Gil Shaham

HK Magazine: I heard that your parents are both scientists? Are they musical as well?
Gil Shaham: Yes, I have scientist parents. My father passed away long time ago, and my mother is still working at the genetics lab. They’re both music lovers; my mother played the piano and my father played the violin. They had a big record collection and would take the kids to orchestra concerts. We mostly listened to classical music but there’s also an extensive John Denver collection. Sometimes I have parents come to me asking me about how to get their children into music. The truth is I don’t really know, but I think music is contagious. Once you catch the bug, it’ll infect the whole house—everybody in my family caught it.

HK: When and how did you start playing the violin? Were you initially forced to learn?
GS: It’s an interesting question because I actually asked my parents for violin lessons when I was seven. I have an older brother who at that time was taking piano lessons and I felt jealous. I remember that my mother was very opposed to the idea. She said the notion of little kids trying to play the violin made her “cringe.” It’s mostly because of the squeaky sound they made, like fingernails scratching on a chalkboard. I have some tapes of me playing as a kid—she’s right; I now know exactly what she’s talking about [laughs].

HK: Your sister is also a musician. Growing up together, were the three siblings competitive musically?
GS: I don’t know about musically. I mean, we could argue about everything, like who [got to] hold the remote control. We never actually played music together as kids. People would ask us if we would—I guess they thought it’d be a good gimmick, like Donny and Marie! Our parents always insisted that we didn’t. It was not until when we were in our 20s did we play together. We did it for a radio show and it was a very nice and special experience.

HK: You have this ongoing project named “Violin Concertos of the 1930s.” Why is the 1930s so important for violin concertos?
GS: Honestly, it’s really an excuse for me to play the music I love. But taking my personal preferences aside, it is a very striking coincidence. In the 1930s—actually, just the eight years between 1931 and 1939—so many violin concertos were written simultaneously. I remember reading the list of those composers to a friend, and he said “Well, you just named all the greatest composers of the 20th century.” And that’s mostly true—you’ve got Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, William Walton, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Karol Szymanowski… I mean, that’s a pretty staggering list and I’m leaving out many! It’s a very curious phenomenon because before that, the violin concerto was not particularly popular, and many of those composers had never written any. I don’t really know why it happened; maybe it’s because of the genre. You have this single voice of the instrument pitted against the voice of many from the orchestra, which sort of signifies individualism.

So I started doing this project a couple seasons ago and it seems to really resonate with the audience. Once a gentleman came backstage after a concert in Washington, and he said to me that the 1930s was a very special time: it was a decade of depression and people felt like they were on the edge of a volcano, waiting for the eruption. He asked me how it was reflected in the music of that time, and how it relates to the music of our times. I don’t have the answers, but I think it’s an excellent question to think about. Then I spoke with musicologist and writer Jessica Duchen and listed the pieces to her, and she said they’re certainly the most “iconic” concertos. And I like that word, “iconic,” which can be overused in arts but in this case is really fitting and apt.

It’s also very interesting that one time I read a magazine article about Hollywood movies, and there was a sentence that said “Experts agree that 1939 was the greatest year in Hollywood history, producing such iconic films such as ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and “Gone with the Wind.’” An architect friend of mine also said to me, “Look, there’s no money in the 1930s, yet there’re plenty of architectural icons built in that time—the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center…” So anyway, looking back to those iconic violin concertos, maybe there’s something behind their simultaneous emergence after all.