Learning the Violin with Jessica Oberlin

Dr. Jenna Devare is a pediatric ear, nose and throat surgeon and faculty member at the University of Michigan. On the side, she plays violin as the concertmaster of U-M's Life Sciences Orchestra and as a member of the World Doctors Orchestra. In this episode she explains what playing in an orchestra actually does to your hearing over time, and why a researcher in Germany concluded that every...

At nearly every gig, someone asks Kailee Vallis's duo the same question: can you add a violinist? So Kailee — a professional musician who performs three to five nights a week on bass, guitar, and more — decided to stop hiring it out and learn violin herself.  In this episode, Jessica and Kailee talk about what it takes to add a new instrument to a working career: why clients keep requesting v...

Can you learn the violin as a busy adult with a demanding career and no musical background? Harshad Ingle is proof that you can. Harshad is a research scientist and faculty member at the Washington University School of Medicine, studying ALS and Alzheimer's disease. Despite one of the busiest schedules imaginable, he is finally fulfilling a lifelong dream of learning violin — practicing just...

When Mark Dandridge picked up the violin on August 23rd of last year, he was 59 years old, a retired Air Force veteran, a high school special education teacher in Arizona — and completely new to the instrument.  He hadn't played anything since clarinet in the 1980s. He couldn't read music. It took him a full month just to learn how to hold the bow. Less than a year later, he's playi...

Rick is a retired engineer with a 48-year career, a former engineering teacher at a magnet high school, and a retired martial arts instructor who taught what we now call MMA before it had that name. He's also a lifelong musician — percussion starting at age 12, piano, guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, dobro, pedal steel. He spent his late teens and twenties playing professionally in road bands u...

For over a decade, Brenda — a high school science teacher from North Carolina — carried a quiet wish to learn the violin. She'd heard a violin solo in a song her daughter shared, fallen in love with the sound, and told herself, "If I don't have time on this earth, in the next life I will learn." This past January, she finally picked up the violin and bow. In this conversation,...