Caitlin Tully

Caitlin Tully

Most college students spend their spare time nursing hangovers, taking extended coffee breaks or working behind a bar to earn extra beer money. But 18-year-old Caitlin Tully, a full-time student at Princeton University, takes lessons with one of the greatest violinists alive.

Tully started learning with Itzhak Perlman after teachers at the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, where she spent a couple of summers during her early teens, noticed that there was something special about her playing. 'I worked with Dorothy DeLay in Aspen for a few summers and took some classes with Pinchas Zukerman,' she says casually. 'Then I started with Perlman when I was 14.'

The relationship continued and now Tully, who has just started her first year at Princeton, will have to fit in trips to New York around her classes and studies. And that's not to mention the professional concert engagements she's already got booked for the coming year, including dates with the Houston Symphony Orchestra and at the Louvre in Paris: 'In 2005 I did about 30 concerts. I've had to pull back a bit last year but this year I hope to do more.'

But it was always clear to Tully, who grew up in Vancouver but has been a US citizen for the last four years, that she did not want to spend her time at university focusing exclusively on music. 'I felt that learning about other things would make me a better musician, because music is about expressing what you think about things,' she says. 'I think young people today are more aware that how you think about things affects how you play a piece of music. I want to connect with a wide audience and to do that you have to be in touch with a broad range of experiences.' Even when she graduates from Princeton, Tully does not intend to take the conventional route of a postgraduate music course: 'I hope I'll be performing enough that I won't have time!'

I don't want it to be about my age - I want it to be about quality.'

This single-minded determination has stayed with Tully since she first took up the violin at the age of four after hearing it on the radio - despite reservations from her parents. 'I heard the violin on the radio when I was three. It was something like a Frank Sinatra record with a singer and then sweeping violins in the background. I was very attracted by the sound so I asked my parents for a violin for Christmas, and they were quite taken aback. I can't sing so they had just assumed I wasn't musical.'

Tully started taking lessons on a hired instrument and made rapid progress. Her first teachers were Lawrie Hill and Andrew Dawes, but she soon started attending the Aspen Festival and working with Dorothy DeLay and Pinchas Zukerman, going on to win the Aspen Concerto Competition aged 13. She was quickly snapped up by management agency IMG Artists, and a performing career beckoned.

But unlike many talented young violinists, who are thrust into the spotlight and labelled as child prodigies as soon as they show promise, Tully was keen to bide her time. 'I was very careful, and fortunately my management were also very careful, not to do too many concerts too young. I'm still learning a lot. Obviously being a violinist is what I want to do with my life but I still feel I'm on the young side. I'd rather wait and do things exactly at the moment I'm ready to do them. I don't want it to be about my age - I want it to be about quality.'

She has already achieved much of that quality, having won prizes including a Yamaha Horizon Award and CBC's Westcoast Spotlight Award and performed with orchestras like the Pittsburgh Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Toronto Symphony. But Tully is determined not to make the transition to being a full-time violinist until she is ready, and remains firmly committed to her studies at Princeton.

'Yo-Yo Ma went to Harvard and did math,' she points out. 'It's a little bit like having two lives at the same time. But the most important thing is the violin. It's pretty clear-cut.'

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