Leila Josefowicz: Bridging Generations

For years, trailblazing violinist Leila Josefowicz has carved a path uniquely her own. She got her start young, first as a Suzuki violinist in California, where she went on to study at the Colburn Conservatory. After further studies at the Curtis Institute where she was steeped in traditional repertoire, Josefowicz began performing music of today and is known for years-long relationships with many of today’s eminent classical composers. She is a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant (1994) and Avery Fisher Prize (2018), and in 2008 was named a MacArthur Fellow for her contributions to the world of modern violin repertoire.

On September 26-28, Josefowicz returns to the Minnesota Orchestra, some 24 years after her first appearance at Orchestra Hall. Recently, she took time out of her packed performance schedule to chat with us about her influences, the music of Thomas Adès (which she’ll be performing with us for the first time ever) and how she faces down the fear of performing new music.

You’ve been performing since you were a teenager. How has your approach to music making evolved? What keeps you going these days?

Well, it’s a huge question…I mean a book could be written about this! But it’s interesting to feel how I’ve evolved as a person as well as a player. And the two are obviously, completely interconnected. The music world, since I was a teenager, also has completely transformed and evolved in different directions than the ‘90s.

I began violin playing and starting a career so young and my early teens was run by a whole different generation of people entirely. I mean, my teachers at the Curtis Institute of Music are not alive anymore, right? They were really the end of a generation, in their 80s, and I was sort of the youngest person to be able to study with them, and they were at their eldest age of teaching.

I was able to have this opportunity to know these people: Felix Galimir—who was probably the most influential of all of them—Joseph Gingold, then various people along the way. But those people were probably my most influential of mentors who are not alive anymore, who are not composers.  

But of course, I hadn’t really met my composers yet at that time, so in some ways, I’m sort of this bridge between this previous world of music and violin playing and artistry, and able to now pass it on through my playing and through some teaching that I do.

I mean in Curtis, I was playing Bartók and Berg [which] at the time was considered “new” music. It was all very centered around classics. I was always kind of doing what I “needed” to do—meaning I had to, of course, know these pieces and know them very well and be performing them—but also know them from a musicological point of view.

And it was a natural—I’m stressing the word natural—evolution into music more written today. It’s artificial to me to just touch on the 19th century before you dive into the 20th, 21st century. You have to see, observe and appreciate where these ideas that living composers use, where they come from, right? Otherwise, you don’t quite have the background and understanding, I think you need to have that before you really know what you’re doing in this new music department.

I had incredible luck in the sense of being able to know and meet so many incredible composers right when they were starting to become fully recognized. This was huge, that some of their really important pieces [were] being written for me at a very crucial time for them.

You’ve said in an earlier interview that to truly make a composer’s wishes come to life, you have to accept the difficulties of learning new music and confront your fears of performing head-on. What influenced this mindset?

The greatest achievements, the greatest performances—the greatest sort of things that move this Earth in a certain way—come from real risk taking. If you’re in your comfort zone fully all the time, I really can’t see how great movement is going to be achieved in whatever way. We have to be ready to really put ourselves out onto an emotional plane that really feels like we’re really trying something a little bit more new, or something that feels not like anything we’ve done before.

There are different levels of this, but that’s why we practice, right? Because, let’s face it, violin playing - it’s really fought like Simone Biles on the balance beam or something…it’s very physical and it demands great precision. The thing is that we need to be expressive while doing this, right? Just to be good enough as a violin player takes such incredible amounts of practice and consistency and meticulous care and that’s just to get notes only.

And I would rather, of course, miss a few notes and have the feeling be really there than have it in a vacuum.

You like to memorize the music you perform. What’s your process for committing these pieces to memory?

Each piece is different, first of all. The composers that I’m able to memorize have a certain way of composing which suits my muscle memory and sort of just my process for doing this. Every composer [I memorize] works for me in this way.

If you were to follow me around, you would see that not every piece of new music is without the score in front of me! It really depends on the musical language; if things are starting, stopping. You know, a ton of different kinds of rests that are happening irregularly, without constancy in the writing. Certain composers will write something, and it will be a continuously playable experience in the sense that there won’t be a ton of rest, there’ll be one note [that] will lead to the next. So, if that is the case, the kind of interaction that you have with the rest of the orchestra is very different than if you’re starting, stopping, interjecting.

This is the first time you’ll be performing Thomas Adès with the Minnesota Orchestra. What draws you to his music, and what can audiences expect from this concerto?

In terms of the Thomas Adès [concerto] it is a piece I’ve known for a really long time. I learned it in my early 20s, and as a piece that now means it’s been with me for a good 25 years or so.

He is an astonishing artist. It was funny when I was talking about starting to play composers whose arc was going up as mine was, this is somebody who I’m talking about. He has an incredible mind in that he juxtaposes different aspects of even popular culture under the surface of credibly skilled genius. He knows all his history, all the great masterworks, and understands what makes them tick, in a certain way: why The Rite of Spring is so incredible, why a Mahler symphony is so moving and profound, and so he has these things that are inside his own writing.

There’s a moment in the violin concerto where he takes a blues melody and puts it between me and say, the piccolo. So, we’re both playing this blues melody, but we’re playing it at the same time at different speeds. That’s just one example. But, you know, none of that would matter if the music didn’t really speak to me.

My intention with this piece is to, [in] some ways simplify it for listeners, in the sense that [I’m thinking] “what is the music really about to me? What’s happening here, in my opinion, as an artist? How can I best portray this to people who have not heard this piece before?”

Are there any composers you haven’t had the chance to work with yet that you would like to?

Andrew Norman has had a commission set up with me for quite a while now, and [I’m] really hoping that that comes through, that would be really wonderful. I have a bunch of composers that I have my eye on at all times, so I’m always [chuckles] always going forward. I have a very good friend and great composer, Charlotte Bray, who’s going to write me a piece. There’s an Estonian composer Jüri Reinvere who I’m going to give a world premiere with the Cleveland Orchestra next season. There’s many things coming on up I’m very excited about.