Stephanie, despite lockdown, is spreading her musical wings

Shakespeare wrote two of his masterpieces — Macbeth and King Lear — during a plague quarantine in 1606.

 Local classical musician Stephanie Li from the Orange Con hasn’t gone that far, but she does believe we should make the most of our current lockdown and keep busy.

 Stephanie — originally from the Gold Coast before starting at the Orange Conservatorium of Music earlier this year — is part of the reverse brain-drain that is seeing talented newcomers enrichen our Colour City community. 

 One of Australia’s foremost cellists and a competent musician in a number of other instruments, she recently set her sights wider. “I’ve been a cellist for 15-years and recently started learning the viola,” she said.

 “I always wanted to play the viola, but I’d always been too busy. Since lockdown, I thought, ‘this is a great timer to really extend myself,’,” she explained. “Which is really exciting, I’m so enjoying it.”

 Like many of us, she has also taken a ‘time-out’ from the constant 24-hour news cycle on the latest COVID-19 infection rates and quarantine conditions, with her father filtering the news and providing almost daily updates on our state-of-play.

 “My Dad does that for me, I’ll give him a call and he lets me know what’s going-on, which is good, so I don’t have to watch it myself,” she said.

 “My Dad’s still on the Gold Coast with my Mum and brother; this lockdown has also given me a chance to reconnect with my family as well,” she said.

 Sunshine State born-and-bred; she admits that news she was moving to the NSW Central Tablelands did come as a bit of a shock to her close-knit family. “I think they were surprised. Actually, it wasn’t a few moments silence, more like a few days,” she laughs. 

  “I think the only time they had heard of Orange was on the Weather Channel when it snowed. I didn’t know much about Orange until I took the job,” she added.

 Stephanie though has no regrets about the move, spruiking our lifestyle to friends both here and overseas, not just in emails, but in old-fashioned pen-and-paper letters!

 “I say that to all my friends, my pen-pals, in the UK and US, I say it’s just an amazing place.

 “I love writing old-fashioned letters, we get so many emails, so it’s really special to get a letter… we save our soliloquies (witticisms and asides) for pen-and-paper, which is really nice,” Stephanie said.

 With lockdown now extended to, we-don’t-know-when, the Conservatorium has established online lessons for students whose skills, unless they’re continually-honed, quickly deteriorate.

 “We’ve just transitioned to lessons online with group classes… the aim is to inspire each other and to restructure our classes so that learning can continue,” Stephanie said.

 The result though, has not been all smooth sailing, she added. “Teaching online is a whole different thing than in-person, there are delays with the sound so you can’t all play together,” she said.

 “So, how do we play together as an ensemble, without any sound?”

 Stephanie believes though that, now is the time we should be counting our blessings: “We just have to concentrate on what we can do, not what we can’t do,” she said.

 “We have to keep inspiring the kids who are so keen and so willing — they just want to keep playing and learning,” she said.

 She urged local music-lovers and performers to utilise the new technology to make the best of our current situation.

 “I think there are still lots of things going on online, we’ve got an initiative called ‘Breaking the Silence’ which was originally going to be community concerts, but that has now gone online.

 “It’s for everyone, even for those who are not musically-minded, it is designed for everyone to participate,” she said.

 Stephanie, believing in the philosophy of an active body and an active mind, has recently taken-up self-defence lessons. “I’m doing karate classes online, it’s fantastic, it’s a great way to keep active,” she concluded.