JAVS Spring 2013

NM : (I’m gonna take its portrait. Nadia, this is so you, this little sardine.)

thing else that I do is project oriented. And yMusic is really, really comfortable in a lot of different sce narios, but that’s a fixed group. NM : Right. It’s always the same thing, and it’s a lot of under-loved instruments—or maybe just viola and trumpet. NS : It’s viola and trumpet and also clarinet and flute and violin and cello. But I love that group just because it’s some of my favorite players I have ever worked with in my life, and we’re doing creative things. The thing about yMusic is that in some ways we’re behaving more like a band than a string quar tet. We’re trying to book venues that we can fill, the way bands book venues they think that they can fill, sell the number of tickets you think you can sell, get a guarantee from the presenter and do it in that manner where . . . [ waiter comes by ]. (Oh, fried oys ter! Mmmm.) NM : Right now we’re all in a position to kind of choose how we make money. If you wanted to you could go teach full-time at MSM or whatever and one assumes to get paid that way—but actually, there’s another way to do it that is a little bit more crab-wise—because you lose money on this thing and you gain money on that thing.

So the other sort of key thing that we should hit on which kind of goes back to everything, which is like, how have you branched out? Like you can’t just commission pieces all the time. How have ACME and yMusic figured into your life as a chamber musician? NS : yeah. Exactly. I think it’s a reality if you want to be a violist—unless you have a teaching job or a symphony orchestra position that is basically just really steady work—you have to cobble together a lot of things in order to make that happen. The thing that is most important to me is working with composers and commissioning new works and pre miering those things. So that is my number one— you can’t really make a living doing that—in fact, that has been something that for my entire life prior to like last year actually cost me money, whereas everything else made me money. And you know, you do it because you love it. That’s turning around finally, which is great. But yeah, I teach, I have a radio show, and my chamber music groups are ACME and yMusic. ACME is a new-music ensem ble that is expandable and contractible depending on the project. It is a very project-oriented group itself in a way that really resonates with me because every

NS : Right. It involves a cer tain elasticity of credit, but it really does work. NM : In the model of how bands work, like they lose money on tours but then they make money on festi vals. NS : On the other side of this, the sort of non-profit y side, what’s interesting is that there are those who are really excited by what peo ple are doing to create new music and like, those are people you want to hit up

Members of the musical group yMusic; from left to right: Hideaki Aomori, Clarice Jensen, CJ Camerieri, Nadia Sirota, Alex Sopp, and Rob Moose (photo courtesy of Ilya Nikhamin)

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