Musicians Offstage: Mary Anne Ballard of Baltimore Consort answers thequestions you've always wanted to ask!
1. If you were not a professional musician, what would you be?
My original ambition was to become a high-school physics teacher.
2. Other than music, what are your hobbies?
My most recent hobby, for the first six months of 2005, was bankruptcy law. (The Consort's record company declared bankruptcy--a situation happilyresolved in mid-June with the purchase of the Dorian label by Sono Luminus.) I find that those of us who work in an area that is usually considered a hobby, such as music, can find the variety that keeps our brains functioning by learning something in an area that might be considered purely work by others who do it professionally.
3. What is in your CD player right now?
Skip Sempe's "Pavana: the Virgin Harpsichord" (Astrée Naïve E8841)
4. What's your favorite TV show / Book / Movie and why
?
My favorite TV show is "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart. It got me and my husband through the 2004 presidential election, or as it was entitled on the show, "Indecision 2004," and its frequent reporting and commentary on the insanity in Iraq, "Mess O' Potamia," is somehow comforting. My favorite book in the last several years was David McCullough's biography of John Adams, which I read in the summer before 9/11. It made me realize how fragile our Union was for the first decades of its history--how the evils of slavery were tolerated in order to achieve the perceived highergood of independence from England and unity among the former colonies--how arduous it was to ride a horse through the snow from Massachusetts to Philadelphia--and how we must be vigilant to preserve the ideals of the founders. Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" has stuck with me all these years. The scene where Cary Grant, nattily attired in a business suit, is pursued by a crop-dusting plane in an Indiana cornfield is the stuff of everyone's most recurrent nightmares. I first saw it from the back seat of a convertible at a drive-in in Nicholasville, Kentucky where I had gone with apack of my teen-age friends.
5. Where are you from?
Originally--Louisville, Kentucky. Then for most of my adult life, Philadelphia.
6. What's your favorite food?
Salad -- tomatoes, red peppers, apples, oranges, carrots, lettuce, and garlic, with a dressing of orange juice, white balsamic vinegar, olive oil and terragon.
7. What kind of car do you drive?
A 1994 Chrysler Town and Country mini-van. It has the 94 inches behind the driver's seat necessary to transport a two-manual harpsichord.
8. What was your favorite non-music course in high school or college?
Greek Philosophy.
9. How did you choose your instrument?
I heard Sydney Harth, the concert master of the Louisville Orchestra, and his wife, Theresa, perform the Bach double concerto and I knew I wanted to be a string player. I was lucky that the public school system in Louisville offered beginning orchestra class and then orchestra every day for grades 7through 12. I ended up on viola because I had to run a great distance from the class before orchestra, and on the first day they had given out all the violins and cellos before I arrived. But I loved the sound of the viola, and, later the gamba when I discovered it in College.
10. Do you have a favorite professor / teacher / mentor?
That's a tough one. I can name four who made a huge difference: Lettie Jane Noland--who made all her fifth-graders memorize the GettysburgAddress, and then shared with us her very keenly-felt political views, and thus the notion that it's good to think about such things. Joseph Klan--the high-school orchestra teacher whose ambition was that we play Bach's third Brandenburg for the State Contest (instead of a medley of show-tunes). Owen Jander--who went to the trouble of finding a teacher and taking a gamba lesson, so he could show his students at Wellesley College something about how to hold an instrument and draw the bow. August Wenzinger--whose systematic gamba pedagogy brought order out of confusion, and was a model for teaching as well as an aid to teaching oneself; whose knowledge of music and culture was deep and wide; and whose sound on the bass viol has not been equaled.
11. What's your favorite time of the year / time of the day, and why?
Dawn--because it's so quiet and peaceful. If you can get up that early, it's usually just you and the birds.