TIM LAWRENCE — D I R E C T O R O F S T U D I E S
Making Music
T
he musical instruments that Director of Studies Timothy Lawrence owns and plays spread across a room like a stringed menagerie: the fiddle, the mandolin, the banjo, the banjolin, the mandocello, and the bouzouki. He also plays a bit on the ukulele, and he is learning to play the oud, a Middle Eastern instrument in the lute family. Many of his 15 or so stringed instruments hang on the walls of Tim’s music room at home, where he can easily reach them and often does. Tim learned classical violin beginning at age 7 and eventually took a liking to folk, bluegrass, and Irish music. “I grew up a mile and a half from the biggest fiddle contest in Maine,” he says, referring to the annual East Benton Fiddlers Convention. Tim’s parents entered him 32
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in the contest when he was 10, and thus began a turn on the contest circuit, including highplacing finishes at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado. As he grew up, Tim learned to play other instruments, and his passion for making music surged at college, where he met other musicians interested in bluegrass. When he was a freshman, he and his new musician friends formed a bluegrass band, the Cross County Ramblers, and to their surprise, the group started getting gigs. The Ramblers even played in Europe during the summers, “for beer and tips,” Tim demurs. More recently, Tim and three other musical Loomis faculty members formed a band that played at a Mercy Gallery art opening and at a faculty-staff event.
Tim also composes music, including collaborations with Loomis music teacher James Rugen ’70 on the “Loomis Chaffee Hymn” and “Where Rivers Rise and Fall,” the latter along with David Snyder ’80 in celebration of the school’s Centennial. A few years ago, a playwright friend asked Tim to compose music for one of her plays, which was produced at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in Waterford, Connecticut, and later was produced Off-Broadway. “When I was a kid, we always had music going in the house,” Tim recalls. His mother played the piano, and his father built her a harpsichord and clavichord. Tim’s brother, Quil, plays the guitar and the mandolin, and whenever they get together, the brothers play music. Every year on the day after Thanks-
giving at their parents’ home in Maine, neighbors and friends come over for a hootenanny and leftovers swap. Tim and his wife, Paige Bray, also have a musical home. When their sons, now in ninth and fifth grades, were younger, Tim used to play them to sleep every night. Now he still picks up an instrument most evenings and plays a little. “It’s a way to relax and keep my fingers nimble and keep my calluses,” he says. His sons are musically inclined as well. Music “is a language for me,” Tim says. “There have been times when I’ve traveled and not known the language, and music was my language.”