Namuun Tsend-Ayush ’17 was among the first-place winners in the American Protégé International Concerto Competition last spring (college students/professional musician category). So on Dec. 18, two days after fall semester ends, she’ll perform the first movement of Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in the winners’ recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall in New York.
She used the American Protégé competition as a way to focus her practicing and improve her playing. “Having a goal like that, to practice for a competition, it definitely motivates you more, and you want to do better,” she says. “When you have a goal in mind, you want to push yourself more.”
Tsend-Ayush has been refining her playing through contests—and the practice, practice, practice they require—since 2004, when she first competed in her native Mongolia, winning second place, at age nine. She entered the American Protégé contest by submitting a video of her playing, but she’s competed in person for the multiple contests in Mongolia, the Czech Republic, and Italy that have provided her motivation through the years. Walking onto the Carnegie stage will be a familiar experience in some ways.
Of course, the violinist has performed multiple times at Luther as well—solo, in small groups, and with the symphony and chamber orchestras. As concertmaster of both ensembles, Tsend-Ayush also tunes the musicians and leads first violin section practices. She’ll be polishing each note of the Bach sonata movement for her New York debut in December, but Tsend-Ayush has perhaps a bigger challenge before then. She won the Hemp Family Prize for Orchestral Performance earlier this year and will give a recital this fall, learning a full concert’s worth of new music.
Tsend-Ayush’s violin teacher at Luther, visiting assistant professor of music Igor Kalnin, has no doubt about her abilities and also credits her initiative. Meeting for lessons only once a week, Kalnin says, “There’s no time to talk about all the details of a piece. Students have to take the initiative and have a certain mindset” that drives them to refine their playing. Tsend-Ayush has that mindset, he says, and strives to improve the quality of her playing and the details of her technique on her own.
But when it comes time to take the stage, Tsend-Ayush isn’t necessarily thinking about the particulars of technique that she’s rehearsed for hours in the practice room. In fact, she says she sometimes doesn’t remember much after a performance—whether she played a certain rhythm just so or hit a tricky note. She’s concentrating on expressing the music at this point: “I think that in music, the emotions that you are portraying or sharing with people are the most important. . . . It’s not about perfection but about the general performance.”
Tsend-Ayush, a Davis United World College Scholar, took up the violin as a first-grader in a music school in Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital city. She made her way to Luther via the United World College Adriatic. Jon Lund, of Luther’s Center for Global Learning and International Admissions, first talked with her about Luther, and then she met Luther associate professors of music Spencer Martin and Andrew Whitfield. They codirect the International Music Festival of the Adriatic, and Tsend-Ayush heard them speak about Luther when they visited the UWC to give a master class. Friends of hers had also spread the word about Luther, and because the college is similar in size to UWC Adriatic and is known for its music program, Tsend-Ayush thought she could be comfortable in Decorah.
She has been. Her favorite memory so far is from the first time she participated in Christmas at Luther. She sang in the Aurora choir and performed with Symphony Orchestra. At one point, while she was singing in the aisles of the Center for Faith and Life, she noticed people in the audience tearing up as they smiled. “It was such an emotional moment, and I thought [performing in Christmas at Luther] was a beautiful thing to do, and I’d like to keep doing it as long as I could.”
Tsend-Ayush will graduate from Luther next spring. She’ll have completed the music major and be just shy of a double major in accounting. Her parents enjoy listening to classical music but are not musicians themselves, and Tsend-Ayush’s accountant mother encouraged her daughter to learn accounting too. She may yet finish that degree. She’s hedging her bets a little, sure, but she also really likes accounting.
First, though, she’ll follow her passion for music and begin graduate studies in violin performance. She’ll be entering the professional music world at a time when there are a lot of good violinists, Kalnin says, but he is confident that Tsend-Ayush has a good future in music. “She will do well,” he says.