’It’s been a journey, and a life-changing experience; not only in the academic regard, but also because you meet people who are going to be in your life for ever!’ says the cellist
When I graduated from my bachelor’s degree and started working, I wasn’t really thinking about grad school, even though I wanted to keep learning. But then I met Amit Peled and I just knew that I wanted to study with him – so I applied to Peabody!
Amit really lets you go at your own pace. In the beginning, a lot of my technical issues were solved because of the way he explained how the body works when performing and how, instead of having all this nervous tension, you should use your body to make music. After that the lessons were more focused on finding my own voice through the cello, and learning how to tell a story.
For a doctoral student like me, every day is very different. In the beginning there were lots of classes and papers, and constant performance. Now it’s much more flexible: I still have to be really self-disciplined to set time aside to practise and study for my written exams, but I also teach and play in orchestras. Between those things, I am pretty busy!
Peabody is very diverse, which is one of the things that I really enjoyed: to learn from different cultures, and to share in our cello studio. We were all friends, and it was an awesome time! One of my favourite memories was playing my doctoral chamber recital. We got really stressed out because it was a very hard programme of Shostakovich and Haydn, and our time to rehearse was limited. Still, it’s fun to go through it with a quartet of your closest friends, and in the end it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever played!
It’s been a journey, and a life-changing experience; not only in the academic regard, but also because you meet people who are going to be in your life for ever! Try to learn as much as you can and get as much knowledge out of the professors as you can. It’s a lot of work, but it’s really worth it.
Subscribers to The Strad receive the 2025 Degrees supplement free with their copy of the May 2025 issue
Read: My experience: double bassist Marcelo Rodrigues, Royal Northern College of Music
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