About me

Fun facts

Serious facts

People and organizations

OAQ

Occasionally Asked Questions

• Why did you study music?

  Because it seemed like the obvious thing to do. Most of my family members were musicians, some of them professionals; they valued music very highly and were proud of me when I practised music. I can listen to, think about, or talk to others about music all day long and not get bored.

• Why do you study sociology and philosophy?

  Right in the middle of my graduate studies I suddenly could not stand to hear myself play anymore. I took a semester off to take a break – something I had never allowed myself to do for fear of getting worse – and to free my head. But I also wanted to fill my head with something else and decided to start another course of studies. The combination of sociology and philsophy seemed most useful to me to tackle some questions that were important to me, like for example:

  • Why can’t Europe seem to manage to treat refugees in a humane way?
  • Am I allowed to think that Tchaikovsky is lame?
  • Why are the people who come to my concerts almost exclusively old white folks?
  • What’s the point of religion?

• What are your plans for the future?

  Utopia: I can freely divide my time between playing concerts, reading, thinkung, practising, counseling, doing housework, writing, rehearsing, chilling, planning projects, being creative.
  Realist thinking: I finish my studies and find myself a half time job which gives me the freedom to choose how much and what sort of music I want to make in the remaining time.
  Either way, I hope everything can always be open to change.

• What do you do when you study sociology?

  I read a lot of texts. Sometimes I write some. (Here you can read a few, in German.) And every now and then I say something in class.

• What is sociology?

  Oh boy. I really don’t feel entitled to answer this question. I plan to put up a text here some time in which I have tried to explore the reasons why I personally want to do sociology and how I want to go about it.
  (Interestingly, no one really ever asks me what philosophy is. And I’m fine with that because I feel I would struggle at least as hard to find an answer.)

• Are you good at playing the violin?

  Of course, this is not a question I get asked just like that. (At least it hasn’t happened so far.) But anyone who has a job and has to make money from it will be confronted with this question sooner or later – any musician will probably ask themself this question from the first day forward.
  On a standard website you might now be presented with a list of all the awards I’ve won. Truth is: there are none, at least none that would make me stand out in any way from the huge amount of great violinists that there are in Germany.
  Or I could give you the names of all the great ensembles and artists that I have performed with. There are a few, but I don’t think the fact that I have played with person xyz really says something about me. The reasons for that might have been other than my abilities – I could just as well have had a couple of beers with xyz once, or xyz might be hoping to get a foot in the door to the world of sociologists by working with me. I am kidding, of course, but if you know the professional music scene, you know how sometimes those kind of things play a bigger role than the actual quality of the performance.
  Which leads me to the next point: who decides if I’m good? The simple answer would be: whoever is listening. (I hope to write something about the more complicated answer soon and show it to you.) So, why don’t you take a look/listen here.