Nokuthula ngwenyama wikipedia

She had, however, been writing music for some years, and now enjoys parallel careers as a violist and composer. Ngwenyama's starting point is prime numbers, translated into music as specific intervals. The performance by the SCO available as part of the Digital Season for a month, from 6 March uses a rescoring of the music for strings, harp and percussion — a combination of instruments Ngwenyama had enjoyed hearing in Bernstein's Serenade after Plato's Symposium for violin and orchestra and subsequently used in her own Viola Concerto, where she found it beneficial "in terms of balance".

With many years of playing in string orchestras herself, it is understandable that she should feel comfortable writing for the medium. Kennedy Center. The New York Times. May LA Phil. Primrose Viola Competition. External links [ edit ]. Authority control databases. United States. Thula's path as a musician began in her native Los Angeles, when she was four years old.

Thula wanted to learn to play the violin, but her mother advised that she start with the piano, and so she did. The classes, taught by Ann Pittel "Miss Annie" , also emphasized ear-training and solfege, and "each student received a kit. It had the grand staff on it, with magnetic notes. No rhythmic value, just little circle magnets.

And we could move them around on the grand staff. We would have an assignment of arranging these notes, and then playing them. She started violin a bit later, but it was not all smooth sailing. And she made good on her promise! She continued on violin with Sybil Maxwell, then Michael Tseitlin; then she switched to viola and worked with Alan de Veritch, who prepared her for the Primrose Competition.

Nokuthula ngwenyama wikipedia

And what made her fall in love with the viola? Specifically, she admired Michael Tree 's playing, in a recording of the Mendelssohn Octet from Music of Marlboro series - in the third-movement Scherzo. And that sound," Thula said, "I thought, I'd never heard that sound on a violin. I kept trying to make that warmer sound, and then I realized, that's not a violin, that's a viola.

That's when she took her grandmother's old French factory violin from the closet and re-strung it with viola strings. I learned the clef from a book called something like 'Learn Viola Clef from the Violin Clef' - then boom, I was playing! With all the violin and viola playing and performing, composing remained present, but at the sidelines.

The struggle is real! She laughs I mean Minuet No. I still remember the sensation of not being able to coordinate my left hand with the right hand and the string crossing. I remember that wall. It's really hard to make music through learning the mechanics of the instrument. Her Crossroads high school theory and harmony teacher, Mary Ann Cummins, was a former student of the composer Nadia Boulanger.