A Successful DIY Touring Career For Composer/Cellist Zoë Keating

Keating: “You have to give yourself permission to play your own music. It doesn’t seem valid somehow; it doesn’t seem like real music. It’s like, ‘Well, I’m just playing. I’m making up this stuff.’ And I had a really long period of that, of feeling like there were all these different buckets. There was the music that I would play that was classical–the stuff that I was learning, or that I was being judged on, or graded for. Then there was music that I listened to, which was mostly popular music, that I would sometimes try and work out on the cello. And then there was the music that I would improvise or that was just my own. And they were all very separate.”