Heimberg Audio Clip and Transcript

Interviewer: Basya Petnick.

BP: So some of the things we’re going to look at today are elements in your childhood that led into your career in music.

TH: Well, this feeling, this intense sense of wanting to be connected to my father who had passed away was associated with the violin. And I said all along I wanted to be a violinist. I didn’t really know what it meant, I didn’t know how you did it, but I wanted to be a violinist. And my mother—to the extent that we looked for teachers and my family paid for the lessons—did not discourage that. My brother Jim remembers hearing a nighttime conversation between my parents where my dad proposed that we stop the violin lessons because you can see there’s not much progress happening, you can hear it doesn’t sound very good. It’s the age that was raised on the young Russo-Jewish virtuosi.

BP: So, if you weren’t instantly a child prodigy …

TH: Yeah. And my mom said, “No, as long as he wants to do it, we're going to do it.”

BP: Good for her.

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