Andrea DiGregorio
When WyoHistory.org published its history of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra in October 2021, the editors realized that there were many more people available to contribute their thoughts and memories of that organization. The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming was also interested, and offered to contribute funding to support an oral history project to capture more information on the history of the symphony.
The Casper College Western History Center transcribed most of these interviews. In addition to being available here, at WyoHistory.org, the audio files plus transcripts are also available at the Western History Center and the American Heritage Center.
Thanks to the interviewees for donating their time; to the Casper College Western History Center for transcribing the audio files; to Kylie McCormick for transcribing some of the audio files; to the American Heritage Center for funding the project; and to the trustees of the George Fox Fund, Inc. for donating the use of its Zoom account.
Wyoming Symphony Oral History Project
Rebecca Hein interviewing Andrea DiGregorio, June 22, 2022
Date Transcribed: October 9, 2022
Rebecca: Alright.
Andrea: How come I know your name, actually. Becky Lange. are you a cellist?
Rebecca: Yeah, I remember you.
Andrea: I remember you too.
Rebecca: Well you are, I don’t know, probably five years younger than I am and your mom, Lola Reynolds, I swear she took you to every classical concert in Casper. You were always there, always near the stage and you were always really engaged. You were probably in elementary school when I was in junior high. I just noticed how incredibly interested you were then and it is not terribly common for a grade school child to be so interested in music and I noticed.
Andrea: Uh cool, because I do remember. Now your father, our parents knew each other right? I think it was hard to keep track of my mom’s friends and stuff as a kid. But I remember you, and I remember you played in the symphony and of course everyone who played in the symphony to me were gods. So it was like, oh you can look on stage; look at what they are doing. I remember the first autograph I got was when Gene Fodor played with you guys and I think it was before he won the Tchaikovsky [The Tchaikovsky Competition; international solo competition. Any first prize winner can launch a world-class solo career. The competition is named after Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 19th century Russian composer] He was probably, you know, cheap then.
Rebecca: I remember that concert.
Andrea: I thought he was so cute. I don’t remember how old I was but he was right up there with Michael Landon in my book.
Rebecca: Yeah he is a pretty good looking guy and he can play the violin. Let’s just start by making sure I have the recording on. Tell us your name, your instrument and how you came to play that instrument.
Andrea: Okay, my name is Andrea DiGregorio. I play the cello. My maiden name is Reynolds and that is who I was when I lived in Casper Wyoming. I came to play the instrument because some people came to my fourth grade class and they had string instruments. I tried out the violin and thought, oh that is squeaky. Then I tried out the cello and I think I ended up hitting the C string first [the lowest string on the cello] and I thought, oh that is nice. Then I went home and my mom said, “Well right now you are too small but your grandfather has an old cello we can probably talk him out of.” If you choose that instrument then we will have a free instrument, she is thinking. So they let me rent from the music store, the one that was downtown. Do you remember that one?
Rebecca: Les Parson’s.
Andrea: Les Parson’s, that’s right. We rented an instrument from there and then Curtis Peacock came to my elementary school at Cresthill Elementary twice a week. I missed spelling, it was a pull out just like they are now actually, but it was okay because I was okay at spelling but if I would have missed math I probably wouldn’t have been a musician because I wasn’t as good at that and my grade would have been an F. They would have been like, “Well maybe the cello isn’t for you,” you know. So we met in the library and that is how I started playing.
Rebecca: So did he basically function as a public school music teacher for those two days a week?
Andrea: Yeah, he was there just fresh out of school. I had a major crush on him and I told my parents that I was going to marry him when I got old enough.
Rebecca: (laughter) They probably told you he already had a wife.
Andrea: He didn’t yet. This was before he met Ellen.
Rebecca: I couldn’t remember that he was single when he came to Casper.
Andrea: He was fresh out of school. He was a public school teacher and later became part of the symphony and conductor of the Casper Symphony. I just thought he was the most charming thing ever.
Rebecca: Okay, so that is the connection. He had you back here in the 90’s to play the Brahms Double Concerto. [A concerto is a composition for one or more solo instruments with orchestral accompaniment. Johannes Brahms, 19th century German composer] I am jumping the gun a little bit. I remember that performance because I was the principal cellist at the time. It was a great performance.
Andrea: Thanks, that is reminiscent of the string quartet. And John came back with me. We had played it here in Charleston, West Virginia first I think and Curtis said you can come and play. And he went on and on about how wonderful I was and everything, and I had just had a baby and John had given us a little toy dog; kind of plush dog for the baby. What I had been doing at the time was, I can remember the thank you notes, I would name the people like “John the Dog” and “Chris the Pig” and you know, so I could write the thank you notes properly. I told John this and he thought it was really funny so he goes on and Curtis is introducing you know this is John Harrison and John looks at me and says, “the dog” (laughter) It was pretty funny. Hometown girl comes and dog.
Rebecca: Well yeah I remember that very clearly that Curtis made a big fuss over you because you were a local girl.
Andrea: That is right. (laughter)
Rebecca: And he brushed off the other guy. I think you gave John a better introduction. Okay well, let’s see. How you came to play the instrument and your education from there.
Andrea: Well you know what it was like growing up, there wasn’t a cello teacher and so it was basically just you were self-taught. Which is fine because I played piano more seriously at the time than I did the cello. And I went to a bunch of different rehearsals for the Casper Youth Symphony and when I was fourteen I got into the Casper Symphony and I was kind of over my head but it was okay because I was sitting last chair back there and listening to all of the cool instruments, you know. As I got older it didn’t bother me that much that I didn’t know how to play that well, but at some point I thought, I should be able to play this better, and I ended up going to something called The Congress of Strings. I don’t think they have it anymore. They had one for the east coast and they had one for the west coast. It was in Seattle, my parents let me leave and it was all free; the Casper [Musicians] Union paid for it. I got to go and it was wonderful because I had never gotten to be away from home that long. You know the longest I had been away from home was a week at the [University of] Wyoming Music Camp in Laramie. So, this was just like a big deal, and the guy there was like, “I can’t believe you haven’t taken lessons. It would take you forever to ever catch up to everyone else.” There were people from California. So I went home kind of crushed a little bit and thought, okay I need to actually study this instrument. So Curtis I think told my parents about De Lemos [principal cello] of the Denver Symphony and maybe put in a word for me. So my parents would drive me maybe once a month, if it didn’t snow, my senior year in high school. Because they wouldn’t let me drive that distance yet. We would go and I would have a lesson for an hour and a half and we would stay with my mom’s cousin and then we would come back and I would practice everything Mr. De Lemos told me to do. That is how we did it and I ended up going to the University of Colorado because Mr. De Lemos was there. We already had this relationship and then he left after my first year. I was so mad. He had a sabbatical, he went back to Germany to play in the Hamburg Radio Orchestra. This woman named Barbara Theim came in and she was nice and all but she wasn’t Mr. De Lemos but she actually ended up changing my life as well, just the way Mr. De Lemos did. When I was I think 20, she took me to Austria with her for a summer and I got to meet people like [world-famous solo] bassist Garry Karr and other famous people that she knew, and stay in her villa. It was three stories, quite an extensive house but it's not made particularly well but it is still pretty and all that. I had never been in the Alps and all that. I came back and studied with her for the rest of the time and then I graduated early after three and a half years because I had been taking some courses at Casper College in my senior year and they fortunately transferred. So I got out early because I thought it would save money, which I am sure it did, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I taught here and there I had a job at the Boulder dinner theater trying to sell Annie. Barbara was like, you need to figure out what you are going to do with your life. She offered me an assistantship at the University of Colorado so I could figure out what I was going to do. So I took the assistantship, had a great year and fell in love for the first time, practiced a lot. Then I decided, I will either get into these schools or I won’t and I will do my Plan B. So my Plan A worked out though, and I ended up going to Yale University for my master’s degree. I studied with Aldo Parisot. [Parisot was a Brazilian-American cellist and teacher] So from out of there a quartet in Colorado that I knew called me up and said, “Do you want to be our cellist?” and I said “Sure, why not? I have nothing better to do and I don’t know what else I am going to do to make money.” So we won a couple competitions and we ended up going to the University of Wisconsin because there was something there called The Music Institute run by the Fine Arts Quartet. It was kind of like an assistantship so we didn’t have to worry about money and we studied there for two years and then we got a job at the University of Northern Iowa for a year. Then we got a job in West Virginia with the symphony which was nice because all four of us were kind of the pearls of the symphony. That lasted for about 25 years and then the symphony started falling on hard times and now my symphony is with West Virginia State University. COVID has kind of killed the quartet for at least a year and a half. We had our first violinist leave, he went to Hong Kong to visit his mom and dad, then Trump closed the border to China and he couldn’t come back. So he had to resign and we had to get another woman who ended up getting a job with the Utah Symphony and here we are with[out] a violinist. But during that time the university fell on hard times and were like, we aren’t sure we have enough money to pay for completing your quartet. So we are stuck in a bit of a limbo place right now. And that is it in a nutshell. (laughter)... [whirring in the background] Well I hate to think about what it is that they are doing to my house.
Rebecca: Oh, that sounds like a saw.
Andrea: It definitely is a saw. I am going to move.
Rebecca: That’s alright. The Congress of Strings; I was going to ask you about that. See, I went to Congress of Strings as well probably a few years before you. Tell me do you remember anything about it? Either musically or anything else? Because for me it was a very special experience.
Andrea: Yeah it was wonderful. It was about a month or so and I had never been around so many string players. Good string players and good conductors. Playing things like [Arnold Schoenberg’s] Transfigured Night and [inaudible] and it was just like, “wow this is what you guys play?” You know and it was wonderful to be on my own for so long. It was beautiful there. They had a wonderful summer and it hardly rained. It rained for maybe fifteen minutes in the afternoon, and that was it. I had never stayed in a dorm and some of the people were older than me but only by a year, going [to] places like USC and I think I just found, this is what’s possible. It was really neat and it was a special summer and you can put the green sticker on your cello case and go out there and feel kind of special in the airport because you have an instrument. [Congress of Strings administrators issued round green “Congress of Strings” stickers to participants to put on their instrument cases, to be able to recognize them at the airport, where they were met.] It was fun and it was transfiguring for me because the teacher there was like, “jeez you need to get a teacher,” or actually what he encouraged me to do was to become a doctor. He says, “You know, there is money in being a medical doctor,” and now I am lucky. But at the time I was terribly insulted that he would think that, but now I’m like, yeah he is probably right. As I look at the hole in my house I am thinking maybe I should have gone that direction.
Rebecca: Well when you are young and you love music like I did, and it sounds like you did, it is almost impossible to think about anything other than how beautiful the music is and how much fun it is.
Andrea: And I am the sort of person where if you tell me I can’t do something, I am going to do everything to prove that I can.
Rebecca: Me too, yep.
Andrea: So it is sort of like, go ahead. What he ended up doing, unfortunately, for what his aim was to discourage me and get me to do something that was a little more lucrative. He actually pushed me into it because after that I said to my parents, “I am going to quit piano and concentrate on the cello.” And they were like, Oh no! No, No! They didn’t say that but, I was 17 I could make up my own mind, but they were like, all those piano lessons all this time. But I knew I couldn’t do both anymore half-assedly especially since I was far behind everybody. So that’s what I did. But yeah it was cool.
Rebecca: Yeah, let me see. I am looking at my notes here. Did you have chamber music opportunities at the Congress of Strings?
Andrea: Um I don’t remember of them, no. I just remember orchestra.
Rebecca: Okay and just for the non-musicians in the audience and for the historical record. Transfigured Night can you say who its by and the German-
Andrea: Schoenberg the [inaudible] and Metamorphosis by Richard Strauss; those are the two ones that I remember specifically. [Richard Strauss, 19th and 20th century German composer and conductor (son of Johann Strauss of “Blue Danube” fame.) Arnold Schoenberg, 20th century Austrian-American composer] Shoot, we also played a Vaughn Williams, I forget which one, but I had never played all string pieces. [Ralph Vaughan Williams, 20th century English composer] It was extraordinary to me. Especially because the orchestra was huge with lots of cellos. Did you go to All Northwest?
Rebecca: I never did make All Northwest.
Andrea: That was kind of like- I went to All Northwest before I went to- Did I? Yeah Congress of Strings. All Northwest [orchestra] was just like 25 cellos [in the cello section] or something like that and we played the Firebird [Firebird Suite from the ballet, The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky, 19th and 20th century Russian composer] and we played Brahms Academic Festival Overture [Johannes Brahms, 19th century German composer]. Things that we had never played in the Casper Symphony, you know? But there were so many people there, it was kind of neat. In fact they had it in this huge coliseum; it was in Billings Montana just to fit all the kids in there. It was neat to hear that kind of sound around you because that is why we like music.
Rebecca: Yeah, so let’s jump back a little bit just for the sake of clarification. Can you explain what All State Honors Orchestra is and what All Northwest Orchestra is?
Andrea: Well sure, All State was just the state of Wyoming in which people from all around the state got to play [admitted by taped audition]. I forget where it was. I can't remember if it was in Cheyenne or not actually. All Northwest then included: Montana, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington I believe. Or yes the Northwest of the United States. [also admitted by taped audition]
Rebecca: Okay, let’s see.
Andrea: Hey, was Mr. Fox your orchestra teacher? Did you go to NC?
Rebecca: I went to NCHS [Natrona County High School] but I had Robert Bovie all three years.
Andrea: Oh sure, I remember him. Did you have Rex Eggleston at any point?
Rebecca: No, I am not sure where he taught. I know he was the head of the public school string program for years and years and I played under him in the symphony.
Andrea: I think he taught in the junior high schools- I think he taught at Dean Morgan, that is the school I went to. What I liked about him and what I thought was interesting and you could never do now; if someone’s fingernails were too long, he had clippers and he would clip them [the string player’s left hand fingernails have to be short to facilitate pushing down the strings]. He also had a pocket knife. It might have been on the same keychain (laughter) and if your endpin was slipping he would dig a hole between the tiles for your endpin, like deface school property, for the cellos. Now I am like, that was so cool! You could never do that now but that was so cool.
Rebecca: Yeah well, the cellos had to have endpins that didn’t slip for sure.
Andrea: Well my first concert with the Youth Symphony- the Casper Youth Symphony with Curtis I was twelve and I was the youngest person in the Youth Symphony. I had no clue what I was doing, I sat last chair with Gaylen Corrigan. I think his brother later became Mayor, right?
Rebecca: Yeah-
Andrea: Yeah I am not sure what happened to Gaylen because I am pretty sure he was high most of the time. I did not know that myself as a twelve-year-old but he just seemed a little out of it. Although, he did explain what tenor clef was to me because I had no idea and um- let’s see what was my point to this. Mr. Peacock that is right- My mom- We had to wear white on top and black skirts. My mom sewed a black skirt for me. Here I was, this was my first concert and first time on the stage with the Casper Youth Symphony and the first thing that happened was the endpin slipped and my cello fell flat onto the floor. Just as we were about to start, and he knew I was appalled. Everything came to a complete halt, Curtis Peacock came over picked my cello up, re-tuned it for me and gave it back to me. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t seem mad but I just felt like I was going to sink into the bottom of the earth. That was my first performance experience with the cello.
Rebecca: Okay let’s jump back just for the people who don’t know, define the word “endpin.”
Andrea: The endpin is- Well the cello is a large instrument; not as large as a string bass and you sit down to play it so that your knees, it would probably be good for your knees, think of the [inaudible] you would have if you had to hold the thing up all the time, but they developed an endpin at the end of the instrument that sticks into the floor so that you don’t have to hold the instrument with your knees you just kind of hold it against your chest and your knees are on either side and it [the endpin] holds the instrument up.
Rebecca: Right, okay thanks. So do you recall any of the concerts you did, or any of the Youth Symphony concerts you did?
Andrea: Um- I do know the concert where Gaylen Corrigan taught me to read tenor clef was [inaudible]. Now mind you, I am coming from elementary school I had never played anything this complicated in my life. But it was good for me. I think Mr. Peacock was like, “throw her in the deep end and see if she swims or not.” You know? I looked at it [tenor clef] and I said “what is that?” and he basically said, “That is one fifth up from what you are looking at.” [This is relatively easy for cellists because the strings are tuned in fifths, so it’s only necessary—with a few minor adjustments—to play the tenor clef passage on the next highest string.] I knew enough piano, I didn’t know any [music] theory but I had been playing piano since I was six, so I thought I could understand, and then I had to write in all of the notes in my practice part because- to practice. I didn’t do that to Gaylen’s part because he was the one who taught me what tenor clef was, so after a while I was able to read it. So Finlandia was big and I just thought it was the coolest piece ever and then Live and Let Die Lennon McCartney we did a lot of that. I think we played it in Billings, Montana when we went on tour there. Those were two pieces because we actually got to play somewhat contemporary pieces.
Rebecca: Okay let’s back up here, for the people who don’t know what a clef is c-l-e-f can you give us a definition of what a clef is and then go to tenor clef in particular?
Andrea: Okay first you have to start at the musical staff, and at some point in the western history in the notation of voice and music they came up with five lines of and on those lines or in between the lines are certain notes. Since there were sopranos- very high and then the next was alto. Soprano became known as the treble clef and alto is what viola...is played on. Then you have two sorts of bass clef and it is sort of interesting because the cello and the bass plays it but the bass plays it an octave lower. The tenor clef is between the alto and the bass clef. It was put in there because the clef got too high, too many lines above the staff for people to read. So they decided to add another clef and it was also for the tenors to sing in a chorus so that’s about the best I can do right now.
Rebecca: Okay; I will just add that it is a sign, a kind of hieroglyphic that musicians have to learn. It defines that particular line and it defines the note and from there that is the reference point for all the other notes on the staff. Without a clef denoting what note it is, those five lines have no meaning at all. Great, okay- cellos typically play in bass clef which is what you learned in and had played in forever so then you bumped to tenor clef which is more advanced and you were rescued by your stand partner, right?
Andrea: Yeah, because I didn’t know what it was, and if you have a cello teacher they will tell you what that is, but if you have never seen it before, you don’t know.
Rebecca: Right, right.
Andrea: Because of piano, treble and bass clef were things I had heard of before but tenor clef was something I had never heard of before.
Rebecca: Well you wouldn’t have, would you. Do you recall, this is sort of between cellists but I can’t help but mention it because it could have been a complicating factor for me. In Dvorak’s music—the Czechoslovakian composer from the late 1800s—sometimes those passages are in treble clef no- should be in tenor clef and are noted in treble clef and you have to take them down an octave.
Andrea: That is right- that is standard what you have to do and it is annoying too.
Rebecca: I don’t think I had ever [would have] run into that if I hadn't learned [it] in high school music camps in Montana. I think I would have been sunk at a later audition. Okay let’s back up, you mentioned Finlandia, please mention the composer and a bit about the piece if you could recall.
Andrea: Uh [Jean] Sibelius um- a Finnish composer, it is basically an ode of love for Finland. I can’t remember when it was written but it was definitely a late 19th century piece. I think it was an ode of love for his home land. Was it after World War I? I am not sure, I think it was before that. [Jean Sibelius, 19th and 20th century Finnish composer]
Rebecca: Didn’t he incorporate the Finnish national anthem or something like that?
Andrea: Yes, yes that is right.
Rebecca: It is a very accessible and beautiful piece.
Andrea: (Singing the melody of Finlandia)
Rebecca: Okay, okay so how did you come to be in Youth Symphony so young?
Andrea: Uh- Curtis Peacock. He just threw me in there.
Rebecca: That is great that he was so encouraging to you.
Andrea: Yes- Yeah, I was learning cello I was learning it fast and I had been playing it for a couple of years and he just threw me there. I had a friend, I made some friends there and they thought I was just the biggest nerd on the planet but you know I didn’t mind because I was amongst the big kids so I felt pretty intimidated.
Rebecca: Okay um- I don’t want to interrupt you if you were going to add something else.
Andrea: Nope. It was great, it was great and unlike piano and this is maybe why I chose the cello. I am an only child and the piano is a solo instrument. With the cello I could be with other kind of nerdy people like myself and actually have friends. You know? And we could go to rehearsals together and learn music together. Whereas, when you are given a piano piece you are just practicing alone at home.
Rebecca: Right.
Andrea: So it was also a social outing for me.
Rebecca: You are telling me the story of my life when I was in high school. Youth Symphony was pretty much my social life.
Andrea: Yeah, yeah my entire social life had to do with Youth Symphony, [Casper] Symphony, and Casper [College] Baroque Ensemble that Curtis also conducted. You know? My senior year I got to play Beethoven Ghost Trio [Piano Trio in D major, Op. 70 No. 1] with Curtis and whoever the on staff pianist was because there was just no one else around. Cellists, we are just like gazelles in Wyoming or something which just doesn't belong there.
Rebecca: Well, that was a great opportunity for you.
Andrea: It was. It was wonderful. I don’t think I have played it since I was 17. I can’t remember.
Rebecca: Let’s go to your senior year of high school when you won the Young Artist Competition.
Andrea: Oh yeah that was fun and I also got to ride on the float in the parade wearing my dress with my cello (laughter).
Rebecca: Were you shaded somehow?
Andrea: No, no didn’t matter. I got to be riding on a float, you know? It is like one of those things that one thinks they will never get to do. But no it was great, they did it right. I wish they would do it like this in West Virginia actually. It [the concert] was at the Thunderbird Gym at Casper College and they trucked in all these grade schools and I think there were three performances. I was part of it and there was a pianist who also won who was part of it who played the Grieg Piano [Concerto] first movement [Edvard Grieg, 19th and 20th century Norwegian composer and pianist] I played the first movement of the Haydn [Cello] Concerto [in C major]. [Franz Joseph Haydn, 18th century Austrian composer] At that time I had been with De Lemos taking lessons and stuff and he had forbidden me from playing any real music because my technique was so bad. I was only allowed to play [etudes] and I was not very happy [An étude or study is an instrumental musical composition, usually short, designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill (definition provided by Wikipedia)], and then this opportunity came to audition for the Young Artist Competition and I was like, I want to do this but Mr. De Lemos won’t let me do this, I know it. So I ordered from the music store the Haydn C Major Cello Concerto which I liked, and I had heard other kids practicing it at Congress of Strings. And I was like, I am going to learn that first movement, so I did. And against Mr. De Lemos—he never heard me play it because I was afraid he would be really mad, and [at] the end [of] my freshman year of college he wouldn’t let me play any music either (laughter). I went back to only playing etudes. Until the very, very, very end of the year but I mean it was cool because I got a pretty green dress and these kids would come in and you got to play it three times. And I forget, I think the kid was from Cheyenne who played, wait, was it [singing] anyway he played the first movement of his piano concerto and then the second part of the concert was Pete Williams who was a newscaster at the time. Do you remember him? He is at CNN now, he really went up in the world. And he narrated Peter and the Wolf [a symphonic fairy tale for children by Sergei Prokofiev, 20th century Russian composer] and that is what the symphony played. It was just a fantastic experience, first of all, you are playing for other kids so they are not going to be too critical you know and you get to play it three times. So it was a great experience to get to do that. And then Mr. De Lemos found out about it and he didn’t say much, he just looked at me, because it’s hard to say, “I forbade you to do any of this but you did win.” We never had that conversation. He just said, “I understand that you did this.” And that was it.
Rebecca: Wow, so you taught yourself the first movement of the Haydn C Major Cello Concerto.
Andrea: Yeah.
Rebecca: Without any coaching or any teacher’s input.
Andrea: Yeah.
Rebecca: That is quite a feather in your cap I would say.
Andrea: I don’t - I have kind of been teaching myself cello all along so to me it wasn’t- I taught myself the Boccherini first movement of the B flat [cello concerto] to win Congress of Strings too. [Luigi Boccherini, 18th century Italian composer and cellist]
Rebecca: You had to audition?
Andrea: Yeah you had to audition.
Rebecca: I didn’t have to audition, I just got recommended by the local musicians union. That’s- I wonder if they changed.
Andrea: Yeah I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get it because there were people [competing for it] who were in college. Curtis had gone to and fetched them from Colorado; they were violinists; they had come from Colorado to attend Casper College.
Rebecca: You were cutting out for about ten seconds [so] you should probably repeat what you said a few sentences ago.
Andrea: Do you remember how old you had to be to get into that?
Rebecca: Congress of Strings?
Andrea: Yes.
Rebecca: I don’t know if they were letting high school students in when I attended. I went after my freshman year of college I believe.
Andrea: Oh, okay. Because I didn’t know whether there was an age cut off. I don’t remember. Yeah my phone is doing something weird.
Rebecca: It is alright, I’ve got you now.
Andrea: I have moved to a different part of my house.
Rebecca: Well maybe that’s it.
Andrea: Yeah, I was trying to get away from the sawing sounds.
Rebecca: Okay, you mentioned Peter and the Wolf can you fill that in a little bit? The composer, what kind of work it is and that sort of thing.
Andrea: Um- it is a popular classical music children’s work by Prokofiev. It is about a young boy named Peter who is warned by his grandfather not to go out and look for the wolf but he does. And let me think- isn’t there a duck? And a little bird? And they are each represented in the orchestra by different instruments. So it is not only an engaging fairytale with each character represented by a different instrument. The little bird is the piccolo and the crotchety grandfather is the bassoon. It is a well loved work by Sergei Prokofiev, the Russian composer.
Rebecca: It is basically a stage work that the orchestra-
Andrea: No, it's just a narrator.
Rebecca: Okay I couldn’t recall.
Andrea: Whenever I’ve played it. I mean I had the Disney cartoon of it too, but it’s a narrator and an orchestra.
Rebecca: Okay, that’s right, yeah. Okay, let’s back up. You rattled off some names of etude composers under De Lemos. They are familiar to cellists but not to everybody else. Can you say a bit about each of them: Cossmann, Duport, Grützmacher, and Dotzauer. [Bernhard Cossmann, 19th and 20th century German cellist; Jean-Louis Duport, 18th and 19th century French cellist; Friedrich Grützmacher 19th century German cellist; Friedrich Dotzauer, 18th and 19th century German cellist]
Andrea: Uh okay, I think they were, except for Duport- um- these ... De Lemos was German despite his Spanish sounding name and he liked the German composers of really difficult etudes. The only reason they exist in the world is to torture cellists or violinists or violists or what have you. These particular composers wrote for the cello, and they wrote very impossible, very difficult things. That you could break your knuckles over and still wouldn’t sound that good. But the really good people sound great on some of these, but I never sounded great on any of these. The idea is to work through them, and as you work through them, you get better. And even if they aren’t perfect and you never play them in a concert hall, the point is that you learn a lot from motor memory and from finger patterns and bow patterns. But I used to just sometimes - I couldn’t even figure out what it was supposed to sound like and I used to practice in my living room with the grand piano and my cello. If I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to sound like, I was unfamiliar with thumb position; I had never heard of any of this stuff, I just played, but Mr. De Lemos had to teach me a lot of things. I would be like, what is this supposed to sound like? So I would turn around and play it on the piano so I could hear it and then I would try and match it on the cello and that is actually how I taught myself a lot of stuff. Because I already knew how to play piano so I would turn around play it on the piano and then I would be like, okay now I understand what this is supposed to sound like.
Rebecca: Yeah for me as a former teacher, it doesn’t seem to me to be as important how you learn to read music and hear what you see on the staff as long as you do learn it.
Andrea: Mhmm-
Rebecca: Etudes, I do agree a lot of them are so unrewarding that it is really difficult for students to stay motivated to work on them.
Andrea: Well some of them were [inaudible] so I was like, I am not going to do this anymore. I just refuse to do this anymore.
Rebecca: You told your teacher that?
Andrea: No-
Rebecca: Oh.
Andrea: (laughter)
Rebecca: That was smart not to tell your German [inaudible] I guess I am stereotyping. I don’t know.
Andrea: No, I just broke down. I couldn’t do it anymore, and by that time I was playing actual music that was hard, so you know, playing back-breaking etudes wasn’t something I needed to do anymore. I mean, I would probably be better but I knew people who were getting tendinitis from playing this stuff so I was like, this isn’t worth it.
Rebecca: Well Cossmann in particular, no doubt you know the story; was it Robert Schumann who devised a method to strengthen his fingers and it ended up ruining his hands for piano. Do you remember that story?
Andrea: Yeah.
Rebecca: It is a good story, maybe it didn’t happen; you never know with history but, I never had a teacher that made me play Cossmann but can you describe those explicitly and if you can’t I can because I really remember how bad those were for the hand and how hard I fought.
Andrea: Ugh Cossmann what it does is, it is all about repetition and there is no music involved. It is all about finger repetition. Like if you were to sit at a typewriter and type the same things over and over and over again. To me that is what Cossmann is like.
Rebecca: Well, and doesn’t it require that you keep a finger down and you exercise another finger on an adjacent string while leaving the other finger down. I was never convinced that it was actually good for the left hand or taught it very much except contortions.
Andrea: Yeah the only thing I think that does- hold on I am going plug [to] this in, maybe that is part of the problem I am low on battery. I think the only thing that does is basically teach you finger positions within one position, and the angles in order to be in tune that you have to kind of contort your fingers.
Rebecca: Right-
Andrea: Yeah. You know during COVID or during the beginning anyway I started to go ... I know Alwin Schroeder, [Alwin Schroeder, 19th and 20th century German-American cellist and composer of etudes for the cello] but I’ve never gone through much of the second book, so then I started the third book, but the third book is mostly Piatti [Carlo Alfredo Piatti, 19th century Italian cellist, teacher and composer] unfortunately, the Caprices. But in the second book I was introduced to this guy named Merk, a German composer of etudes. [Joseph Merk, 19th century Austrian cellist, and composer of cello pieces] He was part of the compilation that Schroeder did of etudes. And you know? He was musical. I was like, I really like these; one could actually play these for real in front of an audience and it would be musically gratifying.
Rebecca: Yeah I seem to remember that the Schroeder second book was pretty good. Well you are lucky that- Do you know about Rudolf Matz, M-A-T-Z. [Rudolf Matz , 20th century Croatian composer]
Andrea: Mhmm.
Rebecca: Talk about boring, repetitive, systematic. I bought those, I think, when I was teaching and I repent of making my students work on those. Very systematic, nothing is neglected except the interest of the student of course.
Andrea: Right-
Both: (laughter)
Rebecca: Okay, well this is really great. Oh I have a standard question I ask everyone at some point. Does anything from your musical experience in Casper whether: Youth Symphony, Casper Symphony or your performances with the Young Artist Competition stand out to you as the highest point of your musical career then?
Andrea: Ooh- Hmm- Gosh, because with me growing up in Casper, well, you know the western type of thought is like, figure it out and do it yourself. I mean, people who grow up in Wyoming and maybe the Old West; there weren’t a lot of people, so you have to figure it out. Whatever it is you want to do, you have to figure it out: If my mom wanted to carpet the front step. It was cement and she wanted carpet on it, whatever, so instead of hiring someone to do it she just figured it out and did it, that kind of thing. You want to know how to work on your car? Take it apart and see how it fits. For me, the greatest part of living in Casper was having the freedom to figure things out and no one was going to say anything. “Oh no, that’s wrong,” or anything; there was just discovery. So I don’t know if there was a high point necessarily. There was just a constant discovery of things you could do and music you could listen to. So I don’t know if there was a high point; there was just a continuation of education. So there were many high points but it was really a progression into the next fun thing to do, and it was always fun.
Rebecca: It’s really true, when you are in a, should we say, culturally relatively isolated place that if you are going to be doing the sort of stuff you are describing, you are pretty much on your own unless you luck into a really really good teacher who is within a reasonable distance geographically. Yeah, that’s great. Okay-
Andrea: So, yeah I enjoyed it. I enjoyed growing up there. I mean, I don’t know what would have happened to me if I’d grown up somewhere else where there was more cultural access and a teacher I could, you know, but in a way there are other things that go along with that too, so. No, just being able to learn music at my own pace and having fun doing it, I think for a young person is- and- and no negative feedback, only encouragement is really important.
Rebecca: Well if it’s fun then you’re gonna be motivated.
Andrea: Yeah. To learn the next thing.
Rebecca: Yep, I wanna back up. You refer to thumb position. We know what that is but a lot of people don’t, so can you describe it?
Andrea: Well okay, so you have your fingers in a kind of spider- like way going up the cello and then you get to a point where the neck is not gonna let you go up any longer in the spider-like position, so you’re gonna run out of fingers, and your fourth finger [pinky] is the weakest finger, so instead of letting them run out so you don’t get into higher pitch positions you can put your thumb up there and it acts as a finger and then you can keep going [into higher pitch positions].
Rebecca: Right, and you lay it across the strings so you’re pushing it down with the side of the thumb.
Andrea: The side of the thumb and that- first learning how to do that really hurts.
Rebecca: I know.
Andrea: (laughter) Until you get callouses there it really hurts. (laughter)
Rebecca: Yeah, I remember when I really finally got to a teacher that made me learn thumb position and told me that I really couldn’t do without it, I was asking him, “Listen, when does this stop hurting?” He said, “Oh, it takes about a year to build up a callus.” And that was very discouraging. (laughter) When you’re 20, a year seems like a really long time.
Andrea: Yeah, well I remember asking, for some reason we were taking like some sort of field trip in Seattle at Congress of Strings with our teacher at a lake. And I was kinda like, “Aren’t you gonna go jump in the lake?” And he was like, “Oh, no no no no. I have to play tonight and I don’t wanna lose my thumb callus.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay.” (laughter) So professionals apparently think about that sort of thing, like oh we don’t wanna soften that cause then it’ll hurt.
Rebecca: Right.
Andrea: How did you learn vibrato? May I ask?
Rebecca: Okay let’s define vibrato first. You get to do it since you’re the interviewee.
Andrea: Well it’s, people hear a singer, just have a steady pitch and vibrato is on either side of the pitch while still holding that pitch and it is thought to beautify it. And string players do that by- it looks like they are shaking their hand on the string, but actually it’s a fairly steadied and intentional shaking of the hand, in which you are basically playing the same pitch but you are making it more beautiful.
Rebecca: That’s the hope anyway. (laughter)
Andrea: Yeah, well, yeah.
Rebecca: Did you ask me how I learned vibrato?
Andrea: Mhmm.
Rebecca: Oh, well, you know, I don’t remember, I think- I don’t know how I bypassed the really nervous nanny goat sort of wiggle but I never did have to unlearn that. I think I just kind of started doing it. I went to a lot of concerts and I probably absorbed. I mean my parents took me as your mother did, I’m sure, to every classical concert in town whether it was a chamber concert or the symphony or whatever until I was old enough to play in groups and I must have just absorbed from watching how it was supposed to behave because I never had to really reform my vibrato I just had to refine it. Because if it’s too wide it sounds wobbly ... and if it’s too narrow it sounds nervous and, this is the motion of the hand I’m referring to, so I was lucky. I guess I just sort of started and went on from there. As a teacher I had to unteach quite a lot of badly started vibratos but that’s sort of in the game. And I don’t know if you’ve discovered this either as a performer or a teacher but vibrato is as much a psychological technique as anything else. I’m thinking of a student I had in Wisconsin who, her- she had two older sisters and she was- they were really good on violin and piano and she-, well they picked on her a lot. It was not a very happy family situation and she ended up as a cellist because they weren’t cellists; they were pianists and violinists and she had a chance of doing something on her own that they couldn’t criticize so much and she was so determined to do well that she kind of defeated herself and it came out in the vibrato, it was just overworked and nervous and I could tell how much her state of mind was affecting.
Andrea: Yeah.
Rebecca: How did you?
Andrea: Huh?
Rebecca: How did you learn it?
Andrea: Well probably the same way you did. I mean, I watched people do it and tried to do it and I had a hard time getting rid of that really shaky shaky shaky, you know, too fast kind of vibrato and oh god, I mean how old was I? Oh, even- Okay so, somewhere in the later years of my bachelor’s degree I went to a music camp and I roomed with a Juilliard [prestigious conservatory of music in New York City] student who had actually—she had figured out how to do vibrato and what she did is, she would, she said, just do some position in first position and do it very slowly and just bend your finger to loosen them up back and forth. And then what you do is you’ll do with the metronome one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two- and finally with your thumb up cause you can’t cheat, right? When your thumb is up, you can’t bend your finger like in some kind of bizarre way, and that was the first time that I was able to loosen my fingers up enough to do vibrato, but even when I was in graduate school and I went to lunch with my teacher and another student and I don’t know how we were talking about vibrato but he said, “Oh well, you don’t necessarily move your body you just kind of shake.” and I’m like “Oh did you have to say that in front of Marian?” (laughter) Did you really have to say that? But it was true, I struggled with vibrato and I still kinda do a little bit here and there, if I get nervous I start reverting back and just shaking. So, I mean I know that there’s ways to control it and I know what exercises to do now because of this roommate that I had. But yeah, I- You know who you should talk to is John Stovall.
Rebecca: He went quite a distance, didn’t he?
Andrea: I would say. Talk about someone who ... taught themselves what to do.
Rebecca: We should mention he ended up in the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Andrea: Yeah.
Rebecca: Casper bass player.
Andrea: Mhmm, and I remember him cause, well I was a little kid and he was older but in high school I remember him playing Lieutenant Kijé from the bass solo and it was amazing. I don’t know, I mean bass players, a lot of them are self taught anyway because there is no actual methodology for bass players. I started playing bass about ten years ago and I was like, “Well okay.” just cause it seemed like a fun thing and you know I was looking at all the different books by Vance and Roth and so forth, and they’re just, how do these people learn? [George Vance edited and produced collections of music for bass] And you know Vance starts in treble clef and it’s like, no, why would you do that? (laughter) Suzuki, [Shinichi Suzuki, a Japanese violin teacher, spawned the Suzuki philosophy of music teaching, in which children begin their music lessons at age 2, and parents are heavily involved in lessons and home practice] they can’t even decide on what position is fourth position, so if you’re like teaching yourself the bass, boy you’re on your own, and unless you have a really good teacher, which John didn’t. Right? I mean that’s even weirder than cello in Casper. He like, taught himself how to play. He ended up at the Aspen Music Festival I know, and ended up in the Boston Symphony. But he was in the Youth Symphony. [The Aspen Music Festival is a classical music festival held each summer in Aspen, Colorado. Professionals perform and teach, and students qualifying for fellowships attend, take lessons and play in the student orchestras]
Rebecca: Yeah, I- My hat is off to anybody that plays the string bass because they’re so big and you can only play two notes and then you’ll have to shift, move your hand I should say for people who don’t know what that is. It’s crazy.
Andrea: Oh yeah. To play in tune and then to vibrato, your vibrato has to be a lot wider. But just to play in tune and get a good sound. And then there are bow holds right? You’ve got French bow, you’ve got German bow. If someone came to me and said play- you know someone gives me a German bow, I’ll be like, “Okay, I kind of know how to hold it.” (laughter)
Rebecca: Describe the difference. Describe each bow and you could maybe give us the reason why there are options for bass players that aren’t [available for other string players].
Andrea: I have no idea. No idea why they’re like that. The French bow looks just like a huge bow that everybody else has in the string section. The German bow has a- it’s huge at the palm so that most of your fingers except for the first finger [index finger] and the pinky finger can fit inside of it, and you have to lean over and it uses a different part of your shoulder in order to play it. And both of them are highly effective depending on which one you use but I have no idea why. (laughter)
Rebecca: Well I think it’s cause the bass is really not part of the violin family, cause you know those sloping shoulders I think it’s part of the viol family, V-I-O-L, that might-
Andrea: Oh yes.
Rebecca: Don’t know. That’s just-
Andrea: That’s possible.
Rebecca: Let’s back up to John Stovall, Lieutenant Kijé. Could you say who that’s by and say a little more about that?
Andrea: Oh gee, now we’re talking about bass things. Are you sure?
Rebecca: (laughter) [inaudible]
Andrea: I mean John Stovall is the star player from Casper, Wyoming to contact him. I mean, I remember he was in high school and he played a beautiful bass solo from Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé. It’s like one of the standards in bass literature and something that you would audition with if you were trying to get into a fine orchestra like the Boston Symphony. And you know, back in my last chair (laughter) Youth Symphony, I just remember looking back at this kind of- he had hair, it was the 70s so it was like, down to his shoulders.
Rebecca: (laughter)
Andrea: And he played beautifully, you know. I mean, that’s as much as I can- I’m not gonna go into who Lieutenant Kijé was and (laughter) this thing so. The fictional character of Lieutenant Kijé, but it’s a great solo for the bass.
Rebecca: I want to jump back to vibrato. You said something about having the thumb up. Do you mean fully engaged with the back of the fingerboard or do you mean actually resting on the string?
Andrea: Resting on the string. In like second position. And then you just, each finger, you kind of get- you bend it more than you necessarily would, because it will, when the thumb is in that position and you can do the exercises that way, and then once you’ve loosened your upper parts of the finger up you put the thumb back where it’s supposed to be [behind the neck of the cello], and you do the exercises that way. And that’s how I slowed my vibrato down because my vibrato was way too fast.
Rebecca: Were you ever told to lightly place your finger on any string, it’s easiest on the high strings the A or the D, and bow- I mean it makes a very- you’re not doing it for the sound, you’re doing it for the physical motion, rub your hand up and down quite a distance and then gradually narrow that until you’re pretty much fastened on one pitch but your hand is still remembering that motion of rubbing up and down on the string very lightly. Did you ever do that?
Andrea: I was never told that. Once I started trying to teach vibrato I started like, investigating ways to do this, other than what the student had taught me in music camp, and that was one of the things I think, William Starr. I went to the Institute of Chamber Music, he was also at the University of Milwaukee, or sorry Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and he was on staff there and that’s one of the Suzuki ways of doing things and I kind of learned that while I was there as a way of figuring out the whole vibrato situation. But no, no one ever told me that. I mean. I was an adult by the time I started looking at that and was- I actually learned a lot by starting to teach. I didn’t know what positions were, I mean I didn’t- I just played. In fact, all the way through graduate school I didn’t know what positions were and then I discovered Rick Mooney books and “Oh, these are the positions?” [“Positions,” on a stringed instrument, are numbered according to what pitch the left index finger is placed on, on the fingerboard.] He also wrote a double-stop book which is pretty good and I was like, “Oh, yeah this would have been really helpful.” (laughter) [Double-stops are two notes played on a stringed instrument simultaneously] I didn’t know what second or third position was. I was just like, “What are positions? You just, you find the note.” But yeah.
Rebecca: It doesn’t help that it’s according to the logic of violin strings. [Because the violin fingerboard is approximately half the length of the cello fingerboard, the violinist’s left hand can reach one more pitch than the cellist’s left hand can. Since the system of position numbering for all stringed instruments is based on how many pitches the violinist can play before having to move the hand, this numbering system doesn’t transfer logically to the larger instruments such as cello and bass.]
Andrea: Right, yeah and that’s the problem with bass playing too, I think.
Rebecca: (laughter)
Andrea: They need to have somebody out there with a bright mind who understands bass and goes, “Okay, here are the method books that are good to actually help you people.”
Rebecca: Yeah.
Andrea: And they still don’t have that.
Rebecca: Well, it would take just the right person, and if somebody’s a good performer it does not follow that they’re a good teacher and, you know, have enough ability to render into a system what they do. I noticed that.
Andrea: Yeah.
Rebecca: Okay, let’s see. I have some notes, I want to be sure that we’ve covered everything. Are there other things you want to tell us?
Andrea: I think that growing up in the 70s, having a strings program in a kind of isolated, small community like that, was just amazing. Just an amazing opportunity, and you know, if I had grown up in a bigger city probably I wouldn’t have gotten the same opportunities that I got in Casper. You know, I was young. Curtis Peacock threw me into the Youth Symphony probably before I was ready. He threw me into the symphony before I was ready (laughter) but I learned. I mean he respected the capacity of my being able to learn quickly because he had known me since I was nine years old, ten years old, I guess it was. And so, having teachers that consistently, they may not be able to teach you the instrument, but they believe in you and can throw you into situations that they know that you’re gonna swim. I think that’s incredibly valuable, and so that kind of independence of thought and independence, of just being able to create and figure things out for yourself is really important. I teach kids now who are just- they seem like they’re helpless. And you know it’s kinda- and I teach in the public schools right, who seem like, “I don’t know how to do this.” and I’m like, “Well, figure it out.” As I get older, I’m getting a little bit more persnickety. It’s just like, “You people have the kind of resources I didn’t have growing up. You have YouTube for one thing. (laughter) And you know, why don’t you just figure this out? It’s- you could figure it out if you want to.” So, you know, it gave me the opportunity to be free to learn how to play.
Rebecca: Well, Andrea I can’t resist. Well, I don’t want to interrupt you if you have more to say.
Andrea: Nah, that was about it. (laughter)
Rebecca: You’ve smoked a story out of me here. When I was, I don’t know, I’d been teaching about twenty years and I was starting to feel kind of stifled by what I was doing and I read, I forget now just what book it was by Abraham Maslow, if it wasn’t a book, it was a story of some Native Americans who were sitting around watching a two-year-old, a very young child, try to open a really heavy door and Maslow watched this. I’m not sure how he had the opportunity to watch it but he did, and the really cool thing from his point of view was that the adults did not help this kid at all, and so this very young, it sounded like maybe he was two or three, struggled and struggled and struggled and struggled to get this door open with no help from the observing adults and finally got it, and you can imagine the sense of accomplishment, the unbelievable sticktoitiveness and hard work. So I read that, and it just changed my teaching forever and I began saying to my students, “I’m here for you to bring your problems, your cello playing problems to me about, but I’m not gonna tell you how to do things anymore. Go home and struggle with it and tell me what you ran into next week. Bye.” I mean, I didn’t cheat them of their lesson time, but it just changed everything. And so these students, they got really really really attached to their own learning process and figuring it out. They were just so excited about it, and it basically ruined them for their college teachers who were, logically enough, the teacher knows more than the student, so of course the teacher is the authority and should tell the student how to play. That’s the mindset they ran into and it was really hard for them. (laughter)
Andrea: Oh, yep. Well it’s interesting because yeah, when you teach yourself you’re kind of like- it depends on how the ego goes I guess, whenever- when I got to people who I knew knew more than I did, they would ask me to jump and my question was always, “How high do you want me to jump?” It wasn’t like, well, I can think for myself, I already knew that (laughter) but now you have something to add to it so I mean maybe, maybe this is a different generation of, I think somewhat self-entitled children who’ve been raised differently than my parents who grew up during the Depression raised me. So I think it might be just a different culture actually and it’s interesting that you talk about Native American because I’m adopted and I’m Native American. (laughter)
Rebecca: Yeah I knew you were adopted. That’s about all I knew.
Andrea: Oh yeah, I’m from the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation up in North Dakota. But I never saw any of it because I was adopted.
Rebecca: [How] young?
Andrea: Very young, yeah. Baby.
Rebecca: Ah. Okay so, so it’s very interesting that you should talk about how, really, the best thing about being from Casper was that what other people would perceive as a lack of opportunity you experienced as opportunities.
Andrea: With the right kind of mindset probably, yeah.
Rebecca: Mhmm.
Andrea: Yeah, I mean I enjoyed the independence of, of always being able to think for myself. I would, you know, and I would learn from watching the Denver Symphony on PBS every once in a while and when they focused in on the cellos, I would really look at them. And also, just I guess the fact that a small place like Casper, Wyoming would have a youth symphony and a symphony, and occasionally have chamber music come in, and then someone who knew what they were doing who was like, fun, like Mr. Peacock was.
Rebecca: Yeah, and the Casper College Baroque Ensemble could not have functioned without high school cellists cause there often were not many or any cello students at Casper College.
Andrea: Right.
Both: Yeah.
Andrea: Yeah. So I got to do that. Then there was a harpsichord. I never heard of harpsichord before. That was like, “Wow, look at that! That’s a harpsichord.” (laughter) And I grew to not really like the sound of it but that’s okay. (laughter)
Rebecca: Okay describe it. You mentioned it, now you get to describe it. (laughter)
Andrea: Oh no no no. It sounds like, oh who was it that said it sounds like skeletons- oh I shouldn’t say this; I’m on tape.
Rebecca: (laugher) That’s alright. If you don’t know who said it, it doesn't matter.
Andrea: Skeletons copulating on a tin roof. I don’t like the harpsichord. I think I admire the people who are willing to play it. (laughter)
Rebecca: Well, so it’s a keyboard instrument, I forget if it has one or two keyboards.
Andrea: (laughter) It can have one or two, yeah.
Rebecca: And they’re-
Andrea: And it’s very difficult to tune and it has a very tinny sound and it’s a precursor of the piano, piano forte.
Rebecca: Right. And it’s plucked instead of pounded.
Andrea: Yeah, the strings are plucked by the keys rather than pounded like the piano.
Rebecca: Yeah, well I think a really high quality harpsichord very well tuned is a real addition to Bach and Corelli and those things.
Andrea: Oh I agree. I’ve played continuo with lots of them but as far as- they blend really well but if you had asked me to go to a harpsichord recital
Rebecca: Oh no.
Andrea: I wouldn’t be able to do it.
Rebecca: I wouldn’t either. Okay, now you’ve mentioned continuo now you get to describe-
Andrea: Okay, don’t no no no. [inaudible]. You keep asking me- I gotta go (laughter) at some point. [“Continuo” is a bass line, often played by the principal cello and a keyboard instrument (usually harpsichord). As the term suggests, this bass line continues throughout a piece, when the other instruments are silent. The best example is The Messiah, by George Friedrich Handel, late 17th and early 18th century German-British composer, The Messiah has choral and orchestral movements interspersed with interludes where a vocal soloist sings a short “recitative,” resembling an improvisation, and accompanied by cello and harpsichord.]
Rebecca: Okay. Yeah, okay.
Andrea: It’s been really fun talking to ya.
Rebecca: Well thank you for giving us your time.
Andrea: (laughter) Oh sure.