Inspiring curiosity, cultural interaction, and deep listening, INK TRACES reflects violinist Julia Glenn’s 15-year journey exploring Chinese culture and interactions between Chinese language and music, fueled by frequent trips and three years living in China. This Navona Records release reflects a greater interdisciplinary approach seen in Chinese arts — one that blends poetry, dance, painting, calligraphy, and music and shows fascinating interchanges between gesture and sound.
Today, Julia is our featured artist in the “Inside Story,” a blog series exploring the inner workings and personalities of our composers and performers. Read on to learn about her wide-ranging musical tastes, and her in-depth process to prepare for a performance…
What emotions do you hope listeners will experience after hearing your work?
I hope listeners will feel a wide spectrum of emotions listening to both individual tracks and the whole album. There are ranges and progressions within each piece and a staggering variety across the tracks. I hope and expect I can’t predict all the emotions we will feel during a given listening session, but I would be delighted for listeners’ reactions to include any of the following: feeling stimulated, vivified, calmed, grieved, driven, or energized; sitting with feelings of curiosity or even puzzlement; and leaving the world of a given piece with new ideas of timbre and gesture.
How have your influences changed as you grow as a musician?
I think as I have had more time alive, my influences have expanded to include even the most mundane things — the way the light looked behind some trees on a particular day in a forest I walk through all the time, the taste of a new spice, the rhythms of my cat’s water fountain, my niece’s hiccups, or a passing interaction with a fellow stationery shopper. There is so much to observe at every moment, even when we’re busy with our never-ending mountains of duties, and I find it’s really come to inform how I make music at the most basic level. I would also say that previous (and current!) influences continue to grow and hold more weight as time passes — namely those of my incredible teachers, family, friends, colleagues, and students. I think the best influences not only shape you while you’re experiencing them, but take root and continue to inform your process perhaps even more after the fact. Plus, the more experiences we have, the more we can synthesize and draw from across them.
How do you prepare for a performance?
Though my performance preparations can vary greatly depending on context, there are certainly some constants I strive for. In the weeks leading up to a performance I record “cold runs” (a first play-through after warming up) and listen fastidiously to the recordings, making color-coded annotations in my scores. If the piece involves more than solo violin, I increase the time I spend going through the whole score auditing others’ parts. If it’s a performance I’m particularly nervous for and it doesn’t involve a lot of improvisation (like a baroque program would), I like to imitate a technique I heard the amazing rock climber Alex Honnold talk about in Free Solo: I mentally go through each and every moment and motion of a challenging passage, visualizing the most minute details of the choreography and stringing together the sequence of actions as a whole process. The day of a performance, I like to run in the morning, rehearse everything, and then take a break before the concert. My most beloved break activities include taking a nap (big fat nap preferred; 8 minute nap acceptable), doing nothing, and eating a banana, protein, leafy greens, and lots of carbs.
Where and when are you at your most creative?
I’m usually at my most creative after two things have happened: one, I’ve completed something (big or small) that I had procrastinated for a long time, and two, I’ve just had — however brief — some period of actual cocooning or rest. It is rare for artists and teachers to get true breaks in our culture, and a full day off is almost impossible to come by. I find the combined joy and fatigue of constant traveling, concerts, recording, teaching, practicing, and administration must be interspersed with meaningful rest to be sustainable and remain driven by creativity. Such rest can be really hard to come by and usually means saying “no” to a collaboration or project you’d really like to do… but a short period of doing nothing (or doing wildly different things) works wonders for my abilities to synthesize my experiences and explore new ideas. The other thing that most stimulates my creativity is working with inspiring collaborators! There’s nothing like coming up with ideas together.
Take us on a walk through your musical library. What record gets the most plays? Are there any “deep cuts” that you particularly enjoy?
Like many people, my listening interests are a bit all over the map. I don’t actually listen to that much standard classical music these days unless I’m preparing works new to me and want to explore a composer’s repertoire and circle. I love skipping through radio stations without planning what I’ll listen to. In my digital libraries, the artists and composers that have been getting the most plays recently include in no particular order: Mari Black, Tod Machover, Premo & Gustavsson, Rema, Hildegard von Bingen, 24kGoldn, Blitzen Trapper, Rameau, Omar Thomas Large Ensemble (he was one of my jazz teachers in college!), Jordi Savall, Coldplay, Schmelzer, Die Antwoord, Justin Bieber, Heinrich Biber (the other Biber), Goo Goo Dolls, Steve Reich, Bach (cantatas!), Zac Brown Band, Pritam, RAF Camora, Kendrick Lamar, Rhiannon Giddens, and Lully.
What advice would you give to your younger self if given the chance?
I think the best advice can only be gained or trusted with time and experience so I’m not sure I could change anything about what I felt I “had to” go through as a younger person, but I’d probably encourage myself that everything I was pursuing and feeling conflicted about and balancing and experiencing was fully worth pursuing and feeling conflicted about and balancing and experiencing. I might share some recipes and great forest walk locations too… and pictures of my family (including many cat pictures) to look forward to.
With a deep love for music new and old, Chinese culture and music, and exploring crossroads between music and language, Boston native Julia Glenn savors finding and contributing to unique artistic voices as an international performer of modern and baroque violins. Called “remarkable,” “gripping,” and “a brilliant soloist” by the New York Times, she recently joined the Naumburg-winning Lydian String Quartet and the faculty of Brandeis University after teaching for three years at the Tianjin Juilliard School, where she served as violin and theory faculty and was a member of the Tianjin Juilliard Ensemble.
