Musician Musings: Tanya Tomkins

I write this in the middle of PBO’s first live concert- a set led by the fantastic violinist, Aisslinn Nosky.

Warm-up rehearsal for concert in Kaul Hall

I just came from New York, where I played two Mendelssohn trios on historical instruments. These are my first plane trips in two years. To say things have changed since I was last a travelling musician would be an understatement. The last year and a half has given us a new President, a new Artistic Director of Philharmonia in the Bay Area, the retirement of PBO’s Artistic Director, our beloved Monica, and a rethinking in every arts organization about how to go forward.

A trio concert at New York’s Helicon series (with Krista Bennion, violin and Yiheng Yang, fortepiano)

I will start with the personal. In the last year and a half, while producing approximately 50 home video recordings for Valley of the Moon Music Festival (and playing some of them), including all of the violin, cello and piano sonatas of Beethoven, I was overseeing another project of a very different kind. After two years of struggling, my 91-year-old mother died this last April. She was in and out of various facilities, sometimes quarantined and isolated, sometimes in her own apartment with full-time care and lots of visits, and finally at the end in a spare, peaceful care home with only three other people- her final resting place in the last chapter of a whirlwind life. I like to think now that founding a music festival almost prepared me to oversee a very vulnerable and complicated stage of life- during a pandemic and in a country that hasn’t quite allowed for sickness or death. Almost.

With my mother, Millicent Tomkins at the Valley of the Moon Music Festival in Sonoma, CA, 2019

I was lucky to have had music to play and produce during that time and to be locked down with my life partner and co-Founder and director of the festival, Eric Zivian. The moments of crawling on the floor, searching for the correct wire to plug into the microphone or video camera with the recording engineer over FaceTime screaming, “no- the yellow wire, not the green one!”, the sweating hands while pushing the buttons on a phone that would suddenly connect us to an invisible audience- or not connect us, as happened a couple of times. There was a constant thought going through my head: “I’m a cellist, not an engineer!” The joys of learning new skills were numerous, and I know I speak for so many musicians during the pandemic.

Live-streaming from the makeshift recording studio in our living room in Berkeley

But now here we are on stage again with real people in the audience. And while the world struggles, the supply chain is in peril, and the fate of our beloved planet hangs in a dangerous balance, we keep playing on. I have to believe that music is still important. A part of me wants to throw it all away and become a climate activist (speaking of which, check out the fantastic blog of PBO violist, Vicki Gunn, but then what music would there be for climate activists to listen to at the end of their long days? I played Bach every day for my mother in the last few weeks of her life and it gave me a new appreciation for my “job” as a musician. It comforted her and dare I say, she enjoyed hearing it- those familiar sounds that can carry us through the hardest of times, and transport us to heavenly places.

Teddy - my Mom’s cat who became our cherished lockdown buddy

In August I went to the perfect festival for our times - the Moab Music Festival - a festival my sister started almost 30 years ago. Most of the concerts are outside. Please see the beautiful “backstage” below:

And George Takei was there!

Now in Portland I got to celebrate playing together again with my awesome stand partner, Adaiha MacAdam-Somer.

And finally… A part of concertizing musicians missed so much… The post-concert drink together! (All fully vaccinated and with negative Covid tests, of course).