Alisa Rose Interview
Below is the transcript to my interview with the multi-style violinist and composer Alisa Rose. The link takes you to the podcast, video and show notes:
Alisa Rose:
Then there's just the tension is the thing that gets in the interferes between getting your brain to communicate with your body in terms of what you express. So I think if you're a violinist, take a dance class, take an Alexander Technique class, move, go dance on the beach, but do whatever you can to sort of stay in your body while you're playing. I mean, walk around the room, move your feet for sure. Definitely move your feet while you're playing. I mean, I think being a Fiddler definitely helped free up my classical playing and I make most of my students walk around the room at some point or another to feel the beat and get more into big muscles and stay out of our tiny muscles and get a little bit less in our head.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Alisa Rose is a multi-style violinist and fiddler, composer and educator, and in this episode we’re shining a light on her wonderful new album with mandolinist Tristan Scroggins, Speranza. You’ll hear about how she found her way to such an interesting and diverse career from learning Old-Time music from retired farmers in Wisconsin as a child to classical training with the legendary Camilla Wicks at the San Francisco Conservatory, where she’s come full circle as a teacher. Alisa shared wonderful insights into teaching music, including body awareness and using creativity prompts in her improvisation classes. She shared powerful experiences from her tour in Eastern Europe as an Ambassador of the State Department, and advice about the benefits of organizing house concerts. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript to my website Leahroseman.com .It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the description of this episode, where you’ll find timestamps and all the links, including different ways to support this podcast!
Hey Alisa, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Alisa Rose:
Thanks so much for having me here. Glad to be here.
Leah Roseman:
We're going to focus quite a bit on your wonderful new duo album with Tristan Scroggins. And I was thinking the title Speranza must come from the Italian word for hope because this was started during the pandemic.
Alisa Rose:
Yes. The seed for many of the tunes came from tunes we wrote during the pandemic. Tristan started a tune challenge, I believe he called it Quarantunes during that first month of the pandemic when suddenly many people had lost many things, but musicians definitely lost all of their performing in a day. And there was a word prompt each day, and the idea was to write a tune based on the prompt. And I certainly spent hours every day writing these tunes because I had hours as I think many people did, and then recording little videos. So a few of the tunes on the album started with those prompts, and then we worked them out together once we could finally get together. And we actually, we put out our second CD. It was supposed to be, we were supposed to do a CD tour in March, 2020, which obviously didn't happen.
And so we ended up doing it virtually in June, and we did a bunch of split screen concerts where we played solos and made videos. It was a lot of work it, but when we finally could come back together after the pandemic, it was just so joyful. I'm sure you experienced this too, just to get to play music for other people finally in the same room as you, and to play music together and to work on these ideas together. Even when I think the first few sets of concerts we did together after the pandemic were all outside, which has a lot of challenges as an acoustic musician, but it was still such a joyous occasion to come out of that time and be like, oh, the world is reopening up. So yeah, the album is about that kind of the tunes written in the darkness and then sort of this emergence into the joyfulness after the pandemic.
Leah Roseman:
Now Tristan, so he's the son of banjo player, Jeff Scroggins. And so he was touring with his dad when he was super young, right?
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, since he was in high school. He toured with his dad for many years.
Leah Roseman:
And I noticed you guys met teaching at the Nimble Fingers summer camp for adults?
Alisa Rose:
We did. It's a fabulous camp in British Columbia. We were both teaching there. I believe Tristan was 18 at the time. I won't tell you how old I was, but we were both teaching and we just hit it off musically. It was sometimes you just play with someone and you're like, oh, what a natural musical connection. The same way you can have other kinds of chemistry, you can definitely have musical chemistry with someone. And so we decided to keep trying to play together, and the way this really played out was in terms of improvising, we found we could sort of react to each other and follow each other's ideas around. And also I think we had a similar sense of rhythm or some sort of similar sensibility that made it very freeing to play with each other, perhaps from playing a lot of bluegrass. So we met at this camp and then we were like, oh, let's keep playing.
And so whenever his dad's band would come through the Bay Area, he would tack on a few days or longer and we would work out some arrangements. And our first album was just improvised. It was a very DIY album. We rented an Airbnb, we had our awesome friend set up some great recording equipment, and then we hung out for three days and just hit record over and over and over and did a bunch of takes of improvs, mostly on tunes we had written and some on standards, and we thought we were just going to get a demo, but turned out we had a whole album. So that was our first album. Everything went from there. But we started out really improvisatory and then we got more. Our second album is more like all the ideas are very worked out. And then the third is a blend. This recent Esperanza is a blend of both.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I thought it might be interesting to actually start with the last tune Reaper, which I find so evocative and the fact that you're using this, I think it's a baritone violin tuning.
Alisa Rose:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to explain about that tuning first of all?
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, so I first heard Darol Anger play this baritone violin, and all it is is the regular violin with baritone violin strings on it. And it sounds an octave down from a normal violin, but more than that, it has this very moody dark sound to it, which sort of when you play an instrument with such a different sound, sort of conjures different ideas and brings different things out, it's a violin someone gave me. And I actually put the strings on probably more than 10 years ago and have not changed them since. I think that's part of its sound at this point too. So I'm afraid to change it. It has all these weird wolf tones and spookiness to the sound of it, and that's part of what I really like about it. The strings for those of you who play string instruments, they speak slowly because they're so thick, you can't do anything super fast, but they're really good at these sort of having all these overtones and being very moody.
Leah Roseman:
So you said baritone violin strings. Are they basically viola strings or not? Are they made specifically?
Alisa Rose:
They're made specifically. You can just order a set of Octave violin strings or baritone violin strings and put 'em on any violin really, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So can you say anything about Reaper?
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, so Reaper was one of the tunes I wrote from that quarantunes tune prompt that Tristan did. I believe the prompt was death, and it actually was one of the tunes that was the quickest. I am a thinker sometimes overthinker, and definitely a tinkerer with ideas. Usually I get an idea and I mess around with it and I turn it upside down and it takes me quite a while to sort of complete my creative process usually. But this one was, I think it was the idea for the quarantunes thing was maybe a three take thing. I just came up with the idea and liked it and probably had been thinking about death a lot. And the Reaper and the idea of it is sort of the reaper strutting on through time sort of going on, just endlessly meeting everyone as he goes. And I think there's parts that are calm within it. I think some people sort of meet him calmly, and there's some parts that are sort of angsty and dark. We call the middle section or heavy metal section about the painfulness of that too and how people fight sometimes when they meet him as well, or her, I don't know.
But really just about the Reaper's solitary walkthrough time.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. This is a clip from Reaper. Please look at the show notes for the links to Scroggins& Rose (Music)
Now, I think is a really interesting contrast. I believe Tristan wrote Space Samba.
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, so he came up with this idea, I should say about all of them, Reaper too. It's like one of us comes up with the melody and then they're very much worked out together for very much co-composers. So he had this sort of dancing melody. It was lived where many of our ideas do on the voice memos of our phones. I think we played around with what the B section should be for endlessly because we wanted something that contrasted that was more spacious and it took us a while to find something that we liked. And the eight part is kind of dancey and groovy. I think he had labeled it samba, and so that's partly how it got the name. But as it developed, our sort of image for this tune is if there was a tiki party in space or a samba party in space. So everyone's sort of floating around in their spacesuits, maybe with tiki shirts underneath and drinking tropical drinks. So yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Kind of a nice escapism there.
Alisa Rose:
Definitely.
Leah Roseman:
Your about to hear a clip from Space Samba.(Music) I thought it'd be interesting to talk a little bit about your development as a musician. So in Wisconsin, you were a Suzuki kid, I understand.
Alisa Rose:
Yes, I was
Leah Roseman:
Classic, your mom helped you practice, you had group classes?
Alisa Rose:
The whole thing. The whole thing. I didn't have group classes, but I started when I was two and a half with the box and the ruler, Crackerjack box, and my big sisters played, so I wanted to play. So I was really excited about it. And definitely Suzuki camp in Stevens Point, Wisconsin was a highlight of every summer, so I didn't have them regularly, but I had group classes there, which I thought was very cool. I loved staying in the dorms and the playing in the songs with the huge groups of kids, and I feel really lucky that I learned how to play by ear. I think it made it easier to delve into other styles, and I think it sort of left my music experience open in a way that I like.
Leah Roseman:
And you also joined an Old Time fiddle club when you were a kid as well with older mentors.
Alisa Rose:
When I was in middle school. I mean, I sort of met these guys before playing at local fiddle contests and whatnot. But then in middle school I joined the Southern Wisconsin Old Time Fiddlers Association, which was mostly retired farmers who played the Fiddle and me. They were mostly, I think seventies and up or so when I was 12. And it was great. They were very sweet to me. I would skip middle school and go play in, I dunno, libraries and different places with them. And I learned some cool tunes. And I think I just liked the atmosphere of hanging out and playing music and the whole thing that came with it. The tunes in Wisconsin, I learned a lot of great tunes that I've never played anywhere else. There was a lot of Schottisches and a lot of polkas, waltzes like anywhere, but it's a different repertoire when I came to California, I think. So I tried to call some of those tunes and people were like,uhh - so I hope to play some more of those someday again.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So when you were deciding on your education after high school, was it difficult to sort of decide what direction to go into because of the mix of styles?
Alisa Rose:
In high school? I got pretty serious about classical violin. One anecdote about Suzuki campus when I was, I mean I must've been like seven or eight or something, and I went to a Suzuki workshop that they had every year in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, home of the overalls.
And Randy Sabine was there and he played jazz violin and he had us listen to the Blues on records and improvise, and I was like, whoa, this is so cool. And then that wasn't something really that I could find other places growing up, I think I tried actually. I think I tried to see if there was someone I could take lessons with. And I remember cutting out the article from Strings Magazine of Jazz Fiddlers and taking it to the record shop and seeing if they had any in Madison. And I don't think they did, and I didn't know where to go from there kind of. So I mean, I still love classical music too, but I didn't really have the option of anything else laid out for me in terms of it as a career or something people did more seriously. So it didn't feel like an option when I went to college. And in fact, I started out as a double degree with science, so I was trying to decide between music and something more academic.
Leah Roseman:
So if you pursued science, was it more research?
Alisa Rose:
I don't know. I loved biology. I think I was saying biology. I went to Eastman and University of Rochester for a year and doing a double degree. And I really loved physics actually, so maybe I would've gone more that direction. But after that year, I was like, it wasn't a fit for me, the school and the whole everything.
So I took a year off and I came to San Francisco and I loved it, and I've been here ever since. It was the perfect teacher for me. I studied with Camilla Wicks, and she was a wonderful mentor in my life as a human, and she's an amazing artist, was an amazing artist. And then just culturally, I really liked the West Coast. I think I hadn't really spent time here and it felt like more of a fit for me than the East Coast.
Leah Roseman:
Camilla Wicks is a bit of a legend. Can you share a little bit about those experiences or highlights, any memories?
Alisa Rose:
So we would walk to her lessons at her living room and she would be there with her huge cat, Maggie, who was a force of nature as well. Just her artistry was just amazing. Anytime I could get her to demonstrate anything for me, I would be like, oh yeah, please demonstrate. It would just be like, oh my God, yes, I want to sound like that. But she taught me really how to craft something in a way that I hadn't learned before, how to create expression through how you do the timings, exactly how to sort of control all the elements. I think I really hadn't learned about timings, but also just sound colors and everything. My mind was kind of blown by the whole experience. And another thing she did really well is she cultivated a really strong studio, like a studio community within her students.
So I think we had studio class twice a week. I think it wasn't at her house by the time I was there, she was sort of nearing retirement, but it had been at her house sometimes. But she would be there. She would bring her video camera, and so you were playing all the time for each other. And I was so inspired by the other students in her studio and just hearing all this wonderful repertoire all the time. And after you played in the studio class with her, you would go to her house and you would watch the video with her and she'd be like, no, no, no, up over, Nope. That's, see how that timing wasn't, and she was so dedicated to teaching her entire craft to students. It was definitely not just about, I mean, no one is just about the notes, but it was really about crafting all these tiny details to help create a beautiful performance.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I mean, I've heard from other people, just like you described, going beyond what would normally be expected in terms of time and commitment, really amazing.
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, you'd go to watch the video after she had taught for 12 hours and she would have you over and spend another half an hour with you. Just incredible dedication to her students.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of your life as a composer, you do write lots of great music, and I really love your Fiddle and Pizzicato pieces album, and I bought the music
Alisa Rose:
Oh, thanks!
Leah Roseman:
Because I want to try to learn them, but they're really hard. The unfamiliar techniques, not just the chopping, but even the way the pizzicato, very specific techniques with two fingers, it's going to be a challenge for me. So I really hope people actually, can we share any of that album or any of the videos?
Alisa Rose:
Great. Yeah, that'd be great, Please.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, wonderful.
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, any of the album, or I can send you a video too.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. We'll edit that in. Yeah. Is there one in particular you think would be nice?
Alisa Rose:
Maybe the Percussion caprice, I think that's maybe people might think that's interesting with the chopping and the different sounds. That one definitely was born of chopping and then sort of exploring all the different kind of chop sounds I could make. And as a composer, I guess what I like to try to do is usually take whatever it is I'm working on and make it into a more through composed kind of story, if you will, or travel somewhere from here to there. So I tried to do that with that one as well. And the chop techniques are not what I would use necessarily in bluegrass, but I definitely worked on chopping a lot within Bluegrass. And I played with singer songwriters for a bunch of years and tried different things with that as well. Just tried to be the drummer.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's such a wonderful texture. You'll find the video to this live performance of Alisa's Percussion Caprice linked in the show notes along with the album link. And please note that you can also buy the sheet music from her as well. (Music)
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Brittany Haas, Sara Caswell, Joe K. Walsh, Guy Donis, Gina Burgess and Tracy Silverman, among so many since 2021. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mubs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend. Thanks.
So who taught you chopping?
Alisa Rose:
I think I had different workshops, but basically figured it out.
Leah Roseman:
Picked it up, yeah.
Alisa Rose:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, you play in such a relaxed way, and I know you do a lot of teaching and you also have your Peghead Nation videos and stuff. Do you have sort of general advice about that?
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, I do think that it's usually the biggest inhibitor of expression is tension. I mean, I think it's worth spending time really in your body as much as you can, even away from the instrument, looking for ways to reduce tension. I would say. I think it's one of the biggest things about learning the violin. People think it's about this, which is actually that's much less than this. This is our voice, our right hand and our bow. But then there's just the tension is the thing that gets in the interferes between getting your brain to communicate with your body in terms of what you express. So I think if you're a violinist, take a dance class, take an Alexander technique class, move, go dance on the beach, but do whatever you can to stay in your body while you're playing. I mean, walk around the room, move your feet for sure. Definitely move your feet while you're playing. I mean, I think being a fiddler definitely helped free up my classical playing, and I make most of my students walk around the room at some point or another to feel the beat and get more into big muscles and stay out of our tiny muscles and get a little bit less in our head and more into our body. So I think those are the big things is trying to find the music more from here, more from your heart and more from your relaxed muscles and less worrying about all the details. Of course, you always have to care about the details, but,
Leah Roseman:
And we always can really only focus on one primary thing at a time. So if you're working on the tension, then you're putting your focus there in terms of letting go of the details, doing something easier
Alisa Rose:
Sometimes it's good to sound bad, sometimes to make progress, you have to sound worse and just live in your big muscles. I like to make students do caveman bowing sometimes, or like I said, walk around the room with the beat of the music, even if they're playing a box suite so that they're connecting to their body.
Leah Roseman:
For people who can't see this, because listening to the podcast, so when you said caveman bow, you kind of grabbed a pencil, it was like a club instead of a delicate bow hold. So what do you mean by that?
Alisa Rose:
I guess that's a little different than the tension thing, but that's sort of about moving from big muscles. I think sometimes we get so all about moving from the smallest joints that we forget that the whole bow arm is moving from the back. You are moving your shoulder, you're moving from your back, so sometimes that kind of helps with that. And in terms of rhythm, I think playing really rhythmically also happens from bigger muscles, and it doesn't have to be a big motion. It could be a small motion from big muscles, but it's easy to get too small.
Leah Roseman:
So you teach quite a bit of improvisation and to different kinds of students. You teach in the pre-college program at San Francisco Conservatory, and you've taught preschoolers and you teach adult amateurs, like a big gamut of
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, I love teaching and I love teaching all the ages. Mostly I teach kids, but I really enjoy doing that class for Peghead, which is an improv class for fiddlers and violinists. In terms of improv, I mean, I think a lot of it is the same no matter the age group. I mean, if you have some skill on your instrument or not, that changes it. But the improv class I did, it was actually for college students, has been really a lot of fun. I think I've been calling it contemporary improv ensemble.
All the players, the students at the San Francisco Conservatory are already amazing musicians. So it's really a question of making it not intimidating. And I think the skills you work on when you improvise are listening to each other, listening to someone else while you're doing something, listening and responding. All of these are chamber music skills that you use in any kind of music playing. So I like to do a lot of games that break things down into small attainable ideas. Hopefully like doing an improv with only two notes and can you make it interesting? Can you give it a little bit of a shape? Can it have a more exciting part? And then can it die out in some sort of way? Or doing an improv that only uses the rhythm, I guess similar to the two notes or finding one texture and exploring that or having one groove and you're responding to that groove and how many ways can you respond to that groove? And I think any creativity parameters help free you up. Actually, it feels like you're adding rules, but when you add rules, you have to be creative within those rules. And it's been really fun to teach that class and see what comes out of it because the students come up with beautiful music. It just needs to be a situation where they feel sort of safe to create,
Leah Roseman:
Like you were mentioning with Tristan's Quarantunes creativity prompts.
Alisa Rose:
Exactly.
Leah Roseman:
So back to your album, so you have this Klezmer style tune. Is it Lasso the Squirrel? How do you pronounce it?
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, Lasso the Squirrel.
Leah Roseman:
Lasso the Squirrel. So have you played Klezmer music?
Alisa Rose:
Not much. When I was in undergrad for a little bit, I would get together with some friends and play some klezmer. That was very early in my development of other styles, so I don't think, in retrospect, I don't think I spent enough time listening to recordings. I just had fun hanging out with them and playing some tunes. But since then, I've listened to more recordings and I love Klezmer music, but I've never gotten to play in a Klezmer band outside of that brief experience.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it's a really fun tune. You can really hear the squirrel sounds, the articulation.
Alisa Rose:
Excellent, thanks. It's also sort of a joke on, I had some bluegrass friends who were making fun of old time tune names, "shove the pig's foot a little bit further in fire" and whatnot, and so they were like, well, someone should write an old time tune called Lasso the Squirrel. It's definitely not an old time tune, but I thought it fit the tune.
Leah Roseman:
This is a clip from Lasso the Squirrel. (Music)
Now, another one of your mentors was Bettina, how you pronounce her name? Mussumeli. So you studied with her for a few years?
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, so I took a break after doing undergrad at the Conservatory music or most of my undergrad. And during that time I did explore a lot of styles. I had joined a bluegrass band and I played with singer songwriters and I did some touring with different singer songwriters, being a side man, and I taught a lot of violin lessons and played a lot of wedding gigs and string quartet stuff, whatever I could play during that time. And then I went back to school and I did the chamber music degree at the conservatory and studied with Bettina. And that was awesome because I got to play chamber music with the faculty at the conservatory. Super inspiring. I learned a lot. I think playing with other great musicians is a really good way to learn no matter what style you're in. And the whole time though, I was also playing other styles and I think only after graduate school that they really start to come more together for me. But while I was in school, I joined the Real Vocal string quartet too, and that definitely changed my outlook on music a lot too.
Leah Roseman:
So that group, it's with them that you toured Eastern Europe as an ambassador of the US State Department,
Alisa Rose:
So it was a singing string quartet founded by Irene Sazer. We all contributed material for the group. It was arrangements from all kinds of music, and we went to Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Latvia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia as US State Department Ambassadors. It was amazing trip and where they send you when you go on one of these is you go to small villages where they want to make a connection with us culture and the whole town would come out, or we played in schools for kids or all sorts of different community centers. And one of the things that was, I mean, everything about that was it was awesome to see these places. I love having musical music as a vehicle to connect with other people. It's a really great way to travel and get to really meet people and play music with other people, and especially in Macedonia and Bosnia and their folk music traditions are so strong. It was really cool to see. And then they really responded to our folk music traditions as well. In Macedonia. We went to the Arts High school in the capital and they took us to their dance and music class, and there was a group of high school girls doing belting the singing out, and there was other people in the corner playing the percussion, and then there was a whole troop of dancers, and that was just in their high school. It was amazing. So every time we played a concert, they'd be dancing, but at the end and just a real appreciation for folk music and string music and very cross-generational audiences from young to old. So it was definitely a trip of a lifetime.
Leah Roseman:
At the beginning of this interview when you were talking about your child in Wisconsin and meeting up with these elders who taught you old time fiddle tunes. In a lot of cultures that would just be normal, but we get kind of siloed,
Alisa Rose:
Right? Yeah, definitely. I love the classical tradition and how you learn with a mentor, and I like it as a teacher as well. I mean, I think it's great to be a mentor to a child for so long, but it's a very formalized tradition compared to how you learn in folk music. There's a lot more hanging out and playing tunes all night and joy, and that's built into the musical learning tradition, and I think those are really powerful things.
Leah Roseman:
Did you learn music there as sort of a group? Did you make a point or just pick stuff up
Alisa Rose:
In each country we went to, one of us arranged a tune from that place that was famous, and sometimes we would play it with another band depending on the city from there. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, there was one place where they had a mandolin orchestra that played with us. We did a few arrangements with them and we played with bands some places it wasn't mandolins, it was similar to mandolins, but slightly different version that they have there. So whenever we could connect with our musicians, we definitely tried to, but because we were a string quartet, it was definitely more prearranged than on the fly sorts of things and performances.
Leah Roseman:
Was there anything that surprised you about that trip?
Alisa Rose:
I think I didn't know how our music would go over other places. You never know until you get in front of an audience what it will feel like and how they'll respond. Singing string quartet music, it's not the most widely popular music here, so it was a nice surprise that the whole community would come out in these places and seemed to really love it. We felt very appreciated. One other surprise was in Azerbaijan, we got to our first concert. I think there had been a mess up with the visas, and so we barely slept and we got to our first concert and they were talking through the whole concert and we were like, what's going on? We asked to our guide, I think his name was, and he said, oh, they're just saying they love it, and the custom there was just to chat through the concert. It wasn't a sign of disrespect or that they didn't like it. He was like, oh yeah, they really are into it. So we were all worried that they hated it. So that was a random just cultural difference.
Leah Roseman:
And I mean, from what I understand, the way in Mozart's time, for example, I think the people would've been talking, they had these long concerts with these nobility. I get them, I might have to ask a historian, but I've had that impression that there was a certain amount and maybe a little later they'd have these very, very long concerts, like four hour concerts in the 19th century with all these different performers, and I think we're probably more formal now. That makes sense. Yeah. So the Real Vocal string quartet, I looked up some of the videos when you were still in the group. I mean, you're playing and you're singing sometimes, right?
Alisa Rose:
Yeah. There's parts where we're all singing or one person is a lead singer or we're singing and playing. So definitely a unique sound and also very hard, but a lot of fun to write for and a lot of fun to play and so many possibilities. That was really the first time I got to do a lot of arranging, and it was great because everybody was a great musician with a lot of opinions, and we had time to really workshop things. So the cellist would be like, nah, that's not a good range. Use this other thing, and it shouldn't be pizz. That's never going to be, we would go through a lot of iterations of pieces. So I think for me as a composer, that was when I really got to start playing around with, oh, you could do this other thing or this other thing and just get to workshop it, which feels like a natural way to compose to me.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, like a real lab.
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, exactly.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, especially with string writing, I find a lot of emerging composers, maybe they're not really, they don't play strings and they're working with their synthesizers, you know what I mean? So they don't really know how it translates.
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, definitely. Any young composer, any chance you get to workshop something and get input from players, hear them play it, and then change some things and try it some other ways. I think there's nothing like it. I mean, still any opportunity I have to work with another composer where we can both try each other's ideas and get ideas. I think it's cool that it's more interactive, but also makes the music better.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Now another group you played with was the San Francisco String Quartet. You're part of that Grammy nominated album, music of Brubeck, so I think it's what Quartet San Francisco Plays Brubeck was the title?
Alisa Rose:
Exactly. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
So that's another group that's cross genre.
Alisa Rose:
That was a lot of fun to play into. Jeremy Cohen wrote all the arrangements. He's the first violinist in that group, and he writes great arrangements. He's really wonderful at it, and we got to record that album at Skywalker. It's a beautiful space. It was a really dynamite group of players, and it was a cool experience to record it and do some touring with them as well.
Leah Roseman:
So you'd mentioned Alisa that you'd done a lot of touring with different singer songwriters, and I believe you toured also in Europe. I was kind of curious about the scene there and how that experience was different than playing in North America.
Alisa Rose:
Yeah. I toured with AJ Roach and we did a few tours in the Netherlands, and we went to the British Isles as well, and they were awesome. People were such great listeners. I found the folk clubs were really nice. There's a little bit more government support of the arts there, so things seem to pay better and just sort of a general level of respect was higher. I love touring there with folk music. It ironically seems easier to tour American folk music in Europe than it does here in the States.
Leah Roseman:
And what kind of opportunities in the Bay Area? Are there enough venues?
Alisa Rose:
Yes. Scroggins&Rose has really based ourselves here now. I have a one and a half year old, so that's probably going to be the way it is for the time being. It works because Tristan comes out maybe three or four times a year. That's probably maxing it out for us. For venues, we've really built ourselves through house concerts. We've done a lot of Groupmuses. Do you know what Groupmuse is?
Leah Roseman:
No.
Alisa Rose:
Groupmuse is an app, you should check it out. I totally think they're great. They're a platform for house concerts. They started out as being just for classical house concerts, but they've since opened their doors to other folk genres or things that are historically based. It's just a way for somebody to host a concert in their home and invite people through the app. So they invite their own friends, but also people through the app can come, and it's been an easy way to set up shows. Sometimes we're setting them up last minute when he finds out when the holes between his tours are, so it's hard to book something more formal in that kind of window. We've played for all sorts of different kinds of people and all sorts of different kinds of homes, and they can be really amazing. It's a way to gain new audience and I think tends to be a little, depends on the house, but tends to skew a little younger than some of the more traditional venues.
And also for a group that I think our music is, we want it to be very intimate chamber music for a small room in a certain way. We like playing acoustically, mandolin, and violin, especially Mandolin has a certain limit sound wise in terms of how far it can project without more amplification. And so it's well suited to a good sounding living room.
Leah Roseman:
This is a clip from Pandemic Buddy. (Music)
Alisa Rose:
We'd be happy to expand to slightly larger venues too, but that's definitely how we've built our concertizing in the Bay Area.
Leah Roseman:
Now, the very first tune on this album is Pandemic Buddy, which I really love and it's great start to the album. But I was curious about set lists in terms of the order of the album and then when you're performing, how much thought you give to that?
Alisa Rose:
We do think about the set lists are, our tunes are mostly three to five minutes long, so a set is maybe nine tunes depending on how talkative usually Tristan is feeling that day. He talks more on stage than I do. The flow of the set is very important. I think we start with stuff that's a little more extroverted and energetic. Then you sort of go into something that's a little more listening and introverted later in the set. And maybe you get another hill of sort of, what would I call it, energy or momentum through the set. And then you end big at the end of the set. Big doesn't have to be loud, but sort of usually more energetic by the end of the set again, if that makes any sense. Once we find a set list, we then we sort of just tweak that until we have enough new tunes that we have to re-figure the whole thing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You mentioned about being a new parent, and I do ask people about this. My kids are grown now, but my husband's also a violinist and we certainly went through the challenges of trying to deal with the lifestyle. Even though we're in one, we're not touring musicians so much, but it's just all the nights, all the weekends, all the erratic schedules can be really tough.
Alisa Rose:
I feel like the pandemic in some ways made me less stressed about sort of leaving, performing. I'm still performing some, but I'm not doing a lot right now while my son is tiny. Leaving performing during the pandemic for a while and finding that I could come back to it, it would still be my voice, it would still feel like me, and in some ways it would be even more satisfying after taking a break makes me less anxious about doing less performing right now. Earlier in my life, it might've been harder for me to sort of separate myself from myself as a musician. And right now I'm really enjoying getting to spend a lot of time with him around some teaching and a little bit of playing, and later on I'll do more playing again. And I think I worried it would feel like more of a sacrifice than it does actually,
Leah Roseman:
But also you do compose. I do like classical music as well. So I heard a little bit of your piano trio and you have a violin concerto. Is it with string orchestra?
Alisa Rose:
Yeah, so that was my big pandemic project, also pre-child, and I got a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission to write it, and it started off with interviews of folks from Bluegrass Pride around themes of inclusion, and I tried to find common themes and base the music on that as well as in some performance. The clips from the interviews are played before each movement. Okay. I'm very proud of it. I worked on it really hard during the pandemic, and it's definitely a synthesis of my own playing and my own, where my ears have spent a lot of time, which is a lot in the American folk music world and a lot of bluegrass and fiddle music and classical music. So again, often a theme I find that I like and then that is fiddly in nature, but then I pull it out into a longer through composed form, which hopefully tells the listener a story.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, when you were in university, did your peers, were they surprised that you're playing all these other styles of music? The rest of them were just doing classical.
Alisa Rose:
I don't think they really knew that much.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Alisa Rose:
Definitely an undergrad they didn't know. And then later, I think I told Camilla at some point, and she was like, oh, that's nice, dear. She was like, oh, I think my son plays bluegrass in his kitchen or something. But yeah, they stayed pretty separate for me until after school, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah. It is so interesting to me, and one of my many motivations for putting so much into this podcast is to show people that life and music is really a broad thing, and there's so many directions, and it strikes me how brave you were to make these decisions at certain points to leave Eastman, like this wasn't working for you to take time to go. It is really inspiring, actually.
Alisa Rose:
Oh, thanks. That was one of the scarier moments in my life, I think. But in retrospect, it was totally the right decision. I think for younger musicians out there, there's a lot of trust in your gut in finding your path, and it's always easier to stay the course than to veer off. But sometimes veering off is the right thing, and I feel so lucky that I ended up in San Francisco. It's beautiful here. It's a really interesting place musically and artistically. I liked the culture and for me at that moment, it was just the perfect teacher for me. I needed someone warm who would push me, but also sort of support me. That was just right for me at age 19.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, I wanted to thank you so much for coming on today. Really enjoyed meeting you and speaking to you.
Alisa Rose:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been really nice to talk with you today.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support the series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
