Violinist James Glazebrook will wrap up 30 years of going for walks at Roanoke Symphony Orchestra’s Summer Music Institute while conducting the Roanoke Youth Symphony Orchestra concert on Friday evening.
Though he intends to retire from the Virginia Tech song school subsequent year, Glazebrook said he wouldn’t prevent working with the budding young musicians inside the kids’s orchestra whenever quickly. “Of all the matters I do, and I’ve ever finished, that is truly the favorite element,” he said. “I assume I’m excellent at it.”
Glazebrook, 79, has carried out lots. An Arkansas native who grew up in San Diego, he first picked up the violin in fourth grade. He performed within the San Diego Symphony even before he started college, and after graduating, he spent years freelancing and teaching. In 1967, Southern Colorado State College in Pueblo, Colorado, invited him to sign up for the music school. He became concertmaster for the Colorado Springs Orchestra before moving even farther east.
In 1975, he obtained another invitation to sign up for a tune school at Virginia Tech, which, again then, “no person at the West Coast had ever heard of.” (Glazebrook shared that Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University had another nickname at the time, “Vippy-Sue,” which I as a card-wearing Hokie had never heard earlier than and were given a laugh from.) He joined the Roanoke Symphony when he arrived. He additionally became conductor of the New River Valley Symphony Orchestra.
He also served stints as RSO’s concertmaster from 1981 to 1984, and alternatively beginning in 1986, when Victoria Bond, the first female to acquire a doctorate in undertaking from the Juilliard School in New York, became RSO’s first paid conductor. Experienced in engaging in teen orchestras from previous jobs, he implemented for and landed the Roanoke Youngsters orchestra conductor position in 1988.
In California, “I had a protracted listing of factors that I did to make a dwelling, one among which changed into train high college. I had an excessive school orchestra for three years.”
In 2003, 9 years after modern RSO music director David Stewart Wiley took a fee, Glazebrook chose to step down a rung, asking to transport into the then-vacant assistant concertmaster’s chair. “I advised David that it become time for some other concertmaster. I felt like we wanted a better violinist in that function than I am.” His maneuver paved the manner for the hire of present concertmaster Akemi Takayama.
He often jokes that transferring over one chair allowed him to percentage a music stand with a far higher companion. “I’m very proud of that selection.”
The Summer Music Institute is hooked to the Roanoke Youth Symphony Orchestra application. Members of RYSO and the adolescents’ string orchestras are predicted to attend. The weeklong institute ends with an unfastened public live performance. “All the tune they may perform has been found out in every week at camp, with the assist of our excellent college,” stated RSO Education Director Sarah Wardle Jones.
Reflecting on 30 years of going for walks at the institute and accomplishing middle college and high school-age musicians, “they’re all different, but they’re all of the same,” he stated.
“One of the things about running with younger people is the consistent alternate. They reach a certain factor, and they leave, after which the folks in the back of them should step up so that it will maintain the standards and the brand new those who are available quickly figure out how we do things,” he said. “They come and make music with us, and they meet each other and improve one another.”
The achievements of RYSO college students when they graduate from the program count loads to Glazebrook.
“That’s sincerely the sort of aspect that keeps me in the game, seeing what our young people can do,” he said. “Some of our standouts move on to be professional musicians. We do have quite a few for a bit city like this.”
He rattled off the prestigious accomplishments of numerous beyond contributors of the kid’s orchestra, first singling out harpist Rachel Lee Hall, now at the Hollins University College, who in advance this month gained the $25,000 pinnacle prize inside the Houston Symphony Ima Hogg Competition.
“On the other hand, there’s all those who went directly to emerge as physicists and university professors and so on who hold to maintain their touch with the track,” he said.
“To be sincere, I consider that our fundamental challenge. It’s great we produce aspiring specialists; however, without a doubt, what we want to be in the business enterprise via which humans make contact with music in this sort of manner that influences them as young humans and encourages them to stay alive wherein tune is an important component.”
