Simon Ertz - viola

Today we’re going to start a series of interviews with classical musicians – instrumentalists and composers – which will give some interesting insights into life as a professional musician, and give us an opportunity to learn about their background, goals, and the projects they’re currently working on.

I’m delighted to start out this series with an interview with Simon Ertz, who plays viola with the Degas Quartet, a critically acclaimed string quartet based in North Carolina.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself – where you’re from and how you got started in music?

I grew up in Scotland, and after a late start, moved to Manchester at 17 to have regular lessons. I did my undergrad at the Royal Northern College of Music, freelanced in NW England for a couple of years before moving to the USA.

What are you doing these days? What ensembles do you play with, who do you collaborate with?

I’m playing with the Degas Quartet, but also fit in freelancing with orchestras in North Carolina and play with the Sarasota Opera Orchestra.

When’s your next concert and what will you be playing?

Our next quartet concert is October 3 in Fearrengton, NC (near Raleigh) – a traditional program of Haydn Op 20#2, Barber Quartet, and Beethoven Op 59#2, all fantastic music.

When you’re preparing a piece for the first time how do you select an edition of sheet music to play from? How do you go about creating your interpretation of a piece?

When there is a choice of editions like for Haydn and Beethoven we are pretty lucky there are some very good urtext editions available, I think creating an interpretation requires a pretty long answer! Its a collaboration between the four of us and our collective past experience and vision of the music.

What music do you most enjoy listening to? Who do you most admire?

I always enjoy hearing new groups and of course there are so many fantastic established groups and musicians around: Takacs, Brentano, and Fry Street Quartets to name a few.

Thank you to Simon Ertz from the Degas Quartet for taking time for this interview. You can read more about the Degas String Quartet on their website at www.degasquartet.com.

Simon mentioned three pieces that the Degas Quartet will be playing on their upcoming concert – follow the links below to find string quartet sheet music for each of them at MyLiszt.com.

• Barber String Quartet, Op. 11 sheet music
• Haydn String Quartet, Op. 20 No. 2 sheet music
• Beethoven String Quartet, Op. 59 No. 2 sheet music

Tags: Beethoven, Classical Musicians, College Of Music, Composers, Degas, Ensembles, Fantastic Music, Freelancing, Haydn, Instrumentalists, New Groups, Nw England, Opera Orchestra, Orchestras, Professional Musician, Sarasota Opera, Sheet Music, String Quartet, Undergrad, Urtext Editions, Viola
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An odd little observation for you today.

One of the challenges I’ve found in creating a search engine for classical sheet music is that the sheet music website industry is surprisingly fragmented into instrument-specific niches.

For example, if you go online and search for classical sheet music the top online stores that appear tend to be sheetmusicplus.com, musicnotes.com, and virtualsheetmusic.com. If you search more specifically for viola sheet music, you get similar results – however if you talk to any violin or viola player about sheet music, the first store in their minds is Sharmusic.com. This website doesn’t appear near the top of the search engine results, nor do they advertise with Google adwords,
and yet if you’re wanting to find viola sheet music, apparently that’s where people go.

And if that’s true for violin and viola sheet music, I imagine you’d find the same thing for trombone, piano, and oboe sheet music. There’s presumably a go-to store known to all trombone players that’s a mystery to everyone else.

Why is this? As far as I can tell, this all stems from the offline world. For example Shar have a strong presence in mail-order sheet music for violin and viola, plus obviously some physical stores, and it seems like a lot of violists were ordering viola sheet music from Shar when they were growing up – presumably because that’s where their teachers got their music.

Unfortunately for me, that means that I can’t get away with simply providing results from the ‘big’ online sheet music stores, because these aren’t necessarily the standard stores used by players of the various instruments. Currently every time I mention MyLiszt to a string player I’m asked if I include Shar in my results (and right now the answer is ‘no’). I’d obviously like to fix that, but no doubt once I’ve satisfied those searching for viola sheet music, I’ll talk to a trombonist, who will be amazed that I don’t include Trombonio.com (or whatever) in the results.

Ah well…

Tags: Classical Sheet Music, Creating A Search Engine, Google, Mail Order, Music Stores, Music Website, No Doubt, Offline World, Order Sheet Music, Search Engine Results, Shar, Sharmusic, Sheet Music For Violin, String Player, Trombone Players, Trombonist, Viola Music, Viola Player, Viola Sheet Music, Violin And Viola, Violin Music
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In recent months, as I’ve examined all the possibilities for the MyLiszt website, and what it could be, I’ve realized that in my excitement I’ve been planning to create too many different things all at the same time (the sheet music search engine, musician webpages, business cards for musicians, etc), before the website is even established.

I’ve therefore begun to refocus the site (for now) as purely a classical sheet music search engine. I know from Erica’s experience trying to find sheet music for the Piazzolla Grand Tango or music for the Penderecki 2nd violin sonata that finding music can present a very real problem. By searching a bunch of different online stores in one place I think our sheet music search engine can help people.

So for now, we’re going to focus on that. I’ll be gradually expanding the range of stores that we search, gradually improving the search algorithm to give better results, and working to promote the site so that more people use it.

Once we reach a point where the site is well used, then at that point it would make sense to expand into offering additional services. But for now, we’ll focus on searching for classical sheet music.

Tags: Additional Services, Business Cards, Classical Music, Classical Sheet Music, Excitement, Find Music, Finding Music, Grand Tango, Many Different Things, Music Business, Music Search Engine, Musician, Musicians, Possibilities, Search Algorithm, Sheet Music Search, Sonata, Tango Music, Violin Sonata, Would Make Sense
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