Yesterday’s homework assignment to create a family tree for my Cada Dia Spanish class led me to investigate the people in my family. As I’ve written before, I come from a very large family — I am the oldest of five children, my mother was also the oldest of five children in her family, and my father had five brothers and two sisters, meaning that there were eight children in his family. With seven uncles and four aunts (plus their spouses), I have 32 first cousins, some of whom I only learned their first names yesterday when I texted my cousin Mary.

I also asked Mary to compile a list of the musicians in our family. While we can’t hold a candle to the Bach family (which had 57 musicians!) we still have a substantial number of family members who make a living in music.

In my immediate family, my sister Margo received a degree in piano and serves as rehearsal pianist for her church choir. My sister Doris is a singer, songwriter and keyboardist in The Braeded Chord, an acoustic folk music duo. And if you haven’t caught on by now, I am an organist. All three of us have perfect pitch, which you may consider a blessing or a curse!

My cousin Mary is a busy pianist/accompanist in the Los Angeles area, and teaches piano as an adjunct faculty member of California State University at Dominguez Hills. She and I studied music together at the University of Southern California and were in the same keyboard harmony class taught by Hawaii’s legendary Emmett Yoshioka!

You might remember that the four of us put together this fun video during a family reunion six years ago, the Galop-Marche by Albert Lavignac for four pianists, eight hands:

Other musical members of my family include first cousin Leon Siu Wai Tong, an internationally-renowned choral conductor, adjudicator and festival advisor and organizer. He served as the Head of Music Department at St. Stephen’s College for twenty-nine years, the Associate Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Hong Kong Children’s Choir for seventeen years. He is the President of the Hong Kong Treble Choirs’ Association since its establishment in 1997 and the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Hong Kong Treble Choir since 2000. He is the advisor of a series of Hong Kong secondary school textbooks Music Journey which was first published in 2000 and he had edited 18 textbooks for both secondary and primary schools in 2006.

Callum Au, the son of my first cousin, Gordon Au, is a British composer, arranger, orchestrator, and trombonist. He writes music across a wide range of genres, with a particular passion for big band and large jazz ensemble music. He is highly regarded for his stylistic awareness and versatility, and has worked with some of the world’s biggest artists, including Quincy Jones, Michael Bublé, and the Metropole Orkest. Over the past fifteen years, Callum has established himself as one of the busiest arrangers and orchestrators in Europe. He has had the privilege of writing music for many international artists, including Quincy Jones, Jamie Cullum, Randy Brecker, and ensembles including the SWR Big Band, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonia. In 2019, he was commissioned to arrange the big band songs in the Hollywood movie adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Cats’. More recently, he had the pleasure of writing two new arrangements for Michael Bublé’s album ‘Higher’, and conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra in a special episode of ‘Sunday Night Is Music Night’ for BBC Radio 2.

Here’s a video of Callum’s trombone playing:

Here’s Callum’s arrangement of the Simon and Garfunkel song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at the BBC Proms.

My nephew Daniel Au, youngest child of my brother Jim, is a baritone, an accomplished pianist, and he also composes music. Earlier this month he gave his junior recital at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Here is a short clip from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

In addition to the family musicians I’ve described above, there is keyboardist Victor Au, who plays in a church in Hong Kong; bassoonist Lois Lai-Yee Au, daughter of my cousin George, plays in London, UK; guitarist Jeff Ewing, son of my sister Margo; his son, Trevor Ewing, who is a drummer and singer. Jeff’s wife, Andrea, plays piano, and his daughter is a singer. Then, of course there are the in-laws: Kay Stephen Au (wife of Callum Au) who is a violinist and violist in London; and last but not least (!) — Carl Crosier, my late husband, was a pianist, harpsichordist, countertenor soloist and conductor.

My first cousin, John Au, retired as a cardiologist and became a violin maker! Here’s what he says about himself: I am a violin maker, amateur violinist and a member of the British Violin Making Association. I have had a life-long obsession with the violin and its heavenly sound. I started making my first violin 20 years ago at the Cambridge Violin Makers workshop. When I retired from heart surgery I attended the Chapel Violins workshop at Newark to learn the craft at a higher level. In the run up to the finals of the BBC Young Musicians 2016 Sheku Kanneh-Mason played a cello made at Chapel Violins. My passion is to make beautiful sounding, aesthetically desirable and affordable violins that aspire to the performance of expensive old instruments.

You can hear audio samples of the sounds of these beautiful instruments on John’s website, https://www.aurumviolins.com/handmade-violins. Once you open the link, click the picture of the violin to hear what it sounds like.

To be honest, I have met very few of these family members yet we all share the same musical genes!