Leap of faith brought violinist back to musical roots

After 13 years living and working in the US, Tessa Petersen and her American husband, pianist John Van Buskirk, gave up their musical careers and, in 2006, moved to Dunedin, where she had grown up.

• Friendship with strings

It was partly because her family was here, and partly because they knew the education for their two children was better here than the options available to them in the US, she said.

It was a leap of faith. They left their professional music contacts and busy performing and teaching schedules to move here, knowing that at least they could teach privately if they could not find jobs, she said.

Luckily, the position of executant lecturer in violin at the university came up the following year and Petersen was appointed to the department she had first graduated from. Van Buskirk is now busy teaching, adjudicating, examining and accompanying, as well as performing in a duo with Petersen, La Belle Alliance.

Petersen grew up in Dunedin in a musical household. When she was 3 she used to carry her mother's violin case around, she says, with a laugh.

She started violin lessons when she was 4, and, apart from a brief time when she thought she might like to be an opera singer, she always wanted to become a violinist. She and her three sisters were encouraged to practise and listen to music by their parents, and taken to concerts.

"My mother was keen for us to be a string quartet but ended up with two cellists, a violinist and a viola player, so she almost had a string quartet! My father plays piano and regularly plays organ at Knox Church. It was a household of music from the beginning."

She had several violin teachers over the years, including a friend of Yehudi Menuhin when she was about 14 and living in Cambridge where her father, Prof George Petersen, was on sabbatical for a year. Back in Dunedin, she studied violin until she graduated with Pamela Bryce, who was then executant lecturer at the University of Otago.

She also learned piano until she went to university, and recorder at Saturday Morning Music Classes.

"I went through the Saturday morning orchestras from a very young age, starting at the back of the second violins and working my way up to the youth orchestra, then leading the youth orchestra.

Aart Brusse was an incredible force for good in music-making, and I went through with a whole bunch of other keen players, many of whom are now playing professionally and some of us are still here in Dunedin," she says.

She remembers playing the 1812 Overture each year and at first she saw a sea of notes and could only manage about two in each run, but as the years went by she gradually managed to play them all, she says with a laugh.

She also played in the Southern Sinfonia (then the Dunedin Sinfonia) from 16 which set her up for professional playing overseas.

She regards the overlap between it and the university a valuable experience for students who are good enough to get into it. "I think it's very important to have continual musical education from a very young age and have access to that for all children.

"I think in a university in a city of this size it's important to have these [executant] positions. It has a trickle-down effect for supporting the younger players and providing workshops and mentoring for players who have potential for heading into the profession, and these positions can support the Southern Sinfonia."