Strings Stories

This story was written by Megan Westberg for the May-June 2025 issue of Strings magazine and is read by the author.

It is an impassioned voice. A raised female voice. “Human life, for us, is sacred,” she says. Music swells beneath her. Bittersweet. Soaring. Rushing in and then retreating. She goes on. “For as we say, if any life is to be sacrificed, it shall be ours.” Orchestral crescendos punctuate her phrases, diminishing on a dime as her voice turns to soprano gravel from shouting. “They’ll have to choose between giving us freedom—or giving us death.”  

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This story was written by Emily Wright for the March-April 2025 issue of Strings magazine and is read by editor Megan Westberg.

 There’s an old Monty Python skit where a husband and wife are discussing what could be scraped together for dessert after a horrendous dinner. The wife begins listing the options: rat cake, rat sorbet, rat pudding, and strawberry tart. The husband is suspicious of the innocent-sounding option, and after a beat, his wife admits there is some rat in the tart...

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This story was written by Megan Westberg for the March-April 2025 issue of Strings magazine and is read by the author.

Sometime around the year 2000, violinist David Harrington of the California-based Kronos Quartet received an email. Its author wasn’t a colleague or a publicist. Or even an adult. This email was, in fact, written by a teenage cellist living roughly 5,000 miles away...

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This article was written by Thomas May for the March-April 2025 issue of Strings magazine and is read by editor Megan Westberg.

 “Music is embedded in everything we do in South African life,” says Selaocoe. “Not even only as an artist, but as a member of the public, being able to express yourself musically through the voice or dance has been such an integral part of my growing up.” 

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Editor Megan Westberg shares highlights from the latest issue of Strings magazine. Get your copy of the March-April 2025 issue here. It's available in both print and digital editions. And, to be sure you never miss a new issue, why not subscribe? Strings Stories listeners get a special deal.

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This story was written by Megan Westberg for the January-February 2025 issue of Strings magazine and is read by the author...

Violinist Sarah Neufeld and cellist Rebecca Foon first met as teenagers at an Ani DiFranco concert. This seems a good place to start, as any discussion of their new album, First Sounds (Envision Records)—on which Neufeld and Foon combine talents with those of multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry—really has to start in the late ’90s, when this trio initially came together. The relationships, you see, came first in the origin story of this project and are inextricably central to it. 

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This story was written by Megan Westberg for the January-February 2025 issue of Strings magazine and is read by the author.

 It exists at a crossroads, violin making. Where living hands take on the work of those who abandoned their tools several centuries before. And from that perspective, it seems fair to say that all violin makers dwell in both the present and the past. That they must, in fact, because Stradivari still firmly guides their movements, peers over their shoulders...

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This story was written by Megan Westberg for the September-October 2024 issue of Strings magazine and is read by the author.

I get the sense that violinist Ray Chen is still searching for the right answer—the perfect, succinct media-ready response—to a particular question. Funny thing is, it isn’t a question I’ve asked him. In fact, outside the introductory pleasantries, I haven’t asked him anything at all. He’s calling from the airport in Chicago as he waits for a connecting flight to Los Angeles (delayed) and has thus far wryly chuckled at my suggestion that he may be headed for a break after his recent stint as guest artist at Interlochen Arts Camp (not so much—but he did get a fleeting “pocket of time” to leap into a Michigan lake post-concert the night before). Before I launch into a litany of questions about his upcoming release, Player 1; his practice platform, Tonic; and the general comings and goings of the artist known as Ray Chen, he thinks it may be worth mentioning why it is he routinely ventures outside the box, as it were, in terms of the activities that typically occupy a concert violinist. So he poses the first question himself.

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This story was written by David Templeton for the July-August 2024 issue of Strings magazine and is read by editor Megan Westberg.

As a performer who often shares the statement, “We are magical creatures,” the notion of a Cirque du Soleil show built around her brand of inspirational pop grandeur—perhaps with actual magical creatures in it—seems like a bit of a no-brainer.

“Right?” she says. “It has to happen.”

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This story was written by Megan Westberg for the May-June 2024 issue of Strings magazine and is read by the author.

It will have started before you notice it’s happening. You’ll hit play on fiddler Louise Bichan’s title track to her recent release, The Lost Summer (Adhyâropa Records), and you’ll suddenly realize you’re moving. In fact, you’ve been moving since Conor Hearn’s guitar and Bichan’s fiddle first lured you into the tune. The music seems a study in delight. A sparkling, clear-eyed energy sweeps through it nimbly with moments of coy rhythmic playfulness. What fun, you think.

So you might be surprised to discover this tune was written in 2020 (ah, that lost summer) and inspired by Bichan’s distress at being unable to return home to Orkney—a group of islands off the northeast tip of Scotland—where she grew up.

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