Meet Our Musicians: Paul Herman, Violin

For most of my adult life, I have been a part-time violinist playing in local orchestras with occasional opportunities for string quartet work, pit orchestra work for operas and oratorios and musicals, and some recording sessions. I don’t teach private lessons because I lack the background in music pedagogy.

I began playing violin at the age of 10 with group lessons in public-school in Washington, DC and started private lessons two years later. I had the good fortune to attend the Oberlin College of Arts and Sciences, not the Music Conservatory, although I took lessons from Conservatory professors and played in the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra for three years, including a tour of seven cities in the Northeast in the Spring of 1964 where we played in such venues as Carnegie Hall, New York, and Severance Hall in Cleveland. I graduated from Oberlin in 1967 with a B.S. degree in French followed by another year at Oberlin culminating in a Master of Arts in Teaching in 1968.

After a few years of public-school teaching, I enrolled in several computer courses at the University of Maryland which led to a career in Information Technology.  For most of the last 50 years, I have split my time as a computer nerd by day and violinist in the evenings.  I had the good fortune to retire in 2011 after 25 years in the Information Technology Department of Anne Arundel County Government. That has given me more time to travel with my wife, to visit family (which includes 10 grandchildren) in California, Massachusetts, and Switzerland, and to practice the orchestra music before we convene for rehearsals.

I have played in the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra for more than 40 years and the Mid-Atlantic Symphony for more than 20 years. I look forward to the day when this pandemic is behind us and we can perform in front of our loyal audiences again. In the meantime, I wish good health to everyone in the Mid-Atlantic Symphony community.