MARLBORO — I inherited a violin and music (“Estrellita - Mexican Serenade”) from my great-uncle Russel Hayes in Pennsylvania, a fiddler who I knew only when I was a baby.
My father, Paul August Andreas Schulz, taught us many old two-part German songs in Gräfelfing, near Munich. We sang on all our hikes “Wach Nachtigall” and “Meins Herzens Schöne.” We sang rounds: “Sitzt a kloans Vogerl,” “Es Tönen die Lieder,” “Rosenstock, Holder,” “Dat Du Meen Levter Bist.” My mother, Ellen Russel Hayes, had a lovely voice and sang us spirituals to put us to sleep: “Swing Low” and “I Got a Robe.”
After the war, in 1946, my three sisters, my mother, and I left my father behind in Germany and went again to the grandparents' 300-year-old house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I went to a farm school at Unionville and studied violin with Eugenia Matz, playing François Schubert's “L'Abeille.”
Although I was accepted at age 14 to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, I was sent to the Quaker-run George School, where I boarded. It then had a meagre music department. In assembly, I played “Souvenir,” by František Drdla. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II also sent their kids there, and everyone listened endlessly to their musicals, “South Pacific” and “Oklahoma.” A song we often sang was “Tea for Two” by Vincent Youmans.
After high school in 1953, my sister Sonia and I went to be with my father in Munich; she studied at the University and I at the Conservatory. I took every possible course, including orchestra, where I had to play viola (“Gretchaninoff Waltz”) and participate in Eurhythmics and choir. In a concert, I played “Concerto No. 4 in D Major,” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
I stayed on for half a year and studied with Uli Blecher, just graduated from Munich Music Academy, who took me to a student seminar in Bayreuth, where we played Franz Joseph Haydn's “Lark Quartet in G Major.”
At Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, 1955–1959, I had a big scholarship and the violin teacher, Dorothy DeLay, came in once a week from Juilliard School of Music. My junior year, I switched to Robert Koff of the Juilliard Quartet, after being with him in Aspen Music School in Colorado for the summer. For my senior recital, I played Mozart's “A Major Sonata K. 526.”
That summer I went to Meadowmount, a boot camp for string players, studying with Ivan Galamian and, again, Dorothy DeLay. That was the first time for me to practice four hours a day plus chamber music ... strenuous! The next summer I also went there and lived with Dorothy. I took Itzhak Perlman to his lessons with Galamian and sat in on them. I took two lessons with the famous man: Bach A minor suite and Tchaikovsky concerto.
During 1959–1960, I worked at Brooklyn College and at the Guggenheim Museum and trained with the National Orchestral Association. I continued lessons with Dorothy and played gratis for a semi-professional opera company, including Tosca, “Vissi d'Arte” by Giacomo Puccini.
Auditions for the Kansas City Philharmonic included Édouard Lalo's “Symphonie Espagnole.” The Philharmonic gave me free studies at the conservatory toward a master's degree simultaneously, and I studied with Hans Schweiger, the Hungarian concert master. I would perform a Mendelssohn violin concerto.
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I met my first husband, Larry Gay, when I worked at the Putney School, teaching strings and chamber music. (Sheldon Weeks had brought me to Vermont in 1956 to interview for the job, but I didn't know then that he'd become my second husband.) Larry played cornet in our performance of Handel's Messiah, and I soloed in the Brandenburg Concerto.
Switzerland is where I had my first baby, Jennifer Gay, while her father was studying at the ETH in Zurich. I met folks by playing in two quintets, violin and viola. Among the music: Antonín Dvorák's “American Quartet.”
Then we crisscrossed the United States looking for a graduate school in physical chemistry and landed eventually in Eugene, Oregon, where he earned his doctorate. I helped form a symphony, where I played as concert mistress. Concerts included Béla Bartók's “Contrasts” and Bohuslav Martinu's “Three Madrigals.” In Oregon, I taught some talented students and had a second baby, Carl Gay.
Returning to Vermont in 1969, I landed at Marlboro College, where I taught solfège, played in the Vermont Symphony and other ensembles, and gave my first big recital at age 40 in Brattleboro. In the 1970s, several of us started the now-thriving Brattleboro Music School.
I took recorder lessons for a year and played viols in an old music group: “Flow My Tears,” by John Dowland. For a while, I played music, including “Country Gardens,” for a Morris dancers team taught by two Marlboro psychology professors.
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In 1980, I re-established an old friendship with Sheldon Weeks, who was running an educational research unit at the University of Papua New Guinea. I joined him there, and we had a late child, Kristina Weeks.
Some of our children lived with us there for a while, and I taught at the National Arts School in Port Moresby. I also concertized with four wonderful pianists over my 11 years there. A friend wrote a highlands-inspired flageolet-filled composition I played at the National Museum: Simbu/Enga Courting Song, which sounds like a jaws harp and Beethoven's motives simultaneously.
When things got too wild and woolly in Papua New Guinea, we moved to Gaborone, Botswana in 1991 and lived there until returning to Vermont in 2013. The Botswana Defence Force immediately found me and took me off to their meagre building for training 12 string players for an orchestra.
There was no heat and no cooling. We worked outdoors when it was boiling inside and indoors when it was freezing outside. I lasted four years there. A recurrent piece with them was “Don't Cry for Me Argentina” by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
I taught part-time a bit at Thornhill School, at Maru-a-Pula School, and from home. I sang in the Gaborone Singers, concertized with Beate Toyka, Louise Abukar, Gudrun Watzenböck, and Olga Merker as well as with David Slater and others.
Margaret Taylor has often assisted; Geraldine de Almeida and Darius Kambwe a few times. Once I brought up some players from Mahikeng for a concert in the Cathedral for that wonderful “American Quartet” by Dvorák and “Thula Thula,” a lullaby from South Africa.
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I end my story with a performance of “Tea for Two.” I dedicate it to my partner and husband Sheldon, who has made these years full of adventure, books, Quakerism, and challenges galore.
“Just tea for two and two for tea and me for you and you for me ... we will raise a family ... can't you see how happy we would be....”