Sydney Hinrichsen Organizes the Bach Project

At the age of three, Sydnee Hinrichsen began pestering her parents about getting a violin. “My favorite babysitter played the violin and I wanted to be just like her,” Hinrichsen recalled. However, her parents were not easily swayed to buy their young daughter such an expensive instrument.

Three-year-old Hinrichsen continued begging for a violin. For Christmas, her parents gave her a toy violin that played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons when she put the bow on the plastic strings. The pretend violin only lasted a matter of weeks because Hinrichsen played it incessantly. This final act and more begging convinced her parents to get her a real violin when she was four and a half.

Hinrichsen has been playing the violin for 20 years now. “It was not a phase,” she joked. Hinrichsen’s most recent violin accomplishment, The Bach Project, brought together 31 violinists who all have ties to BYU. The Bach Project is a performance of all of the Bach Solo Violin Sonatas and Partitas.

She had seen the idea on Elizabeth Faidley’s Instagram. Faidley is a professor at the Manhattan School of Music, a violinist that Hinrichsen greatly admires.

Many of Hinrichsen’s friends expressed interest in participating and her BYU violin professor Monte Belknap encouraged her to take on the project. Henrichsen realized that if this was going to happen, she had to take charge. 31 violinists performed in the project, but Hinrichsen said she reached out to over 70 people. “I really had to reach out to every contact I had, even people I had not talked to in a long time,” Hinrichsen said. She also said that she learned her circle was bigger than she thought. When the performance came and all the violinists gathered, Hinrichsen felt that there was a beautiful sense of community and camaraderie.

During the rehearsal process, Hinrichsen thought heavily about the advice Belknap gave her to get just one percent better each time. As she prepared, Hinrichsen focused on having more mindful practice, telling herself that it was okay to focus on one measure at a time. This careful practice was important as she had the most difficult movement to perform—14 minutes long and memorized. Although there were difficulties leading up to the performance, Hinrichsen noted that everything fell into place when it came time to perform. She said that there was definitely divine help in getting everything to go just right.

Hinrichsen’s advice to anyone who might want to take on a large project is, “Why wait? Someone’s gotta do it so it might as well be you.”