Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Korine Fujiwara raises her hands before clapping to show the unusual rhythm of a song her quartet, Carpe Diem, was about to play Thursday morning for an audience of Laurel middle-schoolers in the auditorium at Laurel High.
Korine Fujiwara will be going back to her roots when she performs with the Carpe Diem String Quartet at the Alberta Bair Theater on Saturday evening.
The 1985 graduate of Billings Senior High first performed on that stage in high school, when she played in the violin section of the Billings Symphony Orchestra, when the venue was still called the Fox Theatre. She is also coming back to the place where the two streams of her family joined to make her the musician she is.
From her mother, Anne, a Scandinavian whose family farmed near Pease Bottom, between Custer and Hysham, she learned the joy of music. Whenever her mother’s family got together, there was music. Everyone in the family played guitar, piano or fiddle, and everyone sang.
“I never thought of it as out of the ordinary,” Fujiwara said, “but that’s what the family gatherings always involved.”
Fujiwara took piano lessons as a child, and when she was old enough to start playing in school, she thought she might like to take up the flute. But her uncle had a half-size fiddle she could use, and that was that. She switched to the viola when she was 18.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Fujiwara performs Thursday morning in Laurel during one of five outreach programs and master classes her quartet is offering in Billings, Laurel, Park City and Red Lodge.
From her father, Karlo Fujiwara, a grandmaster of tae kwon do and judo, she learned the martial arts, advancing to a blue belt in tae kwon do and a green belt in judo. She gave it up at a relatively young age—comparing her experience to people who say, “I used to play violin but I quit”—but the training stuck with her, and she realized later how martial arts training was similar to her training as a musician.
“It’s the same deliberate repetition of motion and precision, just different muscle groups,” she said.
In the martial arts, she said, you spend long hours by yourself learning specific movements and techniques, and when you compete with another person you have to use all that training to react instantaneously to what the other person is doing.
It’s similar with a musical quartet. There is the same practice and individual discipline, but then when you play music with the quartet, you have to be ready to respond to subtle shifts in tempo, mood and interpretation. No matter how long you practice as a group, she said, in a live performance there are hesitations, or new emphases on a particular musical phrase.
To respond quickly, to keep up with the unplanned variations, Fujiwara said, “you have to be in shape.”
Fujiwara, a graduate of the Juilliard School, formed Carpe Diem in 2005 while working as a violist with the Columbus (Ohio) Symphony Orchestra. It grew out of her longstanding collaboration with other symphony players, including violinist Charles Wetherbee, who co-founded the quartet and is still with it. The other two current players are Amy Galluzzo, violin, and Carol Ou, cello.
“It’s a very democratic way of deciding how to play music,” she said.
Carpe Diem is known for its eclectic, no-boundaries approach to music. Fujiwara said there is nothing wrong with all the music written for classical string quartets, and they still play plenty of it.
“But we don’t want to be that kind of ensemble. We don’t want to be the quartet with four frowning people in black turtlenecks.”
Instead, they incorporate gypsy, tango, folk, pop, rock and jazz music into their repertoire. “We all had this kind of epiphany,” she said. “Why do we only play one kind of music when we all listen to everything?”
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
The Carpe Diem String Quartet rocks the Laurel High School auditorium Thursday.
When they play the Alberta Bair on Saturday, selections will include Axl Rose’s “Welcome to the Jungle” and Edvard Grieg’s String Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 27. They will also perform Fujiwara’s “Montana. The quartet played that composition when they were here in 2011, but given some personnel changes and the quartet’s evolving sound, she promised that people who were there three years ago will hear a lot of differences Saturday night.
The quartet carries its free-flowing style into its relationship with the audience. Fujiwara wants people to relax and to forget the idea that there is a “right” way to listen to music.
“If you feel like clapping in the middle of a piece, please clap in the middle of the piece,” she said.
When Fujiwara played at the Alberta Bair with her quartet for the first time, in 2011, it was a show that she and her father had planned for years. He was going to schedule a martial arts tournament the same weekend, so his friends and associates could attend the concert. He also created a special pen-and-ink drawing that was projected behind the quartet during its performance of “Montana.”
He died unexpectedly about 10 months before the concert, making for an emotionally charged performance.
Fujiwara is based in Tacoma, Wash., but travels extensively with her quartet. If she is ever in one place long enough, she said, “and I can find a teacher as good as my father,” she’d like to study the martial arts again.
DETAILS: Carpe Diem will perform Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Alberta Bair Theater, Third Avenue North and North Broadway in downtown Billings. Tickets, $31 for adults and $17 for students, are available at the ABT box office or by phone at 256-6052. Box office hours are Monday-Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. You can also buy tickets at albertabairtheater.org.
