Second of three parts
Re “Performing or Writing, She Makes Mellifluous Music to Our Ears and Eyes”
It is the day before one of the major performing events of Carter Dewberry’s classical music career, 9 o’clock tomorrow tonight at the Yost Theatre, Santa Ana, and she is talking about her almost never wavering lifelong love of the cello. Before she decided to diversify.
A dedicated, trained, disciplined seeker, as opposed to a wanderer, she sometimes resembles a woman of the entire planet, not a local native, as she travels the universe mentally and physically in a restlessly permanent , adventurous search for esoteric and eclectic satisfaction.
She discovered the cello’s magical attraction when she was a 7-year-old in Chicago, soon convinced her parents to purchase her own instrument, and stayed with the cello, in the main, until she was 16 years old.
A deep and tireless thinker with a strong accent on academics, Ms. Dewberry’s main path in her adult life may be as an entertainer . But when self-ordained scolds decry the American fetish of worshipping frothy celebrities, Ms. Dewberry is the antithesis of what these critics have in mind. Too erudite for them.
Relentlessly on the go, in aggressive, eye-narrowing pursuit of an often scholarly objective, she reached back to a day last June as the most recent time she was not multi-tasking.
Her path to the performing stage contained as many wiggles and arrow-straight pieces.
Through all of her travails and successes, her loyal cello was her constant companion. “I got my doctorate, and all the way through school, I taught (cello),” says Ms. Dewberry. “As an undergraduate, I had two degrees, a degree in French, with minors in philosophy and women’s studies, and then the degree in music. So I never can completely leave the cello behind. But I also never really can be 100 percent committed to it.
“After college, I came out to L.A. from the Midwest and worked corporate for a few years. Eventually, I went into community work and proceeded to go to graduate school, but I was still working corporate jobs while I was in school.”
Question: By now, into your 30s, have you found career-type fulfillment in the cello?
“I don’t know what that means,” she says, throwing her head back with a laugh. “I am definitely still searching.”
Question: For?
“I am searching for a synthesis between all of the different pieces and parts of my brain and expression, and how to employ that in my music, or in my art.”
Charmingly complex while also accessible as she is, Saturday’s audience at the Yost Theatre showcase event will have a chance to shift around the moving parts of Carter Dewberry until the puzzle looks just right.
Saturday:
8 p.m. — Pre-party: 208 N. Spurgeon St.
8:30 p.m.— Doors: The Yost Theatre, 307 N. Spurgeon St., Santa Ana, 92701.
The show will begin promptly at 9.
Ms. Dewberry, an accomplished cellist, completed her DMA in Chamber Music Performance from UCLA in December 2005. She received her MM in Cello Performance from UCLA in June 2002 and her B.M. in Cello Performance from Western Michigan University in April 1998. She also holds a B.A. in French with a minor in Women's Studies and Philosophy.
Ms. Dewberry is celebrating the release of her latest album, “Origins.”
Her website is www.carterdewberry.com
She may be contacted at carter@carterdewberry.com
