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Gretchen: I started playing cello when I was 10 years old. I started playing in 6th grade at Eckstein Middle School here. I played because my parents signed me up for strings class. There was one other brown girl in the class I had only really met, besides my sister, I hadn't really met any other brown girls. She was like, "Well, I am going to play cello. Do you want to play cello?" I didn't even know what cello was. Then I just totally loved it. That is how I started playing cello. Then the following year I found some of my parents old classical records and we had been playing like some arrangements of Schuberts unfinished symphony and I found the record of it. I just loved it and then I kind of became a classical music geek from then on. From age 11 on, so it took me a while to enter into the non-classical realm. That's been much more recent.

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Gretchen: When I was first in college I would meet people were in bands. These guys want me to try and jam in their band. I would try and a long time ago I played in a band called Built to Spill that is now pretty, I think, well known band and recorded one of their CD's. That is when I first got a pickup for my cello because I played at a live show with them, which was actually really horrific, but it was a good learning experience. Although I set the pickup and rock bands aside for a long time. Just went in, back into the classical world and the world of school teaching. After I got my bachelors degree, I started going out more again. I would hear at clubs people using these effects box's. There was this guy, Chris Littlefield, who is a trumpet player. He plays in a band call Karl Denson's Tiny Universe, but he plays around in Seattle and he has these effects boxes. You don't usually see, I mean you usually see effects boxes on guitars and stuff, but he was all these effects on his trumpet and I asked him about his effects and he said that I could go over to his place and put my pickup on and run through his effects. Then I really got addicted to using effects and getting this loop sampler. That totally changed my world because as this one cellist, Gideon Freudmann, he uses a loop sampler and he said like "It's great, you don't need friends. You can make music and you can accompany yourself" (LAUGHTER) I know, it's not exactly what he meant, but it was a really fun, new kind of thing. I could deconstruct parts of classical music and find a little loop in a Brahms' sonata or a piece for San Sons or something. Just loop it then make it into something completely new. That is how I started kind of, it was stealing from classical and going from there.

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Gretchen: I was really scared at first to play my CD for some of my friends in the classical music world, actually like my friend Paige, whose house we are at right now. She is a great cellist. The response has been really positive. Same with the conductor in my orchestra, Christophe Chagnard, I was scared to give to him and so many other people. They have just been really nice and loved it and said "I listen to it all the time." I'm not so worried about it now. I think people are fine with it. I am not like going about composition in the classical way, I mean I am not writing stuff down. I usually write stuff down after the fact, if I really liked it. Then I transcribe it to make sure I could, you know, do it again. It's just kind of backwards, not really doing it in the way I supposed to, the way I learned in music theory in college, but it seems OK for now.

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Gretchen: My friends were really encouraging. There are tons of solo cellist playing classical, playing Bach. There are lots of records of stuff like that. My friends were so encouraging I thought I could find a niche where I could play ambient music and there is an audience for that. People in the healing arts, that's where I focused it. I thought I could make a CD that would be very, just pretty. I used to play at this cafe, Lighthouse Roasters, in Fremont in my neighborhood. I would just roll my cello over there every Sunday and play. It was because it was just nice background for people to have their coffee and talk and not be stressed out about having to be quiet. I could be there in my jeans, and not in my concert black cloths. I thought "It is cool to have music like that." I can't think of some of the composers who describe music this way, but that is what it's meant for. To be ambient. I don't know how it all rolled together to make this CD except the man who recorded my CD, Will Doud, he is a percussionist, but he has a studio in his house and he would come to the coffee shop all the time and he heard me playing and he was really encouraging and he wanted to record me. So that was really helpful especially since he knew my playing, he had been hearing me for years, since I went from going to the coffee shop playing Bach every weekend to starting to play with the loop sampler and so I think that helped too. I had this person who was right there, ready to collaborate, so it was good.

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Gretchen: I don't know. I mean in one way I would think I might help create some cross over audience because I play in Northwest Symphonietta which is a classical orchestra and some people who have heard my music this way or heard me in a rock band then I'll tell them about my orchestra and people have come. I have slowly brought people who never come to an orchestra to a concert. In that way just personally I think in the Seattle live classical scene I might be able to bring some more audience in. One of the compositions on my CD, the last 2 tracks, are by a composer, Michael Cava, who I would consider a classical composer, he was director of music for the dance department at University of Washington for many years, but he died. I have a lot of his music that is kind of new classical. The new classical to me sounds like film scores, and then the other art new classical. I want to keep playing his music and see if I can maybe on another recording bring in other cellists because that piece was a cello quartet, but I played all 4 parts myself. I would like to do something with my friend Paige, and bring in other cellists and play that. Find other music, Paige is really good at finding new music. If I keep working on collaborations with other people it might be a drop in the bucket in trying to revive that. Plus I teach music at school so the students know that I play all kinds of music and hopefully they are the next generation of people who will actually keep it all going. Who knows.

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Gretchen: Right now I teach at the Northwest School in Seattle which is a private school on Capital Hill and I teach 6th through 12th grade. I have a 6th through 8th grade string orchestra, little string ensemble. I teach a classical language of music to highschoolers and its very free form. I can kinda do what ever I want, it is just a class where its music requirement and we do all kind of things. That is where I teach now, I have taught public and private schools.

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Gretchen: I got the inspiration for a lot of the playing, I said this in the liner notes of my CD, from just having the freedom to just sit in the cafe' at Lighthouse on weekends. As I said, some of the pieces start from classical. There is a piece called "Myth", that takes 8 notes from the end of a little piece by Hindamith. I made that into something else and some pieces I was thinking about a person in particular. There is a song called "Orcas August", and my friends Megan & Brent were getting married. I was trying to think about their names and then their names turned into a melody and that became a song I played for their wedding. Everything came from something really different. There is a song called Will that I had kind of a melancholy base, austinado line in my mind and when I was trying to come up with that song I had found out that my friend, Will Thorpe, died in a climbing accident and that song really became inspired by that sadness. There is actually a lot of remembrance on this CD even though not all of it is direct. I mean there is my old friend Michael Cava who I was really happy to put his music on the CD. The CD is actually dedicated to my brother who died in a fire, almost 1 year ago on September 5th. That actually, I had finished recording, but I think the CD definitely has some remembrance feeling on it. All though not all the songs. I had for one song, I just thought of how the universal child chant "neener neener neener" goes, and I played often for kids at the cafe' - kids were my best audience always. A three year old can sit there and stare at me playing an entire movement of Bach or anything without flinching. It is amazing, kids are just a great audience and so sometimes I would try to make something kind of fun and there is this song called "Suddenly I Felt Joy" where I tried to put the childhood chant "neener, neener, neener" in there. So they are all really different. A lot of it just came from that really nice freedom of the bustling Sunday morning cafe' experience.

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Gretchen: I feel lucky in a way, it has been years since I have really felt that obvious look of surprise when someone has maybe been talking on the phone, I say "My name is Gretchen Yanover and I am a cellist" and I go to the concert or whatever and its like, "That can't be you." "Yes, yes, that is actually me" The scene of non-classical seems so much more open and more mixed. I am certainly the only brown person in my orchestra, which you know, that's Seattle a little bit right now, I don't know what to say about it exactly. Part for me, being a school teacher and I just like that I am out there a little bit that kids can see that "I'm brown and I'm doing this classical thing." I had real heart to heart conversations with kids where it is like, "It just does not matter what somebody thinks you are supposed to like. Just like what ever you want." I think just by being myself, listening to all kinds of things and playing all kinds of things, I hope that. I am showing that to kids, you know. I really like being a school teacher and I like being able to have that exposure, even if I am not talking about it.

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Gretchen: The Northwest Symphonietta has a few recordings which I am on, Morzart Piano Concerto, Morzart symphonies, then I am playing off and on with different bands. I am playing right now with a band called Trwst. It is another indie rock band like Built to Spill and I think they are really awesome I hope they do really well. We just played their CD release show which my finance played too. I am on their new recording which is called Reactor. I think they have a website, its Trwst. Other then that I play on recordings with a violist, Eyvind Kang, for a lot of things, but I don't exactly know where they end up. I know some of them end up film scores and some of them end up being parts of other bands. We haven't overtly done a collaboration where it's like, "Okay, yes I know where that is going, where I can send somebody." I'll try to figure that out and put it on my website. Other then that I have just old historical recordings of Built to Spill, its not that old, but I can't remember what year it is. It's from the CD "There is Nothing Wrong with Love". Other then my CD right now, that is the things on the top of my head.

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Gretchen: Around Seattle, some of my friends like Eyvind Kang, who I have recorded with, he has hooked me up with playing with some bands for sure. It's good to be in that collaboration with him. My friend Jen Cozel, is also a violinist who plays in different bands. I don't know some of the other classical or cross over musicians. I know of some of them. The other cellist, Seattle has Lori Goldstien, who played with Nirvana and a woman name Christine Gunn, who has a band Trillian Green that she plays with. It is kind of funny, we all know that maybe we have our little niche that we are in so we don't necessarily end up talking to each other. Especially if its a band, then you probably if you have one cellist, then that's going to be it. Other musicians in the genre' that is similar to me where it might be called New Age, because there is no other good classification for classical instrumentation playing non classical. Which is a fine categorization I think. Like a big guy is David Darling and I have never met him. I don't know if you have heard him, he is someone I heard a long time ago and he plays on some crazy cello's. I think he made like a seven string electric and he uses all kinds of effects. My music, I don't think sounds like his really, but it definitely was inspiring. He has many CD's and I don't know if I would ever meet him. There is another cellist too who does, again not the same thing, but Jamie Sieber in Seattle. She uses a loop sampler she plays with a lot of other instruments. Her latest CD is a little more, to me, a little more drone intonation. She also knew Michael Cava and she played some of his music too. I don't think goes quite so much into the rock. I feel like I am in this weird little place. It's good for me to be in a little place by myself.

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Gretchen: My website is gretchenyanover.com. Also you can listen to my music on CD Baby and hear excerpts of all the tracks on my CD. I am on iTunes and I have my CD available in stores in Seattle Barnes & Noble, at the U Village and East West Bookstore.