Berkeley Symphony violist Gordon Thrupp is one of three regular members of the Orchestra who attended UC Santa Cruz with Kent Nagano. While he did his undergraduate work in geology at Stanford, Gordon spent his junior year at Santa Cruz in order to study viola with Heiichiro Ohyama, who was also Nagano’s viola teacher. After completing his undergraduate degree, Gordon worked in geology for a while, then returned to Santa Cruz for his Ph.D. in earth sciences. His specialty is paleomagnetism, which he describes as “the ancient record of the earth’s magnetic fields in rocks.”
Gordon was born in Boston, and with encouragement from his musical family (his father plays violin, his mother piano) he began studying the violin in grade school. The family moved to Pasadena after he finished the first grade, and he continued to play violin through his last year in high school, when he decided to pick up the viola. “I tried it as a whim,” he remembers, “and I liked the sound more than the violin. I played both for a while, but found that there was more of a demand for viola, especially in chamber music. Now I rarely play the violin.”
Gordon’s graduate work involved long stints of field work, including five summers in Alaska. The magnetometer used to measure the magnetism of rocks stayed on 24 hours a day, and he would volunteer for the night shift so that he could practice in the lab or in an adjacent dance studio. But he says the summers without communal music making made him appreciate it all the more and influenced his eventual decision not to seek out a job that involved extensive field work. His work now involves developing numerical groundwater flow models for tools in assessing engineering design alternatives.
After earning his Ph.D., Gordon took a position in Australia, where he met his flutist wife, Margaret. Upon his return to the U.S., he contacted Berkeley Symphony cellist and Board President Ken Johnson, a fellow geologist and another of the Santa Cruz alumni who were there with Maestro Nagano (principal cellist Carol Rice is the third). The two geologist/musicians ended up working together, and Ken suggested that Gordon audition for the Berkeley Symphony. He auditioned in 1992 and has been a member of the viola section since. In addition to the Berkeley Symphony, he plays with the Lamplighters, Pocket Opera, Villa Sinfonia, and several chamber music groups. But he says he particularly enjoys playing with Berkeley because of the “variety of programming” and that he enjoys playing contemporary music because of the “adventure factor.”
Gordon is known for his quick wit and his pranks. When the orchestra performs in the Zellerbach pit for The Hard Nut, new members always do a double take when—in the middle of the run—a mysterious, rather tall figure in a black lace dress takes his seat in the viola section for one performance. His current “day job” is with S.S. Papadopulos and Associates, where he specializes in environmental problems relating to ground water. He lives in San Francisco with Margaret and their two children, Lucy, a budding violinist, and Isaac, who has taken up the guitar.
—Richard Reynolds, January 2003
.