Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#246: Ada Witczyk (Violinist) (pt. 1 of 2)
This week on this podcast is part one of our interview with International prize-winning violinist Ada Witczyk. She’s a dual citizen of Poland and Britain, and is the recipient of numerous awards such as the Henry Wood Award, the Star Award by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust, and the Margot MacGibbon Award. As both a modern and baroque violinist, Ada has performed at many of the UK’s most prestigious venues and festivals including Buckingham Palace, Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican and Royal Albert Hall. Ada has performed with renowned ensembles such as the Gabrieli Consort, The English Concert, and The Academy of Ancient Music.
Ada offers a unique perspective on the significance of supporting new music in a society that often favors the old. She delves into her own experiences of inspiring over 150 compositions for the Baroque violin, and shares her insights on the contrast between period and modern instruments. Our conversation also explores the importance of new music for period instruments, shedding light on Ada’s passion for the genre.
But that's not all! Ada also spills the tea on her experiences learning social media marketing and branding. As classical musicians navigate the digital age, she offers her insights on how to connect with new audiences and break free from the perfectionism that can sometimes hinder creativity. Finally, we reflect on the role of mistakes in creating compelling narratives in music and beyond. As always, we appreciate your support for the podcast be it through tuning in, subscribing or spreading the word. Join us for this must-listen episode that promises to intrigue both music enthusiasts and budding artists!
Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making Art Work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heiss and Nick Petrella.
Andy Heise:Hi Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. My name is Andy Heise
Nick Petrella:Nick And I'm Nick Petrella. International Prize-winning violinist Ada Witczyk is with us today. She's a dual citizen of Poland and Britain and is the recipient of numerous awards, such as the Henry Wood Award, the Star Award by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust and the Margot McGibbon Award. As both a modern and baroque violinist, ada has performed at many of the UK's most prestigious venues and festivals, including Buckingham Palace, royal Festival Hall, the Barbican and Royal Albert Hall. Ada has performed with renowned ensembles such as the Gabriele Concert, the English Concert and the Academy of Ancient Music. Ada is kindly supported by help musicians and is extremely grateful for the generous loan of an 18th century Criminese violin from the Harrison Frank Foundation. We'll have her website and the show notes so you can learn more about Ada's accomplishments and activities and the competition she founded to encourage new music for the baroque violin. Ada, thanks so much for being with us today.
Ada Witczyk:Thank you so much for giving me the chance to speak with you guys.
Nick Petrella:In your bio you're cited as the fearless champion of contemporary music for the baroque violin and I've read you've commissioned some 150 compositions for violin. Why is that so important to you?
Ada Witczyk:I always felt that unless we support modern composers and help the development of new music, we just will be stuck with what we know, which you know is great. We all love Vivaldi and Bach and Elgar, and they're all fantastic. But unless this is all that you want to do in your life and you're not interested in discovering, you know new things and helping it evolve, that you know it's important to help this process, and so perhaps that was one of the reasons why, during COVID-19, during the first pandemic, when I had some more time on my hands with my collaborators we've created the Ružitkova composition competition and since then now in its full year running, surprisingly over 150 works have been sent to us on historical instruments.
Nick Petrella:That's fantastic. How do you fund these compositions?
Ada Witczyk:So it's a mixture of things. We are definitely very grateful to the Viktor Kalabis and Susana Rožičkova foundation, with whom we find great synergy, and they are helping us to make this work happen. The competition is free to enter, to all composers every year. So since we don't have the money coming from the composers whom we're trying to help, that's the whole point. We also have to spend quite lengthy hours applying for financial support from the government and other private bodies. There's lots and lots of applications sending every year.
Nick Petrella:So grants principally.
Ada Witczyk:Yes, correct. And also a little bit of individual giving of people who just want to chip in and say, hey, this is great.
Andy Heise:And who was Susana Rožičkova? So close enough.
Ada Witczyk:So I first came across Susana when I actually got the biography as a Christmas present, and it's a captivating story, until you realize it's about an actual human being who went through everything that happened to her. So she was a prominent young Czech harpsichordist. She has survived three concentration camps during Second World War, but unfortunately, when she got back home to Prague, most of her family were gone and she has found herself with her hands completely destroyed. So you know the amount of courage and strength and resilience she must have had to keep working and to bring it back to its glory, to then become the first person ever who has recorded all that solo works by this label called Rato. And then she had this wonderful career just struggling around the world despite the difficult political situation in the country.
Ada Witczyk:And so her husband, viktor Kalabiz. He was a composer, and so he created wonderful works for her as well, including the harpsichord concerto. And so when I found this out, I was like, oh my God, this is literally what we're trying to do, and here is the living example of that. Not only it can work, but it's a great idea to, like you know, help push the development of new music a little bit. So yeah, and since then, you know, we had a great collaboration with the foundation, which we're very grateful.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, that's an amazing story and kudos to you, andy, for pronouncing that, because I didn't put the name in the intro because I knew I'd butcher it and you're just like hold my beer right.
Andy Heise:Full disclosure. I practiced, yeah.
Announcer:I had to look up how to pronounce it and then I practiced, so I'm glad that's good, all right, like any good musician, right, that's it.
Ada Witczyk:I think all Eastern European names should be, you know, considered tongue twisters. This is a warm up exercise.
Andy Heise:That's right, and so most of the compositions, or maybe all the compositions it sounds like, are what you call new music for period instruments. What are some of the obvious differences that people might observe between, say, a period instrument and a modern instrument, maybe? What are some of the things that aren't so obvious that you know that maybe other people don't know?
Ada Witczyk:Probably the most of the things are what you can see.
Ada Witczyk:So if you have two violins next to each other the Baroque and modern violin on modern violin we use things to make it a bit easier to support playing on it. We have the shoulder rest, the chin rest, then we have metal strings, and the Baroque violin is stripped of all these toys because they wouldn't have them back then in Baroque times. And then the strings are made of gut instead of metal. The bows are different. The modern bow is more of a rectangular shape, the Baroque bow is more an arch kind of shape. There's also different length, and all of this connected with what you can see, but it's a structural difference inside. For example, the shape and size of a bass bar that runs inside the violin creates a different kind of pressure, but also the resonance as you play on it, and therefore I think they're just very different instruments if you think of the sound you can create. So playing these new pieces on the Baroque violin gives you these new opportunities when it comes to the colors and textures and pronunciations of the notes. So just something different.
Nick Petrella:Does it have the projection of a contemporary violin or no?
Ada Witczyk:I would say it's a bit more. Well, it depends where you play. For example, if you play an old church, which these instruments are designed for, then the resonance is wonderful and the sound just goes like waves. But the modern instruments have been, rightly so, corrected and improved. So for the modern concert halls which are bigger and we need the sound to be able to compete with 60 musicians in an orchestra, if you play a solo piece, they all have the positives and negatives.
Andy Heise:And the gut strings are interesting. I'm an upright bass player, so the gut strings I think of like it's a very distinctive sound. I would assume that the gut strings on the violin would be the same, have a similar sort of difference, maybe a little darker, a little, not as resonant, I don't know.
Ada Witczyk:Yes, absolutely. They're a bit more rougher. So if you think of metal strings as more silky and then the gut strings are a bit more like I don't know something a bit rougher, like maybe wool or like really cozy jumpers for winter. The sound is just a bit different.
Andy Heise:Yeah, right, and there's a ready supply of gut strings for a violinist that wanted to explore that.
Ada Witczyk:There is, although it was much easier to get them when Great Britain was still in the European Union, so it's a bit of a hassle now.
Andy Heise:Because are they made in Great Britain or getting them into Great Britain?
Ada Witczyk:I think maybe there are people who make them really wonderfully. The bigger factories and distributors of like bigger amounts. They might be based more in Europe.
Andy Heise:Okay.
Ada Witczyk:I'm only guessing. So then, when you travel with these products, it's difficult.
Nick Petrella:Sure, yeah, I wonder. I mean, do they so as a percussionist, some really fine calf heads come out of Ireland. Do they not make gut as well over there? It's just, that's just a totally different aspect of the material and how it's processed.
Ada Witczyk:Um, I think that, because it's such a niche kind of thing to do, there are maybe as many people as those who make the metal strings, because there aren't as many people who would actually need them. Yeah, yeah. So I think it's just a bit more tricky to like purchase them.
Nick Petrella:Okay, so you're a graduate of the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music in London, acknowledging that you have a successful career. Knowing what you know now, are there courses you wish you would have taken to make your career path easier?
Ada Witczyk:You know what they say, that the grass is always greener somewhere else. Yeah, but all these places any you know, places where you can study, they all have the positives and negatives, and because what I went through and where I studied made me the person, the musician, I am today, I wouldn't necessarily change that. So you know, starting with the beginning of my education in Poland, or the boarding school there, or then coming to study in Great Britain, I think it's very important to appreciate even the difficulties that we went through, because they just make you strong. So I don't think I would necessarily change anything.
Nick Petrella:And that question was alluding to preparing on the business side. I mean, they're fine schools. I've been to both. Certainly a lot of preparation in musicianship and technical training. I was just curious as to now you're an entrepreneur in the arts, were you prepared for that as well?
Ada Witczyk:I think that all educational places are changing. Perhaps there is a bit more recognition now of importance of social media or running your own business being a self-employed musician. So I am seeing this more and more, but I still wish there was a bit more education on how to have a more of a career. That's happening now. They might have been a bit more of learning things that people would have been doing many years prior to us when we were studying, perhaps as a heritage. But yeah, things are changing so fast that I guess that for big institutions to change like courses and find the right people to like teach them, it's like a big step.
Nick Petrella:And it sounds like you had some. I mean, I'm a couple years older than you. When I was in music school, we had none of that. It didn't really exist. How about you, andy Did you yeah.
Andy Heise:Yeah, well, I mean, I saw it out, that was my. So I went to Milliken University in Central Illinois. I saw it out of programs that specifically focused on music, business, music industry sort of stuff. So maybe a little bit different approach than saying I'm a, you know, I'm a bass player first and supplementing there I kind of looked at the industry first and then so yeah, I think it's interesting the evolution over time.
Ada Witczyk:But I definitely think it's very useful and there should be more and more of a business side of things, especially if you know the majority of us. They don't end up working for companies.
Andy Heise:Exactly, yeah, yeah, most artists are self-employed at some point in their career, if not almost their entire career. Yeah, Speaking of evolution of things, classical music audiences are changing all over the world and your bio uses the phrase the new wave of classical audiences. What are some attributes of that new wave of classical music audiences and what might classical musicians and ensembles think about when they're trying to engage that audience?
Ada Witczyk:Well, I think it's not a mystery to anyone that kids these days spend majority of the time in front of screens, not necessarily in front of instruments or books. Even so, when we were designing our competition, we also wanted to tackle, you know, younger audiences, perhaps people under the 30s. So, like young graduates and young professionals, so the winning composers of our competition, they get their pieces turned into engaging music videos, which aren't necessarily what you would expect from classical music, but a bit more pop video. Like the timing is designed, you know, to fit what you are used to watching. If you were to watch, you know, beyonce's video.
Ada Witczyk:And so, with our film director, simon Helding, the Swiss film director, we have thought it through and we really try to meet the audiences where they are used to listening to their music. So all of our videos are on YouTube, accessible and free to watch to everyone, and we really hope that if somebody comes across our videos, which are a bit out there sometimes, then they think you know what. This classical music is not that difficult to digest. So why don't I explore more? And you know that could be an easy way for them to like, get into it.
Andy Heise:Yeah.
Nick Petrella:So, Ada, it takes a lot of work and practice to be a professional musician, but you seem to be very active on social media. Do you post and create content or do you have help?
Ada Witczyk:I wish I had help. It's definitely me doing that. You know what? When the pandemic hit us, unfortunately, I decided to learn some new skills. So prior to this time, I had absolutely no idea how to what to post and what to use it for. So then I've educated myself. I signed up for a few online courses on social media, branding, marketing, and I've been experimenting and literally using my personal profile to promote my music and to do what I was learning. Then, of course, I had much more time and then and so I could do it a bit more. These days, it's literally those few left over hours after practice and teaching and work in the evening where I can still do a little bit just to keep it going.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, when I was coming up with that question, I just remembered and I think it's Horowitz said if I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my manager knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the audience knows it. And knowing what it takes, I mean just for this podcast. I know you're not producing anything like that, but it does take time to do social media, so that's why I was wondering how you carve out that time.
Ada Witczyk:Yes, Sometimes people compare it to Tamagotchi's these toys where you've got to keep feeding that little electronic animal for it to keep staying alive. So not even trying to develop and find new audiences, but just to stay in touch with the people who know your music already. It does take quite a significant amount of work.
Andy Heise:When you were taking those classes and learning those things, were there one or two things that really stuck with you that you try to maintain as you are working on your social media.
Ada Witczyk:Oh, yes, it's also quite closely connected to musicians' personal way of looking at what we do. Definitely, the perfectionism that we are trained in, I would say, as helpful as it is trying to become the best version of ourselves, it also takes away the fun of experimenting, and so I feel like the modern audiences out there, they're not as much interested in something that has been prepared for years, perfected for through 57 times, but it's a bit like hey, here's an idea. It's not like 100% ready yet, but what do you think about it and how do you react to it. And by showing things that are still in process of creating, you also work on your self-esteem, which is very, very helpful.
Andy Heise:Yeah, that's true. I guess you do see a lot of in the visual arts. I guess you see a lot of process videos. We started here, maybe even like, oops, we messed up so we smashed the pot and start over, or something like that. As you said, that that's what I was thinking of.
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