Interview with Martin Riseley v11 n2
Martin Riseley is a 20-year-old violinist. He has just finished a BA of Music degree at Canterbury University. He became well-known New Zealand wide after he won the “Young Musicians Competition” in 1988 and the “Young Achievers Award.”
In August he leaves for the USA, where he was awarded a place at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. Martin started the violin when he was 6 years old by the Suzuki method. While he was in Auckland for a fortnight doing a series of chamber music concerts and recordings with cellist James Tennant and violinist Joachim Neupert, Karen Neupert conducted an interview with him.
KN: What made you want to play the violin?
MR: My parents, as simple as that.
KN: Did you enjoy it … or did you hate it?
MR: I hated it. I cried a lot. My first lesson I cried and cried.
KN: You had a Suzuki teacher. How long did you stay with her?
MR: Oh, I don’t know, I had so many teachers. I was a Suzuki student in the Christchurch School of Instrumental Music and teachers there changed all the time.
KN: Really, and were they all Suzuki teachers?
MR: At the beginning, for three years.
KN: How far did you get in the Suzuki books?
MR: I got to the end of book 5, then I started with scales and other stuff. But it was good to learn from memory. I was already singing in a choir, so I learned how to read music there, and then I gradually translated it to the violin as well, so there was no problem to learn to read music.
KN: Do you come from a musical family, are your parents musical?
MR: Yes. Mum is a violinist and dad is a cellist.
KN: Professional, or?
MR: Oh no, just learning, and all my brothers and sisters played. I was the youngest of 5, so to play something was just normal.
KN: You already told me that you didn’t like practising…
MR: That was, at the beginning, until I could play a little bit better, then it was all right.
KN: How long was the beginning?
MR: Oh, for about three years.
KN: When did you think about becoming a professional musician?
MR: I haven’t yet… It wasn’t until the 6th form, when Jan Tawroszewics came to Christchurch. He is a very good teacher, so I decided to give that a go, to make music my life, to do that as a career, for a while. I left school, instead of doing 7th form, and went straight to university.
KN: That is not so long ago, is it?
MR: It’s only 3 years. Up to that stage everything was open for me, I could have done journalism, languages, physics…
KN: And that is when you took off.
MR: That is when I really started working. I did some work with Carl Pini, but that wasn’t serious.
KN: Who was your greatest influence?
MR: Jan Tawroszewics. The early training of course helped a lot, to have those surroundings.
KN: Did you feel at any stage that you had to go back, that a teacher wanted you to change your technique?
MR: Yes, Jan wanted to change almost everything. Every teacher I have gone to has changed me. That is just the way it is, obviously everybody is different and has different ways.
KN: When you were at school, did you find that studying music interfered with school work or social activities or sport?
MR: I was a little unusual at primary school, because I sang in a choir, which practised in the morning before school and in the evening, I did homework for 3 hours and violin for 2 hours, so I got used to the amount of work. I learned to take working in stride. I never got in the road of my school, but I always did the amount of school work necessary to have enough and tried to do as much practice as I could. Especially in the 6th form. I spent all the study periods practising. But I got through all right. I don’t think it really affected my schoolwork.
KN: And you find it didn’t interfere with doing things with friends?
MR: A little bit, when I was at school. It was better at university, I had more time then, but at school it did.
KN: Did you mind that?
MR: No, I didn’t, that must have been a different person, I don’t know. But at some stage of your life you have to make that sacrifice. At Juilliard it will probably be worse, I’ll have to work all day.
KN: You plan to stay there for 2 years. Have you any plans for afterwards?
MR: No. 6 months ago I didn’t know I was going to Juilliard. Probably in 2 years I’ll know what I’ll be doing next. Of course I would like to be a violinist, but until I get there I can’t see what will happen. It also depends on the right contacts.
KN: Do you think you would ever like to be a teacher?
MR: I teach now, a little. I quite enjoy it, but I don’t know if I’m a great teacher somehow. Too many things that I can do, but that I can’t really explain. I try to get them to do vibrato or something, things I’ve never been taught especially if it was what I did, especially. I copied people, I was like a sponge. If I go to a recital, the next day I would be trying to play like that violinist I saw. I think that in future I might like to do a lot of teaching, but not really for money.
KN: Sure, but you are not one of those violinists who says “I couldn’t stand taking someone to the exams” or something like that?
MR: Oh no, I think it is very useful to teach, because it makes you more aware of what you are doing yourself. Also you learn to appreciate other peoples’ problems. If you have a good student and they work, you can give to them and they give back to you.
Karen Neupert.