The French word for "hobby" is violon d'Ingres, denoting the fact that the great painter Ingres played the violin as his hobby. It turns out that my violon d'Ingres est le violon. I have been studying classical violin since the age of eight. While in high-school and at the university I continued my music studies at the Conservatory in Belo Horizonte, but was short of graduating there because of my many activities in engineering, internships, and two years in the army at the local equivalent of the ROTC.
While at Illinois I had the privilege to study with Paul Rolland who was a master string pedagogue as well as a top violinist. During my stay in Grenoble I continued my studies at the local conservatoire and spend a summer in Nice studying with a professor of the Paris Conservatoire (Mr Benedetti)
But it was in Boston in 1968 that I established contact with Roman Totenberg who I consider one of the greatest violin teachers and artists following the tradition of Carl Flesh. Since that time I have been a student and close friend of Roman. I owe him most of what I know about violin playing and its repertoire ranging from Bach to contemporary music. In countless lessons Roman patiently got me involved with most of Beethoven sonatas, and the works of others like Franck, Debussy, Ravel, Faure, Hindemith, Dvorak, Milhaud, Grieg, Stravinsky and Janacek.
In the mid eighties I had the pleasure to play chamber music with my colleagues and friends Alan Robinson (piano) and Koichi Furukawa (cello). We performed several trios during many of the international conferences in Logic Programming.
In the past few years I have been participating regularly in amateur chamber music groups at Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill, Maine.
jc@cs.brandeis.edu
