by Marc Shapiro
When Irene Sazer (BM ’81, Violin) was diagnosed with breast cancer during the pandemic, it was an isolating experience, but the concept of mycorrhiza (the symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi) greatly comforted her.
“I would think about the people in my life and I would imagine those connections from my body to their body—our energetic and emotional connection,” she says.
So when Sazer and longtime friend Kate Stenberg, a chamber music maestro and violinist, started a multimedia collective to shine a light on climate change, The Mycos Project was an appropriate and poignant name.
“The idea is that we’re all in this together, every organism, every cell, every being, every tree,” Sazer, who lives in Berkeley, California, says. “We’re all very interconnected.”
The Mycos Project includes artists, musicians, educators, and scientists who are working to spread awareness about climate change through the arts, ecological sciences, and Indigenous practice.
Sazer’s violin playing has graced performances and recordings by Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Björk, and Primus, and the stages of the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. In The Mycos Project, her playing amplifies others’ voices in a new context.
When Irene Sazer (BM ’81, Violin) was diagnosed with breast cancer during the pandemic, it was an isolating experience, but the concept of mycorrhiza (the symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi) greatly comforted her.
“I would think about the people in my life and I would imagine those connections from my body to their body—our energetic and emotional connection,” she says.
So when Sazer and longtime friend Kate Stenberg, a chamber music maestro and violinist, started a multimedia collective to shine a light on climate change, The Mycos Project was an appropriate and poignant name.
“The idea is that we’re all in this together, every organism, every cell, every being, every tree,” Sazer, who lives in Berkeley, California, says. “We’re all very interconnected.”
The Mycos Project includes artists, musicians, educators, and scientists who are working to spread awareness about climate change through the arts, ecological sciences, and Indigenous practice.
Sazer’s violin playing has graced performances and recordings by Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Björk, and Primus, and the stages of the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. In The Mycos Project, her playing amplifies others’ voices in a new context.
In the project’s first film, Not Apart, Together, released via YouTube in 2022, Sazer and Stenberg’s music serves as the backdrop for photos and videos of sea birds, flowers, tall grass, and twisted tree bark. An Indigenous educator/activist sings a “hummingbird song” with accompaniment from Sazer and Stenberg and two deforestation researchers discuss their work in the 28-minute film. It both inspires awe in the world’s natural beauty and emphasizes the need to protect it from destruction.
“It’s really hard to be a human being right now, knowing what’s going on in the environment,” Sazer says.
The eclectic violinist traces her musical philosophy back to Peabody—she says she learned as much from her cohorts as she did her violin teacher, Charlie Libove. She and her fellow students would hang out and listen to all kinds of music on vinyl, from Mahler to Coltrane and Stockhausen to Billie Holiday.
“That absolutely changed my world and helped me discover my path,” she says. “I realized I needed to become an improviser to be the kind of musician I want to be, which really led me to being a composer.”
She sees the two skills on thesame spectrum—composing asslow improvising and improvisingas fast composing.
In the mid-1980s, Sazer came into her own as a writer and arranger as a founding member of the Turtle Island String Quartet, a genre-defying group that fuses classical and contemporary music. She left that group and took her refined skills to form the Irene Sazer Band, which culminated in the recording of the album First Things First in 1998. (The album wasn’t released until 2018.)
In 2010, Sazer started the Real Vocal String Quartet, another stylistically eclectic chamber ensemble that fused classical, jazz, and rock influences with the roots music of West Africa, Brazil, and rural America, and had its members singing as well. Just before the pandemic, the quartet released Culture Kin, an album made in collaboration with international musicians from eight of San Francisco’s sister cities, many of whom attended and performed with the group at the album’s 2019 release concert.
Throughout her career, which has also included stints as a sub for the San Francisco Symphony and 16 years running music and arts camps, Sazer has supported herself through teaching. Outside of music, she is a prolific artist who draws and paints pieces that have as much movement, rhythm, and detail as her music.
As for her latest endeavor, The Mycos Project is raising funds for its second film, which will focus on coral reefs and involve colleagues and friends in Hawaii. She hopes to continue expanding the project for more cross-cultural collaborations.
“It’s really a commitment to community—community locally, community globally,” Sazer says. “We don’t feel like we’re doing a big huge thing here. We feel like we’re doing what we can do— we can use our art to do our little part.”
