From China to Appleton
Gu, an assistant professor, has been at Lawrence since 2006, when she chose the Appleton university over three other schools.
“Lawrence was the last place I came to do an interview, and I was really impressed with the student body and faculty,” says Gu. “The students here are incredibly intelligent and motivated.
“I had breakfast with students when I came here to interview, and there were so many questions I couldn’t eat my breakfast.”
Gu has an abundance of experience to pass on. She toured Europe as a soloist and counts among her accomplishments performances in Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Her father, a violinist in the city orchestra of Guangzhou, sensed there was something special about his daughter when a visiting conductor heard her play at age 3½ and complimented her in front of the entire orchestra.
“From then on my dad thought, ‘I have to give her the best training,’” Gu recalls.
That meant moving to Beijing, more than 1,000 miles away, when she was 8. She lived with her mother, a violin teacher, while her father stayed in Guangzhou to support the family with his position in the orchestra.
Although she was performing at a very high level at a young age, Gu did not feel pressured. She simply thrived on music.
“My parents never pushed me to practice,” she says. “I always wanted to practice. They would have to stop me, tell me to get off the piano bench.”
‘Like a poem’
After winning China’s national violin competition at age 12, she looked abroad for more challenges. She competed in the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition in England at age 13, and performed the Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto with Menuhin. He commented that her playing “sounds like a poem, looks like a painting.”
From there, it was on to training in the United States. Her aunt, a professor of violin at Duke University, encouraged her to come to America, and she trained with Dorothy Delay of the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music for two years while living with a host family in Ohio.
“I thought, in China I had already won first prize,” she says. “I was eager to have a new experience.”
She was happy to have the opportunity to learn from an acclaimed teacher, but that did not keep the tears from coming when she thought about her parents back in China. The phone bills grew as the homesick girl called her parents as often as she could.
Her parents made trips to the states when possible, and the talented violinist got used to life in the U.S. At 15 she moved to New York and lived with a host family there while she attended Julliard School. She went on to earn her bachelor’s degree there, earned her master’s from the Mannes College of Music and is in the final stages of getting her doctorate in performance from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
