🎻 Blair student feature: Meet violin performance major Arisa Okamoto

📣 Arisa Okamoto is a rising second year student at Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music. Originally from Japan, she and her family moved to Wisconsin three years ago. Her violin, which she calls “Sunshine,” has a rich history that now lives on through her.
Arisa shares the story behind her violin:
I went to a violin shop near Chicago just before my Blair audition, and from the first note I played, I immediately fell in love. It has a sweet but a little bit melancholy tone. I just love it! It was made around 1910 in Italy by a violin maker named Vincenzo Sannino.
I asked the violin shop where they had gotten the instrument and they connected me with a store in Germany, where I learned that one of the previous owners was a German professor who played this violin for many, many years, until he retired when he was 90 years old.
Learning about the previous owners and the history of the violin is amazing. I refer to it as Sunshine because I'm always looking to the future, but it's complicated, as this violin has been around for more than 100 years. Although I don’t know every single person who has owned this violin, I feel connected to each of them.
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The Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music offers a world class music education, exclusively for undergraduates, at a top academic university. With a student to faculty ratio of 4:1, Blair's areas of study include strings, woodwinds, brass, voice, piano/keyboards, jazz studies, percussion, composition, music education, and more. Vanderbilt is located in Nashville, Tennessee.
Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music
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