GUDRUN WEEKS PERFORMING AT HER 75TH BIRTHDAY.

“Gudrun’s Life Through Music”

Sunset concert

Sunday April 11 at 5PM in Maitisong,

A Little about this phenomenal lady ….

Early childhood: I only knew my great-uncle Russel in Pennsylvania, a fiddler, as a baby. Later I inherited his violin and music:“Schoen Rosmarin” by Kreisler

Father Paul August Andreas Schulz, taught us many old two part German songs in Graefelfing near Munich. We sang on all our hikes:WachNachtigall and Mein HerzensSchoene, and rounds: Sitzt a kloansVogerl, Es Tonen die Lieder, Rosenstock Holder.

Mother, Ellen Russel Hayes, had a nice voice and sang us Spirituals to put us to sleep: Swing Lowand I got a robe

After the war, in 1946,my three sisters and mother left my father behind and went again to the grandparents’ 300-year-old house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I went to a farm school at Unionville and studied with Mrs Matz: Francois Schubert’s L’AbeilleandBourree by JS Bach

Although I was accepted at fourteen to study at Curtiss Institute in Philadelphia, I was sent to the Quaker-run George School, where I boarded.It then had a meagre music department. Rogers and Hammerstein also sent their kids there and everyone listened endlessly to their musicals, South Pacific andOklahoma.

1953 After high school my sister Sonja and I went to be with my father in Munich and she studied at the University and I at the conservatory.  I took every possible course, including orchestra where I had to play viola (Gretchaninoff Waltz), eurhythmics and choir. In a concert I played a Mozart concerto:Concerto No.4 in D Major, first movement by Mozart

I stayed on for half a year and studied with Uli Blecher, just graduated from Munich Music Academy, who took me to a student seminar in Bayreuthwhere we playedHaydn’s Lark Quartet in G Major, as we did here in Gaborone in a recent concert.

1955 – 1959atSarah Lawrence College near NYC – I had a big scholarship and the violin teacher, Dorothy DeLay,came in once a week from Julliard School of Music. My Junior year I switched to Robert Koff of the Julliard Quartet, after being with him in Aspen School of Music in Colorado for the summer. For my Senior recital I played: Mozart’s big A Major Sonata K526. David Slater and I will play the first movement.

The next year I worked at Brooklyn College and at the Guggenheim Museum and trained with the National Orchestral Association. I continued lessons with Dorothy and played gratis for a semi professional opera company: Tosca, “Secret harmonies” by Puccini.

Auditions for the Kansas City Philharmonic – deFalla’sSymphonieEspagnol. They gave me free studies at the conservatory towards a Masters simultaneously and I studied with the Hungarian concert master (Mendelssohn violin concerto).

I met my first husband during a job at Putney School in Vermont,teaching  strings and chamber music [my second husband had taken me to Vermont, but then I didn’t know he’d become that]. In our performance of Handel’s MessiahLarry played cornet. I soloed in the  Brandenburg Concerto No.1. We will play the Brandenburg Concerto No3.

Switzerland is where I had my first baby, Jennifer Gay, while her father was studying at the ETH in Zurich. I met folks by playing in two quintets – violin and viola. Dvorak Piano quintet.

We crisscrossed the United States looking for a graduate school in physical chemistry and landed eventually in Eugene, Oregon, where he took his doctorate. I helped form a symphony and played as concert mistress, taught some talented students and had a second baby, Carl Leander Gay. Concerts included Bartok’s Contrasts and Martinu’s Three Madrigals. Lala and I will play the middle one.

Returning to Vermont and Marlboro College, where I taught solfege, played in the Vermont Symphony and other ensembles, I gave my first big recital at age 40 in Brattleboro. I was hoping Leone could accompany Lala on the second movement of the Cesar Franck Sonatathat I played, but he won’t be here.

Papua New Guinea comes next, after re-establishing an old friendship with Sheldon Weeks after 24 years. Feeling adventurous, I joined him there and we had a child as quite old parents…Kristina.  Some of our children lived with us there for a while and I taught at the National Arts School in Port Moresby, as well as concertizing with four wonderful pianistsover theeleven years there. A friend wrote a highlands-inspired flageolet-filled composition I played at the National Museum:Simbu/Enga Courting Song. I will give it a go…trying to sound like a jaws harp and Beethoven motives simultaneously.

When things got too wild and woolly in PNG we came to our last turbulent home and have now stayed the longest in Gaborone, where the BDF immediately found me and took me off to their meagre building for trainingtwelve strings for orchestra. We worked outdoors when it was boiling inside and indoors when it was freezing outside. There was no heat and I was given no work permit and had to wait six months to be paid often. My favorite piece with them was Don’t Cry for me Argentina. I lasted four years there.

I taught part-time a bit at Thornhill and at Maru a Pula and sang in the Gaborone Singers, concertized with Beate Toyka, Louise Abukar, Gudrun Watzenboeck and Olga Merker as well as with David Slater and others. Once I brought up some players from Mafeking for a concert in the Cathedral for that wonderfulAmerican Quartet by Dvorak. Margaret Taylor has often assisted; Geraldine de Almeida and Darius Kambwea few times. Please sing with me a lullaby from South Africa – ThulaThula.I will close with Tea forTwobyYoumans, one of my students’ external examinationsongs that we sang when young. I dedicate it to my partner and husband who has made these years full of adventure, books, Quakerism and challenges galore. “Just tea for two and two for tea and me for you and you for me ---we will raise a family…can’t you see how happy we would be…………….”.