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Becoming an ‘American Woman’: Camp alumna Juliana Soltis releases new cello album featuring work by American female composers, credits Interlochen with sparking her passion
Soltis shares favorite memories from Camp, the joy of improvisation, and her excitement about bringing forgotten composers to the fore.
Spend a few minutes with Juliana Soltis, and you’ll see right away that she’s not afraid to challenge the status quo. The cellist’s flaming pink hair is just one hint of the subversive optimism that has characterized her career since two fateful summers at Interlochen Arts Camp. In a culture that typically assigns classical music to “dead white men”, Soltis (IAC 98-99) is challenging assumptions and building a reputation for fresh, innovative improvisations. Today, Soltis released her third album for cello: American Woman. She shares about the life-shaping insights she received at Arts Camp, the power of improvisation in classical music, and why she feels compelled to champion the work of American female composers.
“The perfect moment”
When Soltis thinks back on her Arts Camp experience, one particular memory from her first summer on campus stands out in sharp detail.
“I remember lying in the grass outside of Kresge Auditorium listening to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 while I read The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy for summer school,” she reminisces.
It was the first time she’d ever heard Shostakovich live. For Soltis, who had never been away from home before and was suddenly encountering throngs of musically gifted peers, the experience was a powerful call toward the future she wanted to have.
“It felt like a perfect moment. I was on the cusp of adulthood, thinking about my life and what I wanted it to be: music all the time.”
Her time at Interlochen was full of other firsts, too. Soltis played her first piece by a living composer: Corigliano’s “Promenade Overture” (she remembers gushing to him about this when she met him at an industry party years later). The summer and the one that followed sparked Soltis’s intense work ethic and sealed her musical ambitions.
“Interlochen persuaded me that the only thing that I wanted out of life was to spend my life making music while surrounded by other musicians,” she says. “My time at Camp inspired me to push myself. I wanted to work hard, and I wanted to be surrounded by people who challenged my ideas of what music could be.”
My time at Camp inspired me to push myself. I wanted to work hard, and I wanted to be surrounded by people who challenged my ideas of what music could be.
A reputation for improvisation
After two summers at Interlochen, Soltis’s life direction was effectively set. In her senior year of high school, she successfully auditioned for the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony and drove four hours to rehearse in Pittsburgh each Sunday throughout the entire year. In the time that followed high school, Soltis showed similar dedication as she sought out degrees from New England Conservatory, Ball State University, The Longy School of Music, and Oberlin Conservatory.
Soltis emerged from her education with energy and purpose, ready to share her musical gifts with the world. She debuted her first recording, Entrez, le Diable!, in 2017. This was followed by 2019’s Going Off Script, which earned acclaim for its fresh, spontaneous improvisations on Bach’s Cello Suites.
Soltis likes to improvise in performance whenever she can, making each piece an unrepeatable event.
“When you improvise on the music, it's different every time,” she says. “It's an experience that bonds you in the moment with all the people who are listening together. Because you know that once that piece has been played, it's gone. That's it.”
For her, improvisation became even more meaningful after the pandemic confined audiences to their homes. It’s a signature of live music that she thinks is more important than ever.
“Why should you be in the audience when you can just click on Spotify and listen to me play in the comfort of your living room, in your sweats?” she asks. “It’s because there’s power in the experience of the moment. That’s improvisation.”
The making of American Woman
When it was time to create her third album, Soltis knew it was time to do something different—something that celebrated her heritage. She became fascinated with the idea of what it meant to be a specifically American cellist.
“If you're an Italian cellist, for example, you've got all of these composers associated with your national musical history: Vivaldi, Boccherini, Puccini, Verdi. You've got a lineage. I realized I didn’t know what it meant to be an American cellist. So I set out to explore.”
After coming up with a shortlist of about 20 pieces, Soltis was struck with the realization that she knew of very few female American composers. She remembered her experience of being an 11-year-old playing in string quartet, growing bored of Haydn and blurting out in rehearsal, “When are we going to play music by girl composers?”
“My coach looked at me, and I felt I’d said something really wrong,” Soltis remembers. “She said, ‘Oh, there aren’t that many girl composers, and they’re not very good.’ That was it. End of conversation. Even at 11, I didn’t believe that for a second.”
Now, as she prepared to launch out on her third album, Soltis realized that she’d struck concept gold.
“I had one of those moments where it was like electricity ran through my body,” she says. “I realized that this was it. This was the story that needed to be told.”
American Woman was released October 4 on the PARMA Recording Group’s Grammy-winning Navona label. Featuring works for cello and piano by Mary Howe, Amy Beach, Margaret Bonds, Helen Crane, Dorothy Rudd Moore, and Florence Price, the album is intended to celebrate female composers who were highly-acclaimed during their individual lifetimes, but whose music fell into obscurity following their deaths.
“I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to make this album,” says Soltis. “These women deserve their place in the narrative of our shared musical history, and I feel both honored and humbled to tell their stories.”
American Woman is yet another marker in a career that’s already been rich with accomplishments. No matter how her third album is received, Soltis plans to stay humble and grounded.
“At Interlochen, I learned a sense of gratitude and a certain humility,” she says. “I went to Camp with players who were unbelievably gifted, but who had absolutely no intention of going on to pursue careers in classical music. There are so many talented musicians and artists out there who never even go into the field, or, for whatever reason, don't get the attention that their playing would seem to merit—just as I see with the female composers featured on my new album.”
To chase her dreams with the cello is the work of a lifetime, and Soltis is just getting started.
Learn more about studying music at Interlochen Arts Camp.
