Junior Justin Vinyard’s performs his anticipated viola recital
As the crowd grew silent and Taylor-Meade’s McCready Hall stage was flooded in a wash of ambient light, the Junior recital began. Preceding the main performance, a select few other musicians accompanied the stage. After working for nine arduous months, spending hours rehearsing for this performance, Vinyard entered the spotlight. A current junior at Pacific, he’s a viola performance major. With just his viola and tablature in hand, he performed for over thirty minutes, unaccompanied with the exception of the pianist, Karen Lam.
“I like to tell myself that the anxiety and nervousness I’m feeling is just excitement to perform,” says Vinyard, noting that he practices box-breathing and positive affirmations before performances. “This is actually my first solo recital. I’ve done, like, student solo works before but this hasn’t been an entire 30 minutes.” He goes on to say that, “This one was definitely a different challenge.” Performing ten songs altogether, Vinyard had to prepare himself exceptionally well for the performance. Not just due to the rigor of the compositions selected, but also the stress of performing solo.
While Vinyard didn’t choose all of the songs, the two pieces performed by composer William Grant Still, were chosen by him. “The only piece that I really picked, like, in particular, was the William Grant Still one because African American composers are overlooked a lot,” Vinyard made clear. “William Grant Still I picked because I really wanted to highlight an underrepresented composer in my playing and… I really like his works.”
“I’ve been working on the music for about nine months now, but in the fall, I actually suffered a wrist injury,” says Vinyard. Due to the wrist fracture, he was set back three months, unable to practice. Though he stated that, “I started working on the music again in January.”
Though the performance seemed effortless from the crowd, Vinyard noted that not all the compositions were easy to perfect.“I think probably the Bach was the hardest… originally it was written for cello, so a lot of the notes and chords were altered slightly when it was transcribed,” he explains. While the nine months of effort was apparent in the performance, Vinyard made it clear that, “It’s just hard to interpret the original sense of the piece while still making it my own.”