Player Biographies: Bruce Hayes, Violin
I 
grew up in chilly-but-beautiful Ithaca,
New York, where I started in music at age 9 by taking
clarinet and piano lessons. At age 15 I switched from clarinet
to violin, in order to be able to play in the violin section
of my high school orchestra. In college I followed this up by
playing in the student orchestra. I remember both my high
school and college orchestras very fondly. At age 21 I dropped
the violin, as I had become too busy with my pursuit of a
career in linguistics, which I mostly spent (1981-2023) as a professor
at UCLA. During this time I sometimes sang in choral
groups, which seemed less demanding than an orchestra might
be.
In 2007, with my only child just off to college, I took up the violin again and joined the Palisades Symphony. This proved to be a great decision -- it was a chance to meet really nice people and to become more familiar with the orchestral classical repertoire. Nothing is more likely to make you fall in love with a work of music than the experience of practicing and performing it -- this has been my experience, over and over.