Interview with Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch - DECLASSIFIED

[00:11] Cindy: You are listening to the Thoughts From a Page podcast, which is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. My name is Cindy Burnett, and I love to talk about books with anyone and everyone. While listening to my podcast, you will hear author interviews, behind the scenes conversations about various aspects of the publishing world, theme discussions with other book lovers and more. For more book recommendations and a complete list of all of my interviews, check out my website, Thoughtsfromapage.com and follow me on Facebook and Instagram at @thoughtsfromapage. In 2022, I would love for you to join my Patreon group. I offer at least two bonus episodes a month and a monthly advanced read and prepublication author chat. For those on Facebook, I host a special Patreon Facebook group where we all chat books. Thanks so much to those who already participate and I hope you will consider joining us. Today I am chatting with Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch, about Declassified, a Lowkey Guide to the Highstrung World of Classical Music. Arianna earned a Bachelor's degree and Master of Music from the Juilliard School and has performed as a classical violinist in top venues around the world. She's toured with legendary artists such as jazz trumpeter Sir James Galway and Chris Botti, appearing as a featured violinist in venues such as Washington, D.C.'s. Kennedy Center and New York City's famous Blue Note Jazz Club. Declassified is her first book. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Welcome, Arianna. How are you today?

[01:41] Arianna: I'm fine, thank you so much for having me.

[01:43] Cindy: I'm so glad you're here because I really enjoyed your book. It was just such a fun read and I just can't wait to ask you so many questions about it.

[01:52] Arianna: Thank you.

[01:53] Cindy: Well, let's start out with you giving me a quick synopsis of what the book is about for those that won't have read it yet.

[01:59] Arianna: So, Declassified, it's an interesting kind of hybrid. It follows a narrative arc that's based on my musical life. So at the beginning and end of each chapter there will be an anecdote and they're mostly chronological about my adventures in music, and then those set up various excursions into different topics relating to classical music. So in the first chapter, for instance, I talk about how I used to lie under my dad's piano while he was playing Goldberg Variations, and how I formed this attachment to music from that time, from the Baroque era. But I didn't know then that it was the Baroque era. I just knew that these were the composers I liked. And I also at the same time discovered that I absolutely hated medieval music, which is an earlier period. And this music just still to this day, I feel so instantly depressed whenever I hear any music from this period. So then I launch into a discussion of the different compositional periods because this is for me a huge thing that classical music is not it's not one genre. It's just a collection of many different kinds of music from hundreds of years. It spans so many different times, so many different styles. And yeah, so I think it's nice for people to have that sort of guidance, to know these are the composers from this period. This is what this period sounds like. Then 100 years later or 200 years later, there's the next period, and so on. So I go through all of those. And then in the next chapter, I talk about my start as a violinist when I was two and a half and my training in those early days. And then I talk about natural talent and how I actually don't I hate it when people talk about natural talent because it doesn't feel at all natural when you're training. Of course, there should be some ability, but it's mostly physical conditioning. And anyway, so it goes through we get through to my training at Juilliard and then some of my disillusionment with the industry, but also with being a violinist at that level. It's just a really big challenge. And mostly it's very playful and light. And again, we're covering different topics on the way. And eventually we circle back to my where I am now with music, which is, I think, a much happier, healthier place. So that's sort of the narrative arc. And along the way, we learn a lot.

[04:31] Cindy: We do learn a lot. And I love that because I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I read it straight through. But it's one of those that I will keep on my shelf so that when I am encountering some of the things you talk about, I can pull it out as a reference. I think it's very helpful for some of the details. Like you were talking about classical music actually encompassing a variety of genres and what to do at a live performance and just a variety of things. You have some other great stories that I want to talk about a little bit later. But before we do that, how did you decide to write a book?

[05:02] Arianna: Yes, this is, again, partly the story that's in the book, but I've been wanting for so long to find any way of bringing classical music to wider audiences. And I did that partly as a violinist by trying to do interesting sort of different, innovative things. But I also remember already, back when I was at Julliard, I remember Cornering, my business of music professor. And at that time, I really wanted to write a blockbuster ensemble cast movie about a violin competition so that people would be able to see how human, but also how crazy the industry is. And it would give me a chance to set up all of these great moments in the film score. All of my favorite pieces could be showcased in really emotionally charged ways. And so I've been sort of, you know, playing with ideas that were relating to writing for a long time. And I always loved writing when I was younger. My mom's a writer and I grew up reading a lot and I went to an academic high school, so I did a lot of writing there. And then I actually started writing when I was on during my concert tours. There was a time when I got a really bad review from this critic in Montreal. And he was so mean and everyone hated him because he was really just vicious, and I felt it was so unjust and so unfair. In response, as a way of dealing with my frustration, I wrote a series of short stories, funny short stories about his murder. It made me feel a lot better and actually, in the end, I couldn't even get my characters to kill him. So I don't think I would be very good at pulling off a murder in real life. But anyway, I wrote this set of stories and that sort of led to some articles and I realized that I really loved doing this. So then later, when I took a break from performing and I started appreciating music more as a listener again, it really felt like a great next step for me to try to serve the gods of music, as one Japanese manager I worked with used to say in this way, instead of through the violin.

[07:22] Cindy: To declassify classical music for others.

[07:26] Arianna: Absolutely no. And really, I felt like in so many ways, I love this title that we came up with because I think it works on a lot of different levels. There's the fact that I do think there's a certain amount of people don't know that you're sharing. It's a little revelatory in that sense. But it's also you're taking away this class system that's associated with the industry. There's so much elitism and I really wanted to create a point of entry for people who might not have always felt welcomed or in the industry, because it is it depends on your experiences with it. I'm really lucky because my dad's a pianist. I felt like I was entitled to this music from the very beginning. But there are so many people who don't have that access right away. And I think that there are a lot of cues from society, from movies that make people feel like this music isn't for them. And that's such a shame because really, the music itself isn't snobby at all. The composers weren't snobby, or most of them weren't snobby. And the emotions expressed in the music are all just human emotions speaking to our shared human experiences. They're not about money or country clubs or anything. In fact, Mozart, who's most often used in these country club situations, he was horribly uncouth in a lot of different ways. He wrote these really gross poems and songs about poop that are in the book. Some of them are in the book. So I wanted to give people a chance to reach classical music in a more accessible way. But I also wanted to showcase the more human approachable side of the industry and genre.

[09:13] Cindy: Well, I want to talk about Mozart and the poop in just a little bit, but before we do that, I wanted to ask you how it was weaving in your story with the classical music facts that you're providing. So was that difficult for you? Was it easy to balance? How did all of that come about for you?

[09:29] Arianna: Well, that was really interesting because my agent and I first started working on this proposal for this book. My idea was to use anecdotes for my life, but they were much more sort of casual anecdotes. So it was going to be more like, oh, my kids did the craziest thing the other day, blah, blah, blah. And that reminded me of how people treat classical music like this or something. And so it wasn't going to be quite as personal and it wasn't going to involve quite as much of my own journey. But then as my editor and I started working on it, she really encouraged me to use just my own experiences a bit more and the arc of my career. And that worked really nicely. And I think that it was also amazingly therapeutic for me to go through my life in this way and to sort of examine all these different experiences and these different epiphanies that have happened along the way. And it was interesting because there were some topics that I knew I wanted to cover and so for those I had to go hunt for the right anecdote for my life to set those up. But there were other times when there was a memory or something that came to me that I thought would be really cool to put in there. And then that in itself led to whatever the excursion, the more informative excursion in the middle of the chapter was. So the two different sides definitely helped each other and inspired each other and it was sometimes a bit of an editorial challenge just to get the balance right. But I think, I mean, I'm happy with the way it turned out.

[11:13] Cindy: Well, they definitely complement each other, your journey and then journey through classical music and some of the interesting, entertaining and useful things to know about the genre. So I felt it all together worked quite well.

[11:27] Arianna: Thank you.

[11:28] Cindy: One of the things I really liked about the book were the chapter titles. So did that come early on? Did you add those later? Did you write them? Did you have help? How was that?

[11:37] Arianna: So the chapter titles, it was a combination of everything. Some of the chapter titles stayed. They were there from the very beginning, from the proposal, and they stayed. And some of the chapter titles we added later on. I think a lot of the material for the titles, they came from various incarnations of the chapters themselves.

[11:59] Cindy: So I'm going to give an example to listeners just so they know what we're talking about. So chapter five is called Million Dollar Baby. Grands and violins, the literal price of excellence. Then you go on in that chapter to talk about the cost of instruments and how widely they vary. So I just thought it was so engaging because you have these definitely very eye catching chapter titles. And then I was immediately wanting to know what the chapter was going to say.

[12:23] Arianna: Yeah, that's great. So that one I came up with because I was thinking about as you're playing with different words as you're writing. This was one of the things that came to me that didn't really fit into the chapter, but it worked really well as the title. And then yeah, there were some other ones. I don't know what your language policy is on this podcast.

[12:45] Cindy: It's okay, go ahead.

[12:47] Arianna: So there's the chapter, conductors are assholes, for instance, which I don't know if I was going to use the word assholes, but my editor was like, you know, we should just go for it because that's what you're saying and if you're open to it and there was no pushing, but she definitely helped with the direction. She sent over some suggestions and then I kept some of them or tweaked them and then rewrote some of them. But they evolved from what was in the chapters first. But they definitely, I think for the most part, they came later. And only a couple of them stayed as they had been sort of in the initial table of contents.

[13:24] Cindy: I can see that. I was figuring it might be something that developed over time as you were working on the book. But they're a great ad.

[13:31] Arianna: Oh, great. I'm glad.

[13:33] Cindy: And then talking about the cost of instruments, how crazy expensive violins can be. Can we talk about that a little bit?

[13:40] Arianna: It is absolutely crazy. So, yeah, in this book, I talk about some of the most expensive instruments that are on record. There was actually just recently a really interesting sale, and I was so sad that I couldn't put it into the book because it happened after we were done with all of the copy editing phases. But Tasha Seidel, who was a Ukrainian violinist, played on this strad, the DA Vinci Strad, and it was recently auctioned off by Theresa for 15 point, I want to say 8 million something around there, which is a huge amount for an auction. And actually that's not even really close to what the most expensive island is because as I discussed in the chapter, a lot of these sales are done privately, so we don't have public records for them. But I do have friends who work in this industry in very important roles. So they've been part of these transactions and they've shared that these instruments can be into the mid 20 million.

[14:44] Cindy: I just can't even fathom that. And then if you purchased a violin that costs that all I'd want to do is lock it up in a case, I wouldn't feel like I could play it.

[14:53] Arianna: I know. Well, the thing is, if you were the one purchasing the instrument, you probably wouldn't be the one playing it. Which is one of the sad things about having these instruments, as valuable as they are, it's hard because on the one hand, I think they are incredible and they should be given that much importance that they're valued this high. But on the other hand, it's sad that musicians can't pay for that themselves. So it involves even more trust because usually it's an investor who's paying for the instrument and then you have them loaning it out to a violinist or if it's a violist or cellist. And they have to just trust that these musicians will take care of their investments. But I totally hear you. And when I was playing on the Juilliard Strad and the Juilliard del Jay Zoo, I was also at the beginning, it took a lot of getting used to have something like that. Just even in your apartment, in your bedroom, you're really worried about it all the time. And if you have to take it with you I don't know. I usually chose to walk to school, even though it was 45 blocks, instead of taking the subway, because you just think, what if something happens to it? You want to be able to control as many of the variables as possible.

[16:10] Cindy: Well, and you talk about that in your book, that somebody had it stolen out from under their chair. Somebody in London, right, when they were in a Starbucks or something like that.

[16:18] Arianna: Yeah.

[16:19] Cindy: Can you even imagine? Of course, I would probably keep it in my lap with my arms around it or handcuffed to it or something like that. No, but it is fascinating.

[16:28] Arianna: Well, this is the thing is that you spend so much time with these instruments that even if you start off treating them with all of this extra caution, then eventually it does become something that you're so used to having around you that it does make sense that there are sometimes oversights. I won't mention any names, but there are some very famous musicians who have left their Strads and similar instruments in taxicabs, actually. It's nothing like it, but my parents just told me a really funny story. They went to this shop, Rune and Suns, that's mentioned in my book. They sell fine instruments and bows. And they went there to drop off my sister's cello because she wanted to have it repaired. And when they got there, there was a bow on the counter that had her name on it. And they said, oh, what is this bow that has her name? And they said, oh, that's her bow. She left it here three years ago.

[17:29] Cindy: Three years?

[17:30] Arianna: Yeah. Three years. I mean, she's not playing anymore, but she dropped it off to have it reheard, and she just never picked it up.

[17:39] Cindy: Okay, that is hilarious. This story also makes me think about Lizzo, who recently played James Madison's glass flute. All the drama there was related to that. And so it does it is just an interesting thing to think about. The cost of these instruments you're talking about. The owners aren't the ones actually playing them, so if they're going to get any playing time, it is going to be a musician and just kind of all that goes with that. And then the other thing you talked about was if people get any ideas about trying to steal them, that most of them are so well known and documented that you couldn't do anything with it other than hide it.

[18:13] Arianna: Exactly. I mean, especially it's really any of the instruments that have these recognizable names. They're all documented so well, and the dealers know them. And as soon as one of them is stolen, then the first thing that would happen is that everyone would know that this violin was missing, and so people would be on the lookout for it. So if you bring in a Strad, and a Strad has recently been stolen, the first thing they'll do is make sure it's not that Strad. And these guys, these experts, their eyes are just so good. They can spot really the most minute details. So it's not a lucrative thing, I guess, right? Actually, there's a book I really want to read, speaking of book recommendations. It's called the violin conspiracy. And it's about an instrument. I think it's also a straw that gets stolen from a competition. And I've heard such good things about it, and I really want to get to it. But it came out sort of right before this book, so it was a crazy time and I wasn't able to get to it yet. But that's one of my treats for after the book push is over.

[19:21] Cindy: And he has a new book coming out next year as well. I was just working on some historical fiction articles, and I saw that he has a new book that will be out next year.

[19:29] Arianna: Oh, wow. I hadn't even seen that. But that makes sense because the book is doing so fantastically.

[19:34] Cindy: It would be like stealing a Vermeer. You take one of the 33 Vermeers that are known in the world and you try to sell everybody to be like, yeah, no, yeah, exactly. So you have a great chapter on some of the famous composers in their love life, and you talk a little bit about Mozart and his poems regarding Poop and his letters regarding Poop. So let's talk a little bit about that.

[19:55] Arianna: Yes. So there are even some letters of his that I really wanted to put in the book, but I couldn't because it was a little too rambling, which is the way the way my head is organized, but not the way the book is. Well, it's a little sometimes it goes on tangents, but we try to keep it concise. He is one of the most fascinating minds. I mean, there's his facility in composing, which is unbelievable, but there's also the fact that, for whatever reason, he was also completely obsessed with all kinds of filthy things. His poems about Poop are so creative. So I grew up knowing about this side of him. And you hear about it when you're in music history courses, but you don't actually read those poems, I guess because, I don't know, professors maybe are uncomfortable with some of the language in them. So then it wasn't until I was really read, when I was preparing for this book and thinking about what I wanted to include in it, that I started reading the actual words that he wrote. And it's just astonishing. I mean, it's not only that he writes about Poop, it's like it's so creative. It's really impressive.

[21:11] Cindy: It is. But it's just funny to say that, because you include one of his poems and you translate it, and so I was laughing. He is definitely raunchy, I guess is.

[21:21] Arianna: The right word, but again, it's raunchy. But it's so unfiltered and it's so absurd. I mean, people have to read these poems of his in order to really understand. But I could never have come up with any of I could try to write something raunchy, as you say, but it would never occur to me to write what he wrote.

[21:46] Cindy: I think that's right. Was it Margaret Thatcher who was unhappy when someone told her that he had a potty mouth and use some of these words?

[21:55] Arianna: So Peter Hall, who was the former director of the National Theater, he has a story about when she came to a production of Amadeus, the one that was later a movie. Yes. She just refused to believe that Mozart could have been this way about what he calls four letter words. And Peter Hall said, but he was. And she said he couldn't have been.

[22:20] Cindy: She's like, I don't care what you think. It wasn't happening.

[22:23] Arianna: Exactly.

[22:25] Cindy: She's like, I have the power to say that right now.

[22:27] Arianna: Exactly.

[22:28] Cindy: The other chapter I really enjoyed was the Superstitions and Curses chapter. Can you talk a little bit about that? I'd always heard the 9th Symphony one, but there were a couple of the others I wasn't as familiar with.

[22:39] Arianna: Yeah, this was also a really fun chapter for me to write. So there are some legends that float around, and you're referring to the curse of the 9th, which is just that there were a lot of composers who died either right after they composed the 9th or during the composition of their 9th Symphonies. And what solidified this one was that Mahler was the one who first discovered the curse or started talking about the curse, and then he tried to outwit the curse by writing something that wasn't a symphony, but it is an orchestral work and that one has a singer as well. And he didn't call it a symphony. It's a tone poem. So he wrote the lid for the era instead of his 9th Symphony and then he thought he had outwitted the curse. So he went back and wrote a 9th Symphony and then died before he could finish his 10th. So this sort of solidified the curse of the 9th as a thing that people were afraid of. Although I do push back against it a bit because the way you measure someone's 9th Symphony becomes difficult. And then some of the other great superstitions and curses were sort of Beethoven's hair. There has been some talk of it's being haunted. And Mozart's Requiem, this was a great story about so Mozart died while he was writing his Requiem, which is a mass for the dead. And there's a whole story about how as he was writing it, he became more and more ill and when he stopped writing it, he became healthy again. And then when he went back to it, he became ill again and died and he thought that he was cursed while he was writing it. So this has been one of the great mysteries in the classical sort of history. And then there's also Tchaikovsky’s death, which has been a source of controversy. It just was. I think most people agree now that it was probably suicide but at the time it was supposed to be that he died of cholera. So there's been a lot of debate about what actually happened and why and under what circumstances and why the cover up. So these were just some of the curses. I think I got most of them.

[24:53] Cindy: I just found that chapter to be completely captivating, I think, because I love to read and I love murder mysteries and I love curses and things like that. So I really enjoyed that chapter.

[25:02] Arianna: Thank you.

[25:03] Cindy: Well, that raises another question for me because you have a lot of humor in the book, which I loved. I mean, I was smiling and laughing as I was reading. Are you funny in real life?

[25:12] Arianna: It depends on how much I've had to drink.

[25:16] Cindy: So you wrote the book while you were drinking?

[25:19] Arianna: No, I think it's sometimes it's easier when you're writing because you have time to craft the sentences so that you get your timing right. I talk a lot, so eventually something that I say every day has to be funny. But it's not. Like with my husband. He's one of these people who will just he'll be at a dinner, he won't say anything and then he'll say one thing and it will be hilarious. And that's like his one, like, super dry humor line for the evening. And then, you know, maybe at dessert he'll say another one and it will be funny. But I'm definitely just more like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I ramble. And sometimes it's funny, and sometimes it's not funny.

[25:55] Cindy: Well, I really enjoyed the humor in the book.

[25:57] Arianna: Thank you.

[25:58] Cindy: So are there particular questions about music that you get asked a lot?

[26:02] Arianna: So when I was performing, there were more questions, and now that I've written the book, I'm starting to get questions again. But in between, there were very few questions because I was really just existing separately from you know, I wasn't interacting that much with people who saw me as a classical music figure. I was, you know, with my kids and with friends. And as a performer, you're asked a lot of questions, and I found that a lot of them have to do with the lifestyle as much as anything else, which is good, because I think as performers, we don't always know so much about the pieces we're playing, which is which is kind of sad and one of the reasons that I also wanted to write this book. But people ask a lot about what it's like at Juilliard. How do you memorize things? You know, how can you play something from memory? You know, things about performing. So stage fright. And also I remember getting asked questions like, how are you going to make any money? That was a fun one, the age old question.

[27:08] Cindy: Right, related to musicians.

[27:10] Arianna: Exactly.

[27:11] Cindy: Well, now that the book has come out, what kind of questions are you getting?

[27:14] Arianna: Well, I've had actually some interesting debates with people already. Not debates, not contentious ones. I had some questions about why I don't like medieval music, and that is a hard question to answer because it's really just a visceral kind of reaction. I don't actually know why this scale, the Dorian mode that's used in medieval music, why it upsets me, but it does.

[27:41] Cindy: Well, let's talk about your very fantastic cover. So is this the first cover they showed you, or how did all of that come about for you?

[27:49] Arianna: No, so there was one other cover that they showed me, and it was also beautiful. I mean, throughout this whole publishing process, I just feel so you know, it's amazing how many people put time into a book and how many people I feel very unworthy of all of the attention that something that I did has gotten even before it came out into the world. So I want to be clear that the first cover they showed me was also really beautiful, and I really appreciate the work that went into it, but it had a violin on the cover, and I have weird issues with the violin, which is one of the things that the book's about. So I was sort of like, I don't know if I'm going to fall in love with anything that has this particular image, because also, for me, a lot of my personal journey has been separating the violin from music appreciation. And so this cover. That we landed on if it's the second one that they showed me. And as soon as they showed it to me, I was like, oh my God, it's perfect. And we talked a bit. This was exactly the cover they showed me in this color combination. And afterwards when they showed it, I said, okay, I think it's perfect with the colors. I love Beethoven, I love the font, but let's can we try a couple of different color combinations just to be sure? And they were so nice, and they did it up in several different colors and actually all of the colors looked really great because Beethoven, he's such a hunk with the sunglasses and everything.

[29:21] Cindy: Yeah, that's the part I like so much. And the F, the way it's done and all of it, I think it's really well done. And I think I told you before we started recording that that's what first caught my eye was the cover. And I was like, oh, I have to see what this book is about. That cover is phenomenal. And so then, of course, your book sounded great, so I was like, sure, but I just thought the cover is very eye catching.

[29:42] Arianna: Yeah, I think and we wanted it to be something iconic that immediately sort of conveyed that the book was about this subject matter. Beethoven is probably the most recognizable composer, but also that it wasn't going to be your traditional book about classical music. So the sunglasses do a pretty good job of indicating that. And I also love that Beethoven is kind of metallic. He seems to have some sort of metallic sheen on him.

[30:11] Cindy: I agree. I think it's phenomenal. Well, what about what you've read recently that you really liked?

[30:17] Arianna: Yeah, I haven't gotten to do as much reading as I normally would like to because of the book and having two young children who don't like it when I write or read or do anything other than hang out with them. But I have read some really good books lately, and some of them I got to also later than I should have. But How to Be an Anti-Racist I thought was amazing and just also really impressive. And this was actually one of the sort of inspirations behind the hybrid, using your story interwoven with the more informative subject matter. And I also loved a dryer's. English is such. I could read that over and over again. Sometimes I would actually go to it for advice while I was writing, but then I would just keep reading because it's so funny. And I also recently really loved we talked about how I want to read the Violin Conspiracy, but I also love Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker.

[31:20] Cindy: I don't know that one.

[31:23] Arianna: So it tackles the sort of wine worlds, which is also kind of elitist and closed off, and it also sort of demystifies it and goes into some really cool adventures. I would recommend it.

[31:36] Cindy: Okay, I'm going to pick that one up and if you like dryer's English have you seen Ellen Jovin's book Rebel with a Clause?

[31:44] Arianna: No, but I love the title Rebel with a Clause.

[31:47] Cindy: Okay, so she has this grammar table. She lives in New York City and she has this grammar table that she just sets up different places, Central Park by a subway entrance, down at Wall Street. And then she decided to take it to all 50 states and so she did that and then she wrote a book about it and it is organized by different grammar topics, but it is so entertaining. And she has this awesome Twitter account where she does all these grammar polls all the time. But I interviewed her not that long ago and she was delightful as well. So I just love some of these books that talk about interesting subject matter and you really learn a lot, but you also just totally enjoy the story and are smiling and laughing as you read.

[32:25] Arianna: Absolutely. No, that sounds awesome. I'm definitely going to check it out.

[32:29] Cindy: Good. Well, thank you so much Arianna, for joining me today. I'm thrilled to pieces that we got to talk about Declassified.

[32:33] Arianna: Thank you so much for having me.

[32:38] Cindy: Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. If you liked this episode, and I hope you did, please follow me on Instagram at @thoughtsfromapage, consider joining my Patreon group to access bonus content and support the podcast, tell all of your friends about the show and rate it or subscribe to it wherever you listen to your podcasts, I would really appreciate it. The book discussed in this episode can be purchased at my Bookshop storefront and the link is in the show notes. I hope you'll tune in next time.