About Me

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I grew up in one of the most beautiful places in the world: Dunedin, New Zealand. Surrounded by music in a family that loved and supported the arts, I began violin lessons at the age of 5 and soon knew that music would be my passion in life. After completing a Bachelor of Music at the University of Otago, I spent a wonderful year playing with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra before completing a Master of Music at the University of Oregon. Soon after a return to New Zealand, I formed with three friends the Tasman String Quartet, with which I had the great fortune of travelling to the University of Colorado to study with one of the all-time greats; the Takács Quartet. For many years I had been drawn towards what I consider to be the extraordinary beauty of historically informed performance. Following my string quartet studies, I began a second Master's degree in Early Music at Indiana University. I am now living in Bloomington, enjoying the chance to play early music with wonderful groups in the area. Photo: © Steve Riskind
Showing posts with label Conviction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conviction. Show all posts

Monday, October 3, 2011

Truth and Conviction

In launching a blog which features the notion of truth at its core, I may well have shot myself in the foot before I've even started. Because what is truth? As someone I know put it to me after he read my first blog: "Isn't the truth different according to different people?" Is truth, as I claimed earlier, "a fixed entity" - something that just is - or do we humans have individual experiences and beliefs that can be shaped into something that can just as validly be called 'truth'?

In looking up the dictionary, I see that truth is several things: 1. the quality or state of being true; 2. that which is true or in accordance with facts or reality; and 3. a fact or belief that is accepted as true. This last definition is the most interesting to me, and I emphasised the word accepted because it indicates that a fact which may not, upon future investigation, turn out to have been fact, can still be considered true if it was widely accepted to be true at the time.