Sepiachord: How many different instruments do you play?
Betty Widerski: It depends on you definitions of "different instruments" and "play"... My main performing instruments are viola and violin: I have about 10 of various styles, including 4, 5 and 6-string acoustic and electric ones, plus some odd ducks like an octave viola with the range of a cello and a travel violin that comes apart to fit in a small suitcase. In the period of my life between playing viola/violin I took up hand percussion and learned to play dumbek (while dating a belly dancer) and now also play cajon drum - though I can't do too much hand drumming if I also need to play strings in the same show. Plus I own a number of instruments that I use occasionally - but there's just not enough time to do it all: penny whistles, melodica, glockenspiel, mandolin, stylophone, bass, keyboards. My piano playing isn't equal to the parts I write for it, so for recording I've used the Sibelius scoring application's piano emulation. Arriving soon is a 3-string guitar from a Kickstarter project I sponsored... there's probably something else I'm leaving out! (Oh yes - there's a small harp in my studio closet!)
SC: When did you pick up the violin?
BW: In 3rd grade there was a demonstration of the various musical instruments from which we could choose to take a 30-minute lesson during the school day starting in 4th grade. Actually my first choice was trombone, because I knew my father had played it - but the instructor didn't think I had the proper lips and my father said girls couldn't play trombone, so instead I went with violin because my mother had played it briefly as a child and though I could have taken piano lessons with my grandmother we didn't have a piano at home. I guess I picked up the violin fairly quickly, or my relatives thought I did, because after about 6 lessons my mother inflicted my playing (with my grandmother accompanying) on a church luncheon for a blind group!
SC: Were you trained in classical music in your youth?
BW: Yes - I wasn't aware that there was any other way to play a violin. So I played in all the local community orchestras, even more so when I took up viola because I was a good sight-reader so was in demand as a "ringer" to fill out sections for concerts.
SC: How did you move from classical music to rock and avant-garde stylings?
BW: Well, the darker side of my music experience growing up was that it became something I felt that my parents lived through vicariously, along with school teachers who had super-high expectations for me academically. As I finished college I realized pretty much everything I had accomplished had been to meet someone else's ideas of who I was. So one of the things I did to break away from that was to stop playing.
Some years later I realized I missed making music, but trying to go back to the classical world also brought back those negative feelings. A high school friend/violinist put me in touch with a teacher who played violin in a rock band - I went to her and said "teach me to do what you do - I don't want to be stuck playing notes written on a page!" I worked with her for several years learning how to listen in the moment and improvise. I also got my first looping pedal around then, because I wanted to be able to come up with performance pieces whether or not I found more rock bands that wanted a string player - though we're much more in demand these days.
SC: How many different projects are you playing with right now?
BW: I'm active with Ginger Ibex, which was started by composer/pianist Sharon Crumrine and is an instrumental classical/rock crossover with strings, piano & percussion performing original pieces by Sharon and occasionally me. After 4 years full time with Irish Punk band The Gobshites I'm now a "Mockshite" - I do some gigs when they are not too far out of Boston, maybe 1 a month as opposed to about 80 a year before! A Latin duo project recently ended, which gave me more time to focus on Reverse Polish Notation. And I get called in to do studio and one-off gig work for other bands - this month I did a solo violin track for local pop singer Ad Frank and was part of the string section for an orchestral arrangement of a song for "Torture Chamber Pop" band Jaggery; in June I'm driving to Ohio to be a "ringer" in Oakland CA dark Celtic singer Sharon Knight's band at a festival.
SC: You've just released the CD "Imaginary Numbers" by your project Reverse Polish Notation.
What makes this project different than the others you've been involved in.
BW: For better or worse, RPN is all, and only, me. As you might guess if you knew that in my day job I work in an IT department making sure all the data from 400 servers is backed up, I can be very organized and detailed. While I love working with other musicians, I also like having a virtual corner where I'm in control of every aspect of a project.
Plus this is the first project where I've fully composed all the music. I didn't realize I had that in me previously, but after I started working with Sharon to help build string arrangements for her pieces I began to realize I wanted to try my own ideas too. As my first release of those ideas, "Imaginary Numbers" is a mixture of several styles: improvisational looping pieces, a more standard arrangement style of a traditional melody that I did as a commission, plus several songs - I'm not really looking to be a singer/songwriter, but sometimes specific life events give me words that need to be expressed.
SC: What's more challenging finding a consensus while working with a multi-member band or doing everything yourself?
BW: I think they are different kinds of challenges - one involves working with (hopefully) competent people who may have different ideas about musical interpretation that must be negotiated, whereas the other involves deciding how far I'm going to go in perfecting my individual interpretations, or when I need to make some concessions to finish - for instance, I'm not a performance-level pianist so where I really wanted piano on some tracks I programmed it for computer playback.
SC: What single piece are you most proud of?
BW: That's really hard to say! I think what I'm proud of is deciding I didn't need to wait until [fill in the blank: "it was perfect" "I had enough for a full album" "I put a band together"] - whatever, to put myself out into the world.
SC: What projects do you have in the works?
BW: I've got a bunch of looping ideas currently living as little vocal memos on my Blackberry and iPod Touch - having a day job means when an idea surfaces and I'm in my cubicle all I can do is try to capture enough to remember it later. I've got a couple weeks of vacation coming up which I hope to use to develop some of those into enough pieces to release a full album of looping improv. I'm also working on some looping versions of covers for situations where something familiar to the audience is good, like busking. And I've got ideas for a solo version of Bohemian Rhapsody!
SC: What's your dream project?
BW: I once read about Loreena McKennitt's recording process - she assembled a bunch of talented cooperative like-minded musicians together in a live-in studio, where they worked for weeks coming up with her album. I'd love to have the time and space to do that - it wouldn't need to be MY project, just an environment where everyone is there to let the music manifest.
SC: Any words of advice for aspiring musicians?
BW: Two things: play *your* music for *your* reasons - whether "your" music is original or covers doesn't matter as much as that you feel a connection to it. And it's never too late to start, or restart in a new way... and a third: don't compare yourself to others who you deem to be better. Learn from them, yes, but compare yourself to yourself - are you improving, and are you having a good time doing it?
