ritsu katsumata | electric violinist | composer | multimedia artist

about

My life as a musician began as a classical violinist. I enjoyed a minor-league child prodigy career, winning competitions and performing since age 10, and burning out by age 20.

Ten years later, I purchased my first electric violin, and plugged into a Marshall stack. I was thrilled to be able to make sounds that I had never heard before. My first performance with this new sound was in the Jimi Hendrix Guitar Competition at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival. This began my journey from Carnegie Hall to CBGB's.

After gigging in nightclubs and festivals with a rock-based power trio for a few years, I purchased and learned how to use the Echoplex, a digital loop sequencer. This gave me the freedom to perform solo, and I began to compose music with it.

Currently, I live and work in Central Pennsylvania with my photographer husband Stafford Smith (most of the photos in this web site are his) and our two daughters. I write, perform and score music for videos, films and choreography for my artist friends, while making a living as a multimedia designer for Bucknell University.

By freely cross-breeding genres and styles, I make soundscapes with references to baroque, classical, pop-rock and the post-modern with equal abandon, which often offend listeners. (For a sampling of exactly how, see comments on my YouTube postings...) In this web site, I hope to share how expressive the violin can be– lyrical and sweet, aggressive and stark, light and dark; bold and beautiful– and hope to find more who, like me, are inspired by it.

–Ritsu