josh had competed at fish off before with other groups in previous years, but it was Julian's mind first time. So that was our first time on any of the stages. And it was our first time as a group on those stages was as we were

Starting point is 00:22:25 competing. So that is what happens for the quarterfinal round. And then that happens on a Friday and juniors don't hear anything for the rest of the day. We don't know who goes on. We don't know who made it um you go back chill at your hotel maybe rehearse if you wanted to a little bit but we were so fried we i don't think we did um so we did that and then saturday morning you show up and there's a meeting for all the junior division quarter finalists and we all go to this meeting and tom rosenberg who runs the competition gives a huge long speech about fish off and its history and why it's important and everybody's sitting there is like can you just announce already please but he does have some really good points that he brings up in terms of

Starting point is 00:23:07 the fact that competing for the junior versus the senior division can be a very different thing actually the group that won the senior division and the grand prize last year was the calisto string quartet which is from cleveland institute of music where i study now coincidentally and they are still together as a quartet and they're going to go into school as a graduate quartet in residence next year and they're preparing for other competitions this summer you know they are a group and they're planning to stay together for the foreseeable future whereas the junior groups a lot of times you break up after it happens just because people graduate and people go to different schools and you don't all necessarily stay together for more than one year and so a lot

Starting point is 00:23:44 of what he talks about is that if you go to this competition and you don't necessarily win but you played well that is still an incredibly valuable experience to have and you never know you might come back again with a different group in the same division or you might come back as a senior and be able to compete in that one and just having that experience and learning how to compete and as I said everybody that goes through that quarterfinal rounds has to learn how to play music with 10 minutes of notice you know so that's that's something that is really I think specific to that competition so we talked a lot about that in terms of the competition and just taking what you can in terms of having a valuable experience and also something that is kind of

Starting point is 00:24:23 specific to this competition is the junior groups that don't go on into the semi-finals are then invited back that Saturday morning for master classes with some of the jurors. So you still get an opportunity to really communicate with the jurors and get feedback from them and have another performance opportunity, even if you don't go on until the semifinal round. So that's what happens on Saturday morning. They announce all the groups and they announce them in the order that they're going to be playing later. And so from those 24 quarterfinalists, they take 12 and my group was called second to last. So we're sitting there on pins and needles for some reason the entire year whatever competition we were doing we were always called last for m prize the

Starting point is 00:24:59 week previously we um they'd go from six finalists to three or six semi-finalists to three finalists and we were the last finalist group called like we just always were the last group called for whatever division we were doing um so we would just be on pins and needles for ages and because you sit through this whole probably half hour long meeting and then they start to announce the groups and as they're getting down you're like okay wow there are not that many spots left like who else are they gonna call and we were called second to last which means we performed 11th out of 12th which i think worked to our advantage i we liked playing towards the end of the competition it gave us more time to you know warm up and chill out and kind of de-stress from the stress of having

Starting point is 00:25:38 that announcement ceremony earlier in the day so yeah they announce all the groups and then everybody disperses and the semi-finalist groups are given a um a warm-up room time and then when they're competing and while this whole thing is going on the senior division has started so this is why the quarter finalists and the semi-finals are in different rooms for the junior division it's just because there are so many of them they can't put them all into the same big stage but for the semi-finals you do get to play in the big hall which is nice but again at the same time it was our first time playing in that hall was when we walked on the stage for the semi-finals so you're still constantly adjusting to acoustics and how things sound in that bigger space so after

Starting point is 00:26:22 that announcement we actually went into the hall to hear some of the senior division groups play which I highly recommend doing if you have the opportunity because senior division groups are just you know they're just in a different world in terms of where they are in their careers and their education and things like that and so it was really cool to hear some of the groups perform and some of the groups were performing pieces that we were working on and so you can take inspiration from that and learn things from them or you can also learn music that you're like oh hey that's a really cool piece and I would love to play that sometime so I highly recommend going to hear senior division groups or any other people competing in a competition that you're doing if

Starting point is 00:26:58 you get a chance I think it's a really valuable experience but I do say that I cannot listen to anybody competing in my same category before I play I want I know some people can I cannot I could listen to senior division groups and I was like I do not want to hear any of the juniors I cannot deal with it I just don't want I just need to stay you know you do need to say have somewhat of your own guard up and just stay focused on what you're doing um so then we had our warm-up time uh which they gave us a room I think it was for about probably about a half hour 45 minutes something like that that we were given a warm-up time and then we competed in the scene or in the semi-finals and for semi-finals we were able to choose our own repertoire so we could choose what

Starting point is 00:27:39 we played and what order we played it in but they did still cut us off in between pieces if they wanted us to move on to the next thing so we had the semi-final round and then there was a short break for dinner and everything for us it was pretty short because as i said we competed second to last so there wasn't a ton of time for us in between when we played and then there's a meeting that night where they announced the finalists so then you go into another hall at the university and it's everybody's in there the senior division groups for both strings and wins and then all of the junior groups are all in this room and then that's when they announce who made it to the finals which again my group was the last one called in the last category in the last category

Starting point is 00:28:21 but so we're just sitting there on pins and needles and for every announcement that we had at every competition that year like we would hold hands like I would just be shaking in my seat like waiting for this like just so close to just throwing up I was like I am so nervous this is horrible um i think announcements are the worst part of any competition ever it's so much worse than actually competing um so they go through that and then they announced the finalists and for groups that aren't finalists um they get to go and talk to the jurors and get feedback from them because they have this big ice cream social that night so you get to go and talk to the jurors if you're a finalist you are not allowed to go talk to the jurors and then we also so and since

Starting point is 00:29:00 we were finalists after everybody else had left the room we had to declare because we also got to choose what we played for finals so we had to declare what we played for finals we also had to declare what we would play for the winners gala if we won um because there's a second performance that next day and then we yeah we just had to fill out all of our information that they would need for prizes and things like that and then you go home and then you try to sleep which i did not i slept horribly I was up like I was up for 90% of the night I could not sleep I was just so nervous and then the juniors finalists compete did we compete first I don't remember I don't remember if juniors or seniors go first but you compete in the same hall that the semi-finals are in

Starting point is 00:29:44 so we competed and that semi-final or the final round is the longest round so we got to play most of our repertoire in that round and then there's a professional photographer there so right after you compete after you're so nervous and also again we played last that that day too so we were towards the end of all of our um rounds just coincidentally you don't get to pick when you actually play so then after we had that after we competed then we had pictures with the professional photographer that's there because they take them of all the of all the groups generally but then especially the final sets so that they can use them for promo and then you know if you want them for your own use after you can and then you go back into the hall and everybody's in the hall

Starting point is 00:30:27 you know most of the groups a lot of the groups have stayed to watch the finals that didn't make the finals and then all the finalists are there and you sit in the first few rows of the hall and this part is all broadcast on a local i think i don't remember what station was but it's on like a local public television station so it's all being broadcast there and then it's a 30 minute long speech that they give about their donors and thank you for coming and we're so glad to have you here and I just wanted to throw up the entire time I'm so nervous and so we're sitting there and they start to call groups up one by one and the way that they do is they call in three two one for each division and so as soon as they called the second group since there's only three finalists

Starting point is 00:31:12 we knew we had won and like I still kind of get chills thinking about that moment just sitting there and I was I think I was holding Thompson's hand and Thompson's holding like it's like I said we held hands for all of it because I was just shaking and the moment that he just called it and called the second group and we knew that we had won it was I just I don't know that I've ever really experienced something like that because winning a chamber music competition is really different from winning a solo competition because the amount of teamwork and the amount of effort that has to go into every single rehearsal and you know every other competition we had leading up to that every other performance we had every radio interview we had leading up to that

Starting point is 00:31:53 it's all as a team and if one person isn't in it 100 and doesn't have the same ideas as you you're not going to get anywhere um and so to go out our senior year like that with you know people that I had really grown to love and spend we spent a ton of time and we were you know the four way I hung out with them the most out of anybody at academy that senior year and so we just had gotten really close and spent a lot of time together by that point um and I'm kind of getting chills thinking about it now I love them so much yeah so they called our our name so we were Kairos and they called us for first prize and I yeah there's there's a video of it and I'm I'm so close to tears in that moment like it was just it was such a cool moment to have and so because

Starting point is 00:32:37 fish off is a really big chamber competition too you know i came we came off stage after they announced it and we had to grab our instruments and then turn right back around because then they have as i said the winners gala which for the seniors is they have the senior um gold win division and then the senior gold string division compete again for the grand prize but we were done because it's just one junior division so we were done competing but we got to perform again and so we came off stage grabbed our instruments turned right back around and then pretty much went back on stage um and that is one of the most fun performances i have ever had in my life because it was our first performance in a while that hadn't wasn't competing um because we did a lot

Starting point is 00:33:15 of competitions leading up into this and then to come out of having technically three rounds for this competition that we had already gone through and since we had already just played all that same repertoire that we played for the gala earlier in the day competing but now it was for fun and we got to just let go and have fun with it I mean we played the first movement of Mendelssohn F minor string quartet that was one of the pieces that we played on the gala and the finale is the fastest that we have ever played it like we just we went off because we were just so relieved and excited and it was so fun like we were just smiling the entire time like my face was just glowing and it was yeah that's like a memory that I'm never going to forget is playing on that stage and having it

Starting point is 00:33:56 broadcast and having people that you love in the audience and our coach was there my mom was there you know our the director from academy was there and so the junior division groups you know perform then and then the senior division groups go on to perform or to compete essentially for the grand prize round and then they call everybody back up stage all the gold medalists and then everybody else up on stage and you take pictures and you get to talk to the judges and then you're done and you're like wow i kind of didn't sleep for 48 hours but that was totally worth it and you know what this is a great segue into my next question which is what comes next what is the aftermath and what did fish off bring to you yeah so a cool thing about fish off is the prizes

Starting point is 00:34:40 that they give out in terms of performance opportunities and so for the junior division i our group got to be on from the top which was really nice because we did from the top in october of 2018 when we hadn't played together since may of 2018 because as i said we were all seniors in high school and i am a freshman at the cleveland institute of music but all three of the guys actually go to new england conservatory now they are all violin performance majors they're all in three different studios um and doing really well but it was kind of fun to go back and to see them at their school because we we recorded it at at boston so we did it at jordan hall and so we went back and we got to do from the top from the competition from the top has a lot of cool outreach

Starting point is 00:35:23 opportunities that they do for their young artists and we got to go to a charter school in Boston and work with some of the students there and then we performed at Jordan Hall and we performed the Mendelssohn again which that would piece for us was really something that it was one of the first pieces that we had started and something that we knew was kind of reliable at that point in time and so we just got to have fun with it and you know again performing a piece that you've done in a lot of competition rounds and then getting to just perform it for fun is a really nice experience because you kind of let go a little bit um and just let yeah just get to let go and have fun with it and for us it was a really nice um reunion that we got to have um we aren't a

Starting point is 00:36:04 group together anymore as i said junior division groups typically don't stay together just because of where you are in your career at that point in time I know I'll work with them all again at some point in life probably it's all it's a small world and we keep in touch still so that is what we got to do after fish off which was really nice and it was a lot of fun and I know that for me when I was a young musician I was getting so much out of doing competitions for for you how was that what do you feel like you got personally out of competing? I think at a competition like Fish Off, where it is much more of an overall event than it is necessarily a competition. You know, there's people from the local community that come and watch it. There's people from the not so local

Starting point is 00:36:49 community that come and watch it. As I said, it's broadcast on television for the Winners Gala. So people that live nearby, you know, might just happen to be watching it because they turn on the TV in their homes and weren't even really planning on it. But they get to watch some really great chamber music performances that are happening nearby. The sense of community that an event like that brings is really special because I got to meet a lot of people there that I know I'll work again or work with again in the future or I actually sort of met my roommate here at college through that because another girl that I had met and was competing in another group at a couple different competitions that I had done that year knew that I was going to CIM and then knew my

Starting point is 00:37:30 current roommate through her pre-college academy was like oh I met this girl that's going to CIM and then my roommate texted me was like hi do you have a roommate yet and I didn't and now we are great friends so you know you get to meet a lot of really cool people from an experience like that you also get to meet and interact with some really esteemed faculty and musicians that are the jurors for a competition like that you know for us Paul Katz for example served on the jury which he's a really big name in the cello world and I had never actually met him before before the competition and so I got to speak with him after you get a lot of really valuable valuable feedback you know even if you aren't going on necessarily as a group you still can learn so much from what the jurors have

Starting point is 00:38:11 to say and you know a lot of times they'll be like oh yeah we really enjoyed your performance you can work on this next time and it's things that you don't remember because it's like okay if I once I brought it to this level how much farther can I take it and there's always people that are willing to help you with that and Lydia do you have any advice for the young musicians that are about to compete I'd say first and foremost have fun with it and remember that you're there with a group you're not there as a soloist you're not there only representing yourself you are there representing your group in a lot of cases your academy or your pre-college academy whatever you come from where your group was formed and so it's a really good learning

Starting point is 00:38:53 experience because you know especially if you are coming in as a junior you get to have this experience where you're not quite at that senior level but there's still a lot of pressure I would say for sure there's still a lot of pressure on you and you know you want to perform best you want to do your best but do it because you want to represent yourself well not because you want to beat someone else um and come into it with this mindset of what can I learn from every opportunity community and just open like as I said was said before listen to as many other groups as you can you'll find people that you're like wow they sound really great and I hope I can work with them someday or you might find a piece that you really like or you might find people that you

Starting point is 00:39:34 eventually end up going to school with the classical musical world classical music world is so small um that I think the more people that you can meet and give a good impression of yourself is really important and it's also you know it is a professional setting so while you are having fun and while you might hang out with your friends at the hotel later, it's a really good experience to learn how to present yourself professionally in a stressful situation and learn how you react in a situation like that. You know, how do you react with the people at the competition that are running the competition, either the jurors or people that are just the runners or taking care of your music for you or the stagehands, but also your group itself and your coach. Learn how you

Starting point is 00:40:15 are in a situation like that and learn every time how can you can improve your attitude in a situation like that because people might not necessarily remember who got what prize at a competition but they will remember who they liked at a competition and I think that's something really important for young people to take that is so true I completely agree with you Lydia I think that hearing your account of your experience at Fischhoff and hearing about all this wonderful insight you have. And this great advice, I think is so valuable for the listeners. I'm so happy that I could talk with you today. But before we go, can you tell us where to find you? And where can people follow you? Because I personally follow you on Instagram. And I find you so inspiring. I

Starting point is 00:41:03 love watching your career grow. There's a lot going on. What are you up to these days? Oh, thank you so much. That is so sweet. Yeah, you can find me on Instagram at Lydia underscore Scorcello. And that's where I post a lot of day-to-day life, what it's like as a conservatory student. I'm a music performance major here at the Cleveland Institute of Music. And, you know, just follow along with travels, competitions. I try to keep it pretty real in terms of what my day-to-day life is. I also do have a website, www.lydia-ray, my last name spelled R-H-E-A.com. and that's where you can find longer YouTube links of me playing also my event schedule. So where I'm going to be performing next. And I think that is it in terms of where you can find

Starting point is 00:41:49 me on the internet. My YouTube is also under my name. Yeah. I'm just about to finish up my freshman year here at the Cleveland Institute of music. I have finals coming up very soon and my final quizzes and stuff in the next couple of weeks. And then I have some exciting summer plans. So if you stay tuned to my Instagram and my website, you should check those out because you might find out where I'm performing next. Oh, this is a great cliffhanger. I love it. Lydia, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for asking me. I had such a good time and Fish Off is such a special thing to me and to a lot of people. So I'm happy I could speak about it today.

Starting point is 00:42:35 and there you have it i hope this conversation and the ones that preceded it brought you a ton of valuable information applicable strategies and tips and lots of inspiration now it's competition time so make sure to follow me on instagram for live action from fish off and tune in in the coming weeks for more episodes covering the Fish Off experience. Also, make sure to visit fishoff.org and their Facebook page, facebook.com slash thefishoff, to get more info on the live streaming of the performances. That's right, you will be able to witness these incredible young musicians from everywhere in the world. As always, you can visit mindoverfinger.com for the show notes which have more information about the competition and today's guest and I'd love to

Starting point is 00:43:34 hear from you so please take a screenshot of the episode share on Instagram and tag me at mindoverfinger tag Lydia at Lydia underscore cello and tag fish off competition at fish off chamber music and use the hashtag fish off 2019 that's f i s c h o f f 2019 so we can see that you're listening, share it on our stories, and also give you some love. To everyone competing at Fish Off, I wish you good luck and an amazing experience. Once again, thank you for listening, and à bientôt!

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 035 The Fischoff Effect: Lydia Rhea – former Kairos String Quartet

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