I see no reason to hide who I am or what I look like.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

Let me be very honest and just say that if any airline would let me take the violin and the laptop on board I would fly that airline all the time.

I am very lucky and grateful to have this living link to a past era, the violin presumably having much more history to it than the later portion that I know.

Mostly this problem is contained in the fact that the US makes it so difficult for Canadians to get green cards (you heard it here), but if an American orchestra really wants a player, they have their ways.

The concept is basically; that the pieces we know and love are made up of scales, arpeggios, and the like.

A good example of how it must have been is today's world of conducting, which is still utterly dominated by men, and the prejudice the few female conductors have to battle even today is astounding.