How lovely to have students like Dan who want others to gift themselves the experience too:
Hello Catherine and friends of the cello,
I am sitting here on a grey, rainy morning in Victoria on the most southern tip of Vancouver Island in Canada and thinking and dreaming about being in Lewes with you again this summer.
I couldn’t have dreamt that my days in Lewes in 2018, with two years playing cello under my belt, would or could have possibly changed my life in the most extraordinary way. I had dreamt about playing the cello since I had walked into a record shop in 1968 and heard Casals playing Bach and decided that it was what I had to do, and I mean compelled to do.
After a decades-long career as a painter, I shut down my studio and bought a cello. Since my time in Lewes, I have taken lessons from you and taken many All About My Bow and Online Timeline workshops and I can attest to your brilliance as a teacher — a teacher, who manages to delve into all the aspects of the music.
I am writing this to Catherine and also to all those friends of hers and of the cello who somewhere may be enjoying a coffee or a tea on a rainy dark day and thinking they couldn’t possibly join a group of strangers and make music.
You don’t know me and there is no reason to believe me, but I’m telling you, you will never play, or listen to music in the same way ever again. I left Catherine’s summer school able to call myself a cellist but more importantly, I left believing it. Believing in the musician that I always knew was deep within me.
I am here.
I am a cellist.
I hope you can find a way to give yourself this joy.
Whatever you think your goals may be I wish you all the very best.
By the way, I live almost 5,000 miles away from Lewes. It is not that far away.
Cheers Dan