Maya Beiser has been playing the cello since her childhood on a Kibbutz in Israel. "Everybody where I grew up started to play an instrument," Beiser said.
Originally, her teachers wanted to teach her to play the violin, because they immediately recognized her special talent and good sense of pitch. Beiser refused.
"I liked the cello because no one else played it. I just loved the sound of it. My father had this CD of cello music and I just loved it," she said.
"I liked that it was big too. I was a little skinny girl and not especially strong and there was something about the cello that made me feel a lot stronger," she said.
Once she started to play, she was sure about her decision.
"When you do one of those things that is just perfect, you know it immediately," she said. "I started to play and I just knew that this was my life. It was such a strong connection."
She advises college students trying to choose a career path to look for that same sense of connection. "There are so many possibilities, especially when you're just starting and it's such a hard thing to choose one, but that's what is important for each one of us, to find that thing and not to let other people define it for us," Beiser said.
Beiser admits that it is not always easy to follow one's dreams.
"I once had a pretty big crisis in my late teens, and that has defined who I am now as an artist. I wasn't sure that just playing the cello was enough. ... It's one of the reasons that I have left the classical music world. ... Not left, but gone beyond it," she said.
Beiser says that her personality never quite fit with the classical environment.
"I was playing with an orchestra and I wanted to wear leather jeans," she said. "I was 16 and fighting with my mom and I wanted to wear leather jeans and she told me I had to wear a dress. So I decided to go barefoot. I could never understand why I couldn't wear what I wanted to wear on stage."
Beiser has certainly found her calling. The New Yorker Magazine has called her "The Cello Goddess" and the San Francisco Chronicle has crowned her "The Queen of Contemporary Cello." But Beiser shrugs off the praise, saying, "These are only words." However, she admits that the compliments are nice, "because it can help to bring people into a concert hall and discover my music."
Her music is definitely something to be discovered. Dubbed "alternative classical" by Beiser and others in the genre, it is dramatically different from what most would expect to hear in a concert hall.
"Obviously the technique and the training comes from classical music, but of course, the music I'm playing now is rooted in so many traditions and influences that are not necessarily classical at all," she said.
"Some techniques I'm using, like amplifying the cello, using my computer, it's much more used in the rock and pop worlds than in the classical world," she said.
Beiser considers the new sound and style to be "a natural evolution of where classical music is going."
"The kind of stuff we do is a reaction of our generation; we are influenced by everything that goes on around us, and so the nature of this music and the way it is presented is obviously going to be different," she said.
Beiser hopes that "alternative classical" can expand the audience for classical music.
"It makes it more accessible and more appealing to younger audiences because it's something they can relate to. Anyone who is interested in art and music as a form of art ... I think they'd be really attracted to this," she said.
"It's been embraced by so many people," Beiser said. "Cello is becoming so much more popular in rock music, and I do soundtracks for major Hollywood movies and there's a lot of interest to see what the cello can do. It's fun, I'm enjoying it"
