JAVS Spring 2025

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me and Melia following it with saucer-sized eyes while Atar stoically ignored its presence despite being dive bombed during his Ciaccona. The party afterward was possibly even better, with many of my former mentors in attendance and Mimi Zweig’s peerless cooking. Two days later we recorded our movements in Auer Hall and went our separate ways, full to the brim with that fuzzy feeling of accomplishment and inspiration. The last part of the project was editing, mixing, mastering and releasing the recording. We acted as our own producers, and each cut together a performance we were proud of. Grammy-award winning engineer Dan Nichols of Aphorism Studios worked his magic on the tracks to make us sound our best. Ron Arad designed the cover art (and if you don’t know who Ron Arad is, look him up. He is Atar’s brother, and this is a talented family!). I designed the layout for the rest of the packaging and released it through my new record label SBOV Music (Sounds Better On Viola). This was our second release, and if you want your own copy of Partita Party on CD, you can find it at www.sbovmusic.com. It is also available on your favorite streaming platform. This unique project was a pleasure to be a part of, and we hope it will inspire other performers to write and share their own music! ***

In October of 2023, we all returned to Bloomington having written our movements. Bloomington always brings a flood of good memories, and I spent some time that first day walking around enjoying the nostalgia. The schedule for the week included rehearsals, teaching, a discussion panel with current IU students, and a recording session. The concert program included our newly composed Partita Party , other works we had written for ourselves, and my arrangement of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 for five violas. The recording session was for the EP release of Partita Party. The discussion panel highlighted our experience as performer-composers, as well as the options available to modern professional musicians. IU has built an impressive infrastructure for career development since I was a student, which was great to see. Yuval was doing double duty teaching for Atar that week, and we had the pleasure of watching him give a masterclass for the IU violists. He gave caring and insightful suggestions, and we watched in awe as he worked with a student on his own composition, demonstrating passages as though he was the composer himself. We performed the concert to a packed and enthusiastic audience, including a bat that emerged and flew around the hall about 20 minutes in! The video footage includes

From left to right: Atar, Yuval, Rose, Duncan, Melia. Photo courtesy of Rose Wollman.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 2025