[BEGIN ANN HEYMANN PART 01—Filename: A1009a EML Mmtc] DS: We’Re Here in the Celtic Junction

Ann Heymann Interview Narrator: Ann Heymann Interviewer: Dáithí Sproule Date: January 3, 2018 DS: Dáithí Sproule AH: Ann Heymann [BEGIN ANN HEYMANN PART 01—filename: A1009a_EML_mmtc] DS: We’re here in the Celtic Junction. I’m here with Ann Heymann. I was going to look at the date – is this the third of January? AH: Yes, the third. DS: The third of January, and we’re going to have a chat about Ann’s distinguished career and the music and so on. I already warned Ann that usually I ask people, I want to put people in their context, so are your parents both from here, or are they from somewhere else? AH: My parents were both born in Minnesota, but my mother was born in Duluth, and her parents were both Swedish immigrants. Her dad came over, I think, when he was seventeen, her mother maybe sixteen. They met in Duluth. They were both from Sweden, and my mother’s mother died, she remembers her being only sick in bed. She had problems because of having had rheumatic fever, so her father worked selling draperies door to door in the Depression in Duluth, and the daughters sewed the draperies. He’d get the sales, and my mother and her two older sisters would sew the draperies. She was not Catholic, but she had Catholic friends, so she’d go to confession with them on their way to somewhere else. There was Irish music going on in Duluth then too. DS: We’re talking about the 20s, 30s? Later, 40s? AH: Let’s see. They were married in ’46. I should know the year my parents were born, but they never wanted to tell us their age. (laughter) 1 DS: I keep on asking questions during the thing to try and orient myself chronologically, and sometimes I get completely confused. There was a lot of Irish music in Duluth? AH: Yea, yea. I don’t know really anything about it, and she’s remembering back to when she was a girl. She had her group of friends, and her mother died when she was eleven, so she just remembers her mother being in bed, but she tells me stories about how she always wanted to play the harp. This was after, after I started harp. She would take the top off a piano and play the strings individually, imagining it was a harp. DS: It is funny how you can see some things being meant to be, you know, in retrospect. You can look and say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” AH: Yea, I have more to say on that line. DS: Your mother, did she have any Swedish still? Was the language gone, or did she sing anything in Swedish, or know any songs? AH: No, she didn’t have any, but she was interested. Before she died, she was teaching herself Swedish and compiling an English-Swedish Dictionary on her own, when she was sick with multiple myeloma, probably a result of sewing those fabrics when she was a young girl. There’s a grouping of multiple myeloma in certain industries, and one is the textile industry, and I’m thinking freshly made fabrics and working with them, whatever the dies they were using. Both of her older sisters might have died of it as well. They didn’t get checked out fully, so it’s kind of interesting. DS: So we already have a portent of the harp and a portent of the scholarly if your mother is almost dying and she’s making up a dictionary. It’s amazing. AH: My dad, he came from a family of three, and his parents were both born in this country, but one generation later, and they were both from Sweden too. I hear there’s some Norwegian and a hint of the Russian prince somewhere, but who knows? My grandfather on my mother’s side, my mother’s father, his father, they lived at the palace in Stockholm. He was doing something there, and they sent him off because he got a maid pregnant. Of course, I didn’t learn about that from my family. (laughs) And I didn’t seek it out either, I wasn’t very interested. I never found it all that interesting, their line. 2 DS: Did your father play any music or sing? AH: That’s how he started talking about it. His own father was a really nice tenor, and my grandmother was a piano player and teacher, and she’d play piano, and he’d sing with a soprano. There’s a recording somewhere of him, but my grandmother wouldn’t teach my father because he had to wear glasses, and she thought it would be bad for his eyes. It’s odd he never played an instrument. He became enamored with the pipe organ, and he would go to church every week and he had his seat where he could watch the pipe organist play, and all of his kids would have to be stationed. We’d have to go to Sunday school, but we’d have to be stationed to get him into his favorite seat. We’d be positioned at various doors to get in there and hoard his seat so he could watch the organist play. (laughs) He bought himself a pipe organ and built a house around it so sixteen foot pipes in the house, and some shutters. The house was built so the shutters would open and send the noise of the pipes into the living room and into the dining room. He taught himself to play hymns on the organ. He just got teased – we kids were terrible – I didn’t do the teasing, I had teasing brothers, and they teased him all the time. Both my parents, they weren’t brought up really with music, and yet they made sure we had lessons, so there was a piano in the house. Before lessons I remember playing with sounds on the piano and making up stories. It was in the basement with centipedes, so you can imagine the nature of the stories. (laughs) I started piano lessons when I was four. DS: Where were you in the Twin Cities area? AH: Saint Louis Park. DS: Did you enjoy the lessons? Did you enjoy going to the lessons, or was it a chore? AH: it wasn’t too bad. It was something to do, and I walked there, but my brothers had their way of dropping out of things, and I was good enough, I didn’t, you know. I behaved a little better than they did. DS: Did you keep up the piano lessons up to, you know, all these grades and things? AH: I did, and then they started me on pipe organ lessons, so I studied with the Mount Olivet Lutheran Church organist, Diana Lee Metzker. She was a Ph.D. in pipe organ performance. DS: What age were you when you started the pipe organ? 3 AH: I think maybe fourteen, something like that. I wasn’t into it at all, so I sight-read through my lessons. That’s pretty much what I did. I had respect for it, I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t want to do it. And before that with piano lessons, I didn’t want to go to summer school, church summer school – I didn’t want to do that. So I got out of it by practicing three hours a day on those Sunday school days, but the practice consisted of a piece by some Russian composer. It was very banging and strong, and I played in full anger and full strength on a grand piano for three hours, angry. Another thing I did – they’d get me up in the middle of the night if I hadn’t practiced the organ, so I would really play it loud then to wake up the whole house in the middle of the night. I wasn’t happy about it. When I did practice during the day, I wasn’t really practicing, I was reading a book, and I’d have it ready, I’d be pretending with my foot a pedal passage or a hand, and I’d be reading a book. And I’d hear someone coming along and I’d turn the page. I pretty much resisted it all. And I was looking for a music, I was trying to imagine a music that I liked. The music on the radio, the melody wasn’t loud enough, it was all way too much bass, drums, rhythm guitar. DS: The pop music of the day? AH: Yea, a lot of it was bothering me, and I was trying to imagine a music where the melody and the rhythm could be – the rhythm and the harmony could be suggested in the melody. When I first heard Irish music – and this was through my friend Barbara van Vorst, who became Barbara Suess Dahill. I knew her through horses. I always wanted to ride horses. DS: What age were you when you met Barbara? AH: I don’t know, I was in tenth grade, ninth grade. DS: Was she already playing Irish music, or interested in Irish music? AH: No, we met through horses. I ended up riding at the same barn. She was a year ahead of me in school. She went to Washburn in Minneapolis, and I went to Hopkins High School -- well, that would be tenth grade. She would come and she had a car, and she’d come and pick me up, and I was very good at skipping school.

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