Zoe Keating by Peter Hinson
Zoe Keating follows her own beat, not the beaten path.
Once paralyzed by stage fright playing in orchestras, the classically trained cellist discovered she could perform by jamming with rocker friends onstage.
At age 30, she left behind a steady job with benefits to forge a musical career.
[Congratulations to Roy Gaddis, Keri Osborn and Bailey Keimig for winning two free tickets each to the Zoe Keating performance in a Hoopla giveaway.]
And without the benefit of marketing, management or a recording label, the former information architect turned to technology to make and market her music.
She now performs solo, but with a foot pedal added to her laptop computer, she can tap into a multi-layered symphony of sound for her original compositions.
She’ll bring a mix of recent and new works to the Englert Theatre in downtown Iowa City on Monday (2/13). She’s been in town before, playing at Gabe’s Oasis in 2003 with the all-cello rock band, Rasputina.
“My pieces are all made for cello orchestra,” Keating, 40, says by phone from her cabin in a second-growth redwood forest an hour or so north of San Francisco. “You need at least eight cellos to play one of my pieces live. But it’s just me, so I need technology to perform with my orchestra.”
The high-tech treatment is an outgrowth of her days performing with rock bands after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and making her way to San Francisco at the dawn of the dot-com boom.
“I started by experimenting with the distortion and delay pedals guitars usually use,” she says. “I got more and more complex, so I had to use a computer. There’s no other way to do it. Because I used computers at work, it was easy to figure out.
“(Technology) is not a barrier. As laptops have gotten more powerful, I can bring them onstage without them crashing too much. I used to travel with a huge box (full of equipment)”, she says with a laugh, “but now it’s just a tiny little laptop I can control with my feet so I can use my hands to play the cello.”
Her music is melodic, evocative and purposeful, inspired by wherever she’s living, from urban settings to the verdant oasis she shares with her husband and their 20-month-old son.
Still, one writer dubbed Keating an “avant cellist.” She liked that, and says she’ll keep using that tag line until someone else comes up with a description she likes better.
“It’s more about my approach to cello rather than my music. I try to make alternative sounds for cello like in techno music. I re-create that by exploring all the sounds the instrument can make,” she says.
“‘Avant-garde’ can be kind of unlistenable,” which is why she leans more toward melodic creations. “It’s so hard to describe my music.”
It’s her way to communicate and make sense of the world around her.
“Music, for me, is the way to express things I can’t say with words. There’s so much about living, mortality, day-to-day life that is impossible to express. Music is my way to come to terms with being a human. People say it’s like therapy or meditation. Music makes my life complete, self-expressed, a feeling of catharsis,” she says.
“Music is so satisfying. When I’m playing, I cease to exist. I lose myself in the world. I might play for an hour, but it feels like one minute or 100 years. You lose your sense of time,” she says. “It’s so rare to lose your sense of time passing when we’re so chained to time. That’s what happens to me onstage. I consider it a really good performance if I can bring the audience there with me.”
She hopes audiences can see stories float through melodies that blur musical boundaries and keep the cello in the public eye for younger generations to discover and experiment with.
“I really like the challenge of going out there with just a cello and trying to win over an audience,” she says.
Zoe Keating by Lane Hartwell
“When I was studying music, to write tonal music was a difficult thing to do. It was considered a cop-out; it was not ‘artistic’ if a thing was too easy to listen to,” she says.
“But I love pop music, and one idea I like to get across is that when you hear a good pop song, it sticks in your head and you find yourself hearing it while you’re riding your bike. I like the challenge of getting across what I want to say in five minutes — sometimes a simple melody can do that. It’s like a human singing just a single thing. Cello is my voice; I’m just sort of using it like you would sing.”
She almost lost her voice as a teenager.
She began playing cello at age 8 at the suggestion of a teacher at her elementary school in England. She was born near Toronto, but says her family moved around a lot, from Alberta to England and upstate New York.
“When I was 16, I was suddenly hit by terrible stage fright,” she says. “It really paralyzed me. I was unable to perform. I didn’t know there was a cure for it.”
So instead of pursuing a performing career, she pursued a liberal arts degree with a concentration in music.
During her college years, she became enthralled by improvisation and her school’s electronic music studio.
“It expanded my horizons,” she says. “I didn’t see a way to become a professional musician, but I did discover I had no fear of playing music that wasn’t written down. I was unafraid to improvise. I wasn’t afraid to play popular forms of music, sitting in with bands and playing along.”
She kept moonlighting with bands while working her day job in technology. By the time she was 30, she decided to turn her focus to music full time.
“I did it backwards,” she says. “Most people spend their 20s playing in a band, then spend their 30s in a job. I did it the other way around. I had a good, solid job with benefits in my 20s and left it all for an unstable music career. Now we know nothing is stable.
“I’m glad I got a liberal arts degree, which teaches you how to think, how to make your way in an unstable world, whether you’re a musician or working in technology. Nothing is a given and it can all be taken away,” she says.
“I’m so grateful I get to play music right now. I’m going to continue and enjoy it as much as I can.”
— Diana Nollen