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Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
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Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Dan Flanagan, a solo and orchestra violinist,
a concert master of two opera orchestras,
a composer, and a violin instructor at University of California, Berkeley.
You can find the resources mentioned by Dan Flanagan during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
♪ Dan Flanagan plays the violin ♪
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Hello, and welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Dan Flanagan, who is a solo and orchestra violinist,
a concert master of two opera orchestras, a composer, and a violin instructor
at University of California, Berkeley.
Welcome, Dan.
Thank you.
I have read your impressive biography on your website.
You've done a lot of things and you're doing a lot of things right now also.
I would be interested in who you are,
a little bit of presentation of yourself.
Sure. Well, I'm from New Jersey.
I am 46 years old.
I've been playing the violin since I was four, and
I suppose you could say it's been my whole life.
I've been playing in orchestras since I was eight years old.
I knew that's what I was going to do when I was about 10.
I went to College in Cleveland, went to grad school in Oregon,
and I've been living in California for about 20 years.
The last 15 of which in Berkeley, and I love it here.
I play a lot of concerts, tons and tons of concerts.
I've been composing a lot lately.
I've been commissioning a lot of new music.
Right now, California, and you are involved in a lot
of different orchestras and ensembles.
You're also a chamber musician.
Yes. I play concert master of the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera
and concert master of the West Edge Opera, which is a summer festival here
in the East Bay of San Francisco.
I teach violin at UC Berkeley.
I usually have about 15 students there, majors and non-majors.
And I have two chamber ensembles, Trio Solano, it's a string trio.
I recently founded the Berkelium String Quartet.
We named ourselves after the element that was discovered in Berkeley in 1949.
We have our first concert coming up in about three weeks, so that's exciting.
Then I have The Bow and the Brush, which is a personal project.
I started it during the pandemic.
I began commissioning my favorite composers to write pieces
inspired by paintings, and then composed several myself.
It just got big.
We have 36 pieces, 11 of which I composed,
and I released a solo album a year and a half ago,
of 14 of the solo pieces.
I've been touring around wherever I can get it booked.
I did a Carnegie Hall recital this past March, which is a really big deal for me.
I performed it at libraries and universities and art museums
and new music series all across the United States, France, Italy.
I was just at the American Library of Paris and University of Rome.
Yeah, it's been wonderful.
I guess that when you are doing that work, you are also discussing
with the audience and how they have felt their own interpretations of
these paintings that you're performing.
Yes. I think that's a crucial part.
The composers all interpret the art differently, which has fascinated me.
In some cases, they just conjure up the same feeling that the painting has.
That's how I compose my pieces.
Others take an element of it that reminds them of something else,
that reminds them of something else, and then go in a direction.
And I think that's amazing.
Many of the audiences aren't new music
aficionados, so they're not interested
in extremely experimental, weird-sounding stuff.
That's a very small niche.
And they all tell me that when I explain who the artist was and how
the composer interpreted that into their music, it makes them
enjoy the piece far more than they would have without the explanation.
So it's become quite a bit of a lecture here, and it's a lot of fun.
I'm presenting it at the American String Teachers Association
conference in March, where it will be far more talking than playing.
And I'll be addressing string teachers from across the country and talking about
the different pieces and how they can utilize it in their teaching and performing.
For those of you who are listening to
the podcast in an audio form, I can see
behind Dan a lot of different paintings.
What are these?
Can you talk a little bit about these paintings?
Are some of them part of your work of putting paintings into music?
Yes.
I've been obsessed with with the visual arts as well as music for my whole life.
I have paintings all around my little apartment.
Some of them are brand new paintings by San Francisco Bay Area artists,
and others are 19th century French paintings.
That's one of my favorite things.
None of them are artists that you've heard of because I'm a normal person
and I can't afford those.
But a lot of the people who are in the French Impressionist
exhibits but didn't get famous.
And that's just fascinating to me.
So there are several paintings in this room right here.
For example, there's a portrait to my left that you can't see of me,
painted by my friend Paul Gibson.
He's a San Francisco artist.
And it depicts me as an obsessed violinist, and you see violins
swirling around my head.
And a local composer, Shinji Eshima, chose that as his inspiration.
And he made the piece about
my collection of art and put together
a collection of violinistic techniques.
And it's a very beautiful, soulful piece that I've been performing a lot.
Next to that, there's an abstract painting by Nikki Vismara, and
Libby Larsen shows that.
That's one of the pieces where she depicts the mood of it, a simultaneous busyness
of all the blue dots all over the place, along with the stillness that
you feel from the painting as a whole.
Directly behind me, there's a painting by Robert Antoine Pinchon from 1929,
and it's the Grand Place in Brussels.
Jose Gonzalez Granero picked that as his inspiration.
And he went a different direction.
He visited the Grand'Place when he was a little kid.
It was the first time he left Spain, and he remembers a strolling violinist.
So he wrote a piece called Cadenza, number 2.
And It's about this gypsy violinist playing the violin in the square.
And the Bow and the Rush has expanded beyond paintings
that I have in my living room.
There are paintings inspired by Monet and Dali and Georgia O'Keeffe
and people like that.
It started with what's in my living room because of the pandemic shutdown.
And in 2020, I was just recording pieces to put on YouTube.
I see.
On your website, it's written that you are a violinist, a composer,
an educator, and a collector.
So now the collector, I see it takes a lot of sense for me, but it's not
your only collection, right?
I saw something about...
something that was featured in a documentary.
I'm also just obsessed with dead violinists.
I love the whole trajectory of violin history, and all music history, really,
but particularly violin.
I collect concert programs from the past. I have several scrapbooks filled
with them and some autographed photos.
I do presentations here and there at colleges, and several
of them were featured in a documentary for Czech television
on the Czech Violin School.
And that was a great honor and a lot of fun.
So another room over there is filled with the autographed photos of violinists from
the past, many who are still well known by violinists and many who are completely
forgotten, like Camilla Urso
and Ernst, Wieniawski, Joachim.
For those of you who are violinists, you probably know those names.
There's also a photo of Leonora Jackson, who nobody knows who that is anymore,
but it's autographed to her teacher, Joachim.
So I have that photo and Joachim's photo looking at each other,
and it makes me really happy.
I see.
Okay, so I know you thanks to an organization called RAMPD.
In RAMPD, it's all about highlighting
the work of musicians with disabilities.
How does your work relate to the disability arts?
99% of it does not.
There's just one piece I composed that relates to my own disability,
which is chronic Lyme disease.
I've had it since I was a little kid, so over 30 years.
I only got proper diagnosis about seven years ago, which is not that uncommon.
Growing up in New Jersey in the '80s, there was a lot
of Lyme disease running around, but we didn't really know about it yet.
I mean, we'd heard of it, but doctors didn't really
know how to diagnose diagnose it yet.
I had misdiagnoses for a couple of decades and then found out
what it is when I was in my 30s.
I wrote one piece about it.
It's called Rhapsody in Discomfort, number 8, Ehrlichia.
Ehrlichia is one of the diseases under the Lyme umbrella.
There are 46 different bacterial infections
that are known that you can get from ticks and some other similar insects.
And anybody who has one of diseases has a whole slew of symptoms
from multiple diseases and multiple bands within the disease.
So each case is quite unique.
Unfortunately, once you've had it for a long time, it burrows deep
in the nervous system and in the brain, and it's virtually impossible to cure.
I went through about six years of treatments, none of which actually
worked, and I finally gave up.
I may get back to it eventually if something new shows up,
but I found the treatments to just be too destructive to my present life
without much hope for cure.
So I'm busying myself performing and composing as much as I can now.
So I did write one piece about it.
It was supposed to be a joke, and then I just got serious.
And it depicts abstractly different
symptoms of a Lyme disease patient,
as well as the onslaught of the treatments.
And then I commissioned an artist with Lyme to create a painting.
Her name is Nancy Schroeder. She's in Connecticut.
And we made a video of the piece and shared it on a bunch of platforms,
and lots of people loved it.
I heard from probably a couple of hundred different Lyme patients around the world
telling me how much the piece meant to them, which was thrilling for me.
I hadn't planned on anything like that, so that was nice.
But that's really the only example of my disability in my art form.
For me, the arts are a vacation away from that.
I don't express it that much through music.
I may do more in the future, but so far, that's where it's at.
How does this Lyme disease impact
your musicianship or your performance practices
or your teaching practices?
It mostly affects my performance because I'm just in a lot of pain all the time,
and I'm always exhausted, and I have constant vertigo.
All my muscles are attacked, all my nerves.
I have tendonitis all over the place that doesn't heal.
So every note I play hurts and my muscles don't want to cooperate.
Specifically, it just affects my ability to play accurately.
And accuracy is a really big part of classical music performance.
So I guess it's a little bit of a struggle all the time.
I don't think it affects my teaching
because I can just sit there and talk.
So that works out really well.
I also don't think it affects my composing, except my hands hurt
from typing when I have to create parts.
But it definitely gets in the way of playing the violin.
There's no doubt about that.
What are your future concerts or things that you're working on right now?
This season, I'm focusing on my chamber ensembles, particularly
as a Berkilium String Quartet.
The The past three years has been all about new music that I commissioned
and composed for the Bow and the Brush.
And this year I'm continuing it, but I felt this urge to just play
all the string quartets of Beethoven.
So I put together a quartet of a couple of close friends who live nearby.
That's important when you got a chamber ensemble.
If there's a big commute to get to the rehearsals, it's more difficult.
And around California, we've got a lot of traffic.
So we have concerts this season where we're playing several Beethoven
quartets, a few Mozart quartets, a few Schubert quartets.
And I'm sticking in one or two pieces that I wrote.
But that's really what I'm into right now.
I have a lifelong love for Beethoven
and for Brams, and well, for Mozart,
and Mendelssohn, and Bach, and Mahler, and Wagner, and it goes on and on and on.
But Beethoven wrote these 16 quartets, and I've only performed
a few of them in my life, and I want to play the rest of them.
I thought about naming the group the Bucket List Quartet, because for me, it's
really just about playing the rest of the great repertoire while we're still here.
But we decided to go with Berkelium instead.
So that's my focus right now.
I'm practicing Mozart's quartet, the Spring Quartet,
and Beethoven's Serioso Quartet.
We're going to play it in a lovely Maybach mansion in a few weeks.
So this week, that's what I'm doing.
I'm also playing Tristan und Isolde by Wagner at San Francisco Opera.
We just had our dress rehearsal yesterday, open night is Saturday,
and that's going to go on for the rest of the month.
And then we're playing Marriage of Figaro in Sacramento Opera.
That's what's going on right now.
From Beethoven to Figaro.
Yeah, Beethoven to Figaro.
It's all wonderful stuff.
For the rest of the season, I'm in the process of recording
volume 2 of The Bow and the Brush.
I've recorded several pieces.
Actually, my trio about Ehrlichia, Rhapsody in Discomfort number 8,
that'll be included on it, as well as a piece that was just composed
by Cindy Cox, a Berklee composer, also for Trio,
and a piece that's being written right now by Ursula Kwong-Brown,
a Los Angeles composer, and that's for a violin and piano.
So I'm recording these pieces this season, and hopefully that album
will be released in 2025.
Where can we follow all that? On your website?
Definitely on the website.
It's on social media.
The albums come out on all the streaming platforms.
So volume one is available everywhere, Spotify, Apple Music, all that,
and volume two will be as well.
When it gets released, I'll certainly announce it on Facebook
and Instagram and my website.
Okay, great.
We're looking forward to that, actually, if you want to send it to us
and we will just spread the word also.
Oh, wonderful. Thank you. I will.
I have a last question for you, and it's about people who might have
motivated you or inspired you or brought something in your musical career.
If you have one or two people to think of and to name, who would it be and why?
One One or two?
Or more.
Sorry to the other 49 that there isn't time to mention.
I was lucky to have many wonderful violin teachers throughout my life.
Louise Butler, when I was a kid in New Jersey, who I'm still in touch with, and
Janina Robinson after that, and Linda Serrone
when I was in college in Cleveland.
Hal Grossman, Fritz Gerhardt.
These were all wonderful teachers, all of whom I'm still in touch with, except
for Janina Robinson, who's passed away.
In the early part of my career, the conductor Michael Morgan,
he made a big difference for me.
He's now deceased, but I was his concert master in Sacramento for many,
many years, and he did a lot to help me.
But when he died, I learned that he did a lot to help a lot of people.
It wasn't just me.
Everybody came out of the woodwork talking about how important he was to them.
Currently, there are two people at UC Berkeley
that are a big influence on me.
One of them is Cindy Cox.
She just retired as a professor of music, and I've been
studying composition with her.
And David Milns, he's my boss, and he directs the orchestra
and instrumental music.
And he creates a lot of opportunities for all of our students and for the faculty.
We play a lot of new music I'd say those are the two big influences
on me right now.
Well, thank you so much for your time with us today.
We will publish some of the resources that
you mentioned on our ArtsAbly's website.
Great.
And, yeah, with the interview very soon.
Thank you so much.
Well, thank you. Have a great day and talk soon.
Thank you. You, too..
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