Volume 29 Issue 3 | December 2023 & January 2024

IN WITH THE NEW
STRING
MAGIC
Lara St. John
in Conversation
WENDALYN BARTLEY
COURTESY LARA ST. JOHN
Laurie Anderson’s Statue of Liberty, arranged for solo violin
by Lara St. John, from her recent album she/her/hers.
It was an inspiring moment for me – one that
revitalized my love of music which can sometimes
become dulled by too much media exposure. The
moment I’m speaking of was listening to and watching
one of violinist Lara St. John’s performances on YouTube
and finding myself absolutely mesmerized by a full-on
sensory experience where sound, image and raw emotion
became completely intertwined, in her performance of
Czardashian Rhapsody, by composer Martin Kennedy.
Accompanied by pianist Matt Herskowitz, the two of
them raised the roof with their joyful and outrageous
performance of two Hungarian tunes, in a performance
that is available on her album Shiksa released in 2015.
By the end I was left breathless and full of wonder at her
incredible artistry.
she/her/hers at 21C
Thanks to the upcoming 21C music festival, Toronto audiences will
have an opportunity, on January 20th, to have their own experience of
this Canadian-born performer, when St. John will present the music
from her 2022 album entitled ♀she/her/hers. This project features 17
original works for solo violin by 12 women composers, with some of
the pieces written for her, and others in her own arrangements. The
album, released by Ancalagon Records, is part of St. John’s vision to
use the platform she has “to raise up voices that have been muted all
these years”, she told me in our recent interview. It is part of her fight
for women’s rights and other marginalized voices in music.
The repertoire choices began with an interest in solo violin works
and a desire to do something beyond “another encore of Bach”, she
said with a chuckle. She turned to the Caprices composed by Sophie-
Carmen Eckhardt Gramatté (1899–1974) which she found to be very
violinistic and descriptive. The album gradually took shape with pieces
composed by friends Valerie Coleman, Jessie Montgomery and Milica
Paranosic, and her own arrangement of Statue of Liberty by Laurie
Anderson, who will be performing herself at the 21C Festival on April 5.
Gender Inequity
St. John is passionate about her vision to address gender inequity
within musical institutions. Her story of being repeatedly sexually
abused by her renowned violin teacher Jascha Brodsky while a teenage
student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia during the
mid 1980s finally became public in a 2019 article in the Philadelphia
Inquirer. As recounted by NPR, for many years, St. John’s claims were
repeatedly denied and jokingly dismissed by the administration, and
it was not until 2013 that the board finally agreed to hire a law agency
to investigate not only St. John’s reports but other female students
who subsequently came forward. The investigation found, 35 years
later, that her allegations were credible and subsequently Curtis has
issued an apology.
St. John has not only has been public about the rampant sexual
abuse she and others have faced, but also about the lack of gender
equity in the principal roles within leading orchestras, as well as
in the programming of works by women composers. One story she
relayed to me in our conversation featured comments made by the
Israeli conductor Talia Ilan who was quoted in the San Francisco
Chronicle as saying that due to blind auditions, “we know that talent
is equal between the two genders. But if you look at composition and
conducting, only 5 to 10% of those roles are filled by women. That’s
a hell of a lot of mediocre men who have a very vested interest in
keeping women down.”
“Exclusion of women correlates directly with violence against
women,” St. John went on to say, “and that’s something that really
nobody can get behind. What I’m campaigning for is systemic
10 | December 2023 & January 2024 thewholenote.com