When the music teacher at her Fresno grade school came around to her classroom to troll for students, admits Nancy Bien Souza, she saw it as an opportunity to get out of class. Asked what instrument she’d like to play, she picked the clarinet. But the teacher, who was not lacking for clarinet players, suggested she pick a string instrument, and said, “What about the cello?” Nancy wasn’t exactly sure what a cello was, but when he produced one, she was pleased by its size and agreed to give it a try.
As she began to play the cello and started taking private lessons, Nancy says she discovered she had “a knack for pulling a good sound out of the instrument, which was inspiring.” Her parents had saved money to put her through college, and she began at Cal State Hayward as a physical science major. But during her first year she found she had a conflict between a calculus class and rehearsals for Lucas Foss’ chamber work Time Cycle. “There was just no question which I would go to,” she remembers, “and I took that as a sign.” She spent the college fund on a cello and a bow, and worked a half-time job to put herself through school.
Her teacher at Cal State was Allen Gove, and she remembers one lesson in particular, when she was beginning work on one of the Bach Cello Suites. In the past, she says, teachers had always given her the fingerings. But Gove refused to do so. The process of working out the fingerings herself was a revelation, says Nancy. By the time she had made all those technical decisions, she remembers, “I had the notes memorized and was ready to begin learning the music. This was when I began to understand that being a musician was more than just playing the instrument well.”
After graduate school at the University of Iowa, Nancy played with the Charlotte Symphony for three years, but found herself losing her drive. It was a summer of studying with another teacher, Fritz Magg, that rekindled her interest. “I never had a teacher like him,” she observes. “He just motioned to the chair and said, ‘Play.’ When I finished, he looked at me and started talking about Hercules and the seven tasks. I worked very hard that summer.”
Nancy moved to the Bay Area in 1980. Four years later, while playing string quartets for an ACLU event at the Sheraton Palace, she ran into Michael Souza, who was working on the hotel’s sound system. They had met in high school, but hadn’t seen each other for 14 years. An intense reacquainting ensued, and within two years they had married and started a family. In 1987 Nancy got a call to fill in for the Berkeley Symphony’s assistant principal cellist, who had just moved from the area. The following year she auditioned for the spot and won the job. She still remembers one of the first concerts she played with the orchestra, which included Dvorák’s New World Symphony. “I’d played it a dozen times or more,” she remembers. “Everybody knows it, but under Kent it was exciting and fresh.”
Nancy is also assistant principal cello in the Marin Symphony, and freelances widely around the Bay Area, but music is not her only passion. After her youngest child started school, she began to explore her interest in the visual arts through a figure drawing class at West Contra Costa College. From there she moved on to a computer class in Adobe Photoshop and started using her computer to create note cards based on her drawings. Her latest artistic undertaking is a class in acrylics. (The self portrait accompanying this profile is her latest work in that medium.)
Being able to play music, she says, starts with technical facility on the instrument—what musicians refer to as “chops.” But there also has to be an intellectual foundation; an understanding of the music. “Working out the music intellectually is a puzzle that’s separate from passion and expression,” she observes. “But you have to have that in order to communicate the passion.” When it comes to visual arts, she continues, “I’ve always had a facility for drawing, but had never really taken it seriously before, and basic drawing skills are the foundation. I’m only at the beginning of the road as a visual artist. I have lots to say, so much to learn. It’s like being a teenager again. Everything seems possible.”
But in the end, says Nancy, “being a mom is the biggest thing in my life. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. The arts, the friendships, living in a house in the Bay Area—it’s all part of the construct of life, but the mom thing has a richness of experience that defines me more than anything else possibly could.” She and Michael have three children, April (18), Frank (13), and Carter (8).
—Richard Reynolds, January 2005
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