Listen Hear #2: How a Violist Quit Classical Music but Made a Sublime Strings Record, Anyway

On the path to joining an orchestra, Isabel Pine studied classical music for two decades. When she learned to make music that actually interested her, she recorded a beautiful debut called “Fables.”

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of Out & Back, my new newsletter about music and whatever else. If you haven’t subscribed yet, I’d be honored if you did. This is the second installment of “Listen Hear,” an ideally monthly series of short profiles about an artist and an album that deserve a little more exploration. (The first was about the great Ruth Parker.) One of my favorite things as a reader and a writer is to learn how someone got to sounds or songs I love, and I hope this series will do that for you. This month, I’ve got Isabel Pine, whose debut, Fables, is one of the year’s most spellbinding records.

The violist Isabel Pine and I had been talking for 10 minutes about thru-hiking—that is, walking from one end of a very long trail to another in one season or year—when she accidentally told me how she’d made one of this year’s most spellbinding records. She has been on a few multi-week backpacking adventures, but she daydreams about some things I have done, like the Pacific Crest or Continental Divide trails. They were life-changing escapades, I told her, before I offered a caveat: Coming back home and readjusting to regular life can be a motherfucker.

Pine nodded knowingly. “Things feel a bit more harmonious when you’re out hiking. You’re in sync,” she said, the snow piled high beneath the evergreens just beyond her window. “But when you come back, there’s something about being inside of a box that’s really difficult to accept.”

Photo: Nelson Moneo

Pine made Fables—her 15-track debut of self-recorded and nature-indebted string miniatures, released by Kranky in late February—by stepping out of a box. For the first two decades of her life, she pivoted between two careerist pathways. She was an aspiring classical musician who studied viola at the University of Michigan before the grind became too grueling; she put aside the instrument she’d played since she was three in favor of video work in New York, living with her partner in a Park Slope house of eight people.

When the pandemic scuttled that path, too, Pine and her partner decamped to his childhood home among the mountains near Invermere, British Columbia, two hours north of the Montana border. Experimenting with new string instruments and recording techniques, she fell in love with music of her own hand and mind. Like the sprawling Stars of the Lid edited by Max Richter or the Kentucky chamber grace of Rachel’s transposed to new climes, Fables suggests the real topography of mountains in winter: infinite wonder and endless details, never completely removed from at least a whiff of menace.

“I make music now because I love it. I’m only making music because that’s what I want to be doing, because that’s how I’m feeling,” Pine, 29, tells me. “I wanted it to be rooted in what I wanted, so I’m not very careerist about it at all.”

In the suburbs of Chicago, neither of Pine’s parents were musicians, but they urged their daughters to learn to play as a life skill. She started with viola when she was three, studying the Suzuki method at a local music center. She was the sister who stuck with it, at least in part because she had a teacher during high school who was amenable to occasional lessons that felt more like therapy sessions. She could talk her way through the difficulties of adolescence.

All teachers, of course, didn’t work that way. There were tyrants who would launch into tirades if she was a few cents sharp or flat or if her slides between notes were too noticeable. Learning to play centuries-old music by dead men she’d never meet was a vacuum of self-expression, especially as her interests broadened. Acts like Nicolas Jaar, alt-J, and Sigur Rós suggested alternate horizons that her education didn’t really acknowledge, let alone allow for.

“People who are studying classical music, a lot of times, don’t listen to what they’re playing, and that felt disorienting. Why aren’t we making the music we want to listen to?” she says. “Or why are we studying so hard on this music we don’t want to listen to?”

When Pine left for New York and stowed her viola, she didn’t think she was forever done with music; she simply needed to find a way back into it that represented her own evolving interests. It happened by accident. The day before the U.S.-Canada border closed due to Covid-19 restrictions in March 2020, she and her partner crossed back into his home country, bound for British Columbia. She’d visited once before, though the view had been obstructed by wildfire smoke. She now found herself in a wonderland.

“A lot of movies are shot in B.C., so I feel like I had seen this place, but I didn’t know that it was real,” Pine says, smiling. When she was a suburban kid, she always raved about the backpacking portion of summer camp. That was now her backyard on a much grander scale. “Where I’m at would have been such a dream to the child me.”

What’s more, the house was an unexpected instrumental playground. Pine had her viola, of course, and her partner also had his violin. His sister is a cellist, so there was one of those around, too. And his parents are bluegrass enthusiasts who happened to have a double bass on hand; she laughs as she spins her camera to show it to me, like a magic talisman. She began experimenting with these other instruments and with recording herself, an expert suddenly finding unknown ways forward. She noticed new things—the musical texture of her bow hairs touching the strings when her microphone was “hot,” the incidental sounds of her bow shaking against the cello as she tried to learn.

“I realized those sounds were actually more interesting to me than some super pure note I could play really well had I been practicing a lot,” she says. “These were things I’d never pay attention to or something I shouldn’t even be playing when I was studying classical music. It’s such a different mindset of approaching music. Instead of ‘I’ve got to get it right,’ it’s more like, ‘What can happen?’”

During the early days of the pandemic, Pine helped her partner’s family build a little 10-by-10 cabin on their land. It is intentionally spare and simple, with a lofted bed, a space heater, and a desk comprising a keyboard stand and a piece of plywood. (At one point, Pine sent me a video of her trudging through the snow to reach the A-frame; even after she described the place, I was still struck by how monastic the inside seemed.) She made Fables by recording herself outdoors, responding to the scenes and sounds around her, and in that little room. Each track on Fables feels like an impression of a moment, memorialized through one or four minutes of strings and occasional electronics. In fact, Pine will often journal as she listens to her playback, waiting until a track title makes itself apparent before she saves and closes the file.

Photo: Nelson Moneo

There is, for instance, “A Flickering Light,” where the aforementioned sound of the bow’s hair against the strings conjured that title image for Pine. Or there’s “Bare,” whose twisting and turning melody feels slightly haunted, like the leafless branches of deciduous trees rubbing together in winter. “Never Been Here Before” indeed feels like a smile and a gasp upon seeing something new, upon being awestruck by what the world can offer. But those titles don’t seem limiting or prescriptive, either—these 15 tracks are scores for your own scenes, too. I’ve listened to Fables at my desk in snowstorms and on long runs in the Colorado winter; the pieces seem pliable, their shapes morphing to the settings.

Pine took the photograph on the cover of Fables during a bad day. She needed to reset her mood, so she tramped through the winter woods with her camera. Her mindset began to shift when she started looking through the viewfinder, noticing little bits of beauty she’d overlooked. She liked the way the light scattered through the trees, with the shadows casting long lines across unbroken snow. It remains one of her favorite photos ever, an unexpected way of seeing the world. Her music is a lot like that, but for listening.

“It’s pretty easy with photography to tap into a sense of awe. I like getting up close to things, so you can see the way the light reflects off the lens and creates all these shapes, these prisms,” she says. “The line to music is mostly just in noticing, in paying attention and being really present. When you’re really present, that’s when things can happen.”

Photo: Nelson Moneo