Marylou Speaker Churchill, with her husband, Mark, and their twin daughters, Julia and Emma. Mrs. Churchill was a principal violinist with the BSO and a frequent performer at Tanglewood Music Center.
(Globe/File 2000)
Marylou Speaker Churchill, 64, a key violinist, presence with BSO
Marylou Speaker Churchill, with her husband, Mark, and their twin daughters, Julia and Emma. Mrs. Churchill was a principal violinist with the BSO and a frequent performer at Tanglewood Music Center.
(Globe/File 2000)
The violinist Marylou Speaker Churchill, a deeply admired performer and teacher who, in 23 years as a principal player in the Boston Symphony Orchestra came to be seen as a beacon of engaged and empathic musicianship, died late Tuesday at her home in Newton. The cause was cancer, according to her husband, the cellist, conductor, and music educator Mark Churchill. She was 64.
Mrs. Churchill joined the BSO in 1970 and was promoted to the chair of principal second violin in 1977. From that highly visible spot - almost directly in front of the podium - she exuded a grounded yet glowing presence. Conductors came to depend on her warm-toned, rock-solid playing and her ability to give back as much musical energy as they were expending.
“How will I live without you?’’ Seiji Ozawa, then BSO music director, wrote to Mrs. Churchill as part of a book of testimonials given to her when she retired from the orchestra in 2000. On that same occasion, the conductor Andre Previn observed, “It would be nice if there were a utopian orchestra in which you played every one of the string parts.’’
Those sitting in Symphony Hall became equally attached to her. “We would come to the Boston Symphony, and there was Marylou,’’ the cellist Laurence Lesser, president emeritus of New England Conservatory and a colleague of Mrs. Churchill’s since the 1960s, recently recalled. “Her presence at the front desk of the second violins always meant that we were in for a fabulous mixture of the serious and the joyful. We all came to depend on that.’’
It was an on-stage location that she herself appreciated. “I loved being in the middle of things, with the sound above, below, and all around me,’’ she told the Globe in 2000. At the time of her retirement, the paper’s former classical music critic, Richard Dyer, wrote that “she must have the best posture in the orchestra, sitting straight and tall, intently watching and listening . . . You can follow the music just by looking at her face, and anyone can learn to listen better by emulating the quality of her attention.’’
Mrs. Churchill grew up in Portland, Ore., and studied at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox as a teenager, later earning her bachelor of music degree at NEC under the watch of Joseph Silverstein, the BSO’s concertmaster at the time.
After graduate work in California, she freelanced with numerous groups, including Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston, before joining the BSO under William Steinberg.
She was one of the first women to join the orchestra’s ranks, and she marveled at what she described as the “great transformation’’ of the BSO during her decades there. “It was an orchestra of old men when I came,’’ she told the Globe, “and now it is full of musicians who are young enough to be my children.’’
Over the years, her spoken and unspoken support of younger colleagues and even conductors proved transformative. BSO assistant principal cello Martha Babcock recalled her “imposing, radiant, and stable’’ musical presence, but also her “almost maternal kindness and encouragement of my husband and me when we were beginning our musical lives in Boston.’’ The conductor
Mrs. Churchill joined the faculty of NEC’s preparatory division in 1981 and oversaw its string department for a decade, later joining the undergraduate faculty as well. In 1982, she married Mark Churchill, who is dean and artistic director of the school’s prep and continuing education divisions. The couple adopted infant twins from the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific. Through the years, the couple opened their home to almost 80 students, who lived with them while completing studies in Boston.
Through it all, Mrs. Churchill kept her own studio of 25 to 30 students. She was known to teach all day on Saturdays and then wolf down chocolates from the shop at Symphony Hall to keep her sharp for the evening’s BSO performance. Her former students hold positions in orchestras across the United States and Europe. Many of them sent testimonials to an online Facebook group set up in the weeks before her death.
“She was a born teacher,’’ BSO violinist Jason Horowitz recalled yesterday by phone. “You could bring her any problem, and she would make you realize it didn’t really exist. And I’m not only talking violin or music. That was her magic with everything that she touched.’’
In addition to her husband, Mrs. Churchill leaves two daughters, Emma and Julia, both of Newton; and two brothers, Michael Speaker of Wappingers Falls, N.Y., and Paul Speaker of Upland, Calif.
The family will greet visitors from 4 to 8 p.m. Sunday at 41 Woodward St. in Newton.
Funeral services will be private, and a public memorial event will take place at a later date.
In her teaching, Mrs. Churchill often advised young players on how to find that elusive balance between professional and personal investment in music. On at least one occasion, in 1994, she reduced it to a few simple principles. “Consistent, daily work brings strength and freedom,’’ she told a group of students. “Love your instrument, love your work on that instrument if you intend to make it your life-work. There is no greater joy than to master your instrument, play it beautifully, and bring everyone such deep pleasure. It uplifts and inspires, yourself included.’’
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.