Leila Josefowicz: The Genius Grant Went to an Advocate
In 2008 the MacArthur Foundation gave one of its fellowships — the award the American press insists on calling the genius grant — to a thirty-year-old violinist. The citation did not praise her tone, her technique or her interpretations of the standard repertoire. It recognised her advocacy of new contemporary works for the violin. Leila Josefowicz had built a career on music that did not exist until composers wrote it for her, and an institution devoted to identifying unusual minds decided that was the notable thing about her.
A Scientist's Household
Josefowicz was born on 20 October 1977 in Mississauga, Ontario. Her father, Jack, is a physicist; her mother, Wendy, is a biologist. She has a brother, Steven. The family's approach to her education is telling: valuing a well-rounded upbringing, her parents believed that both she and Steven should remain in the public school system — a deliberate refusal of the hothouse, from parents who plainly understood what specialised training does to a childhood.
She began the violin at three and a half by the Suzuki method, which requires a parent to participate in every lesson and practice session. Formal lessons started at five with Idel Low, and at seven she began studying with Robert Lipsett at the Colburn School.
Curtis at Thirteen
At thirteen she entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she worked with a remarkable concentration of twentieth-century violin pedagogy: Jaime Laredo, Jascha Brodsky, Felix Galimir and Joseph Gingold. Brodsky and Galimir in particular were living transmission lines to the European chamber tradition; Gingold trained a generation of American soloists.
She completed a bachelor of music degree and her high school diploma simultaneously, the latter through the Julia R. Masterman School — finishing secondary education and a conservatory degree at the same time, in a city where she had arrived as a child.
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In 1994 Josefowicz made her Carnegie Hall debut, still a teenager, playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. She signed an exclusive contract with Philips Classics the same year and received an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Her early recordings for the label included the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos.
This is, precisely, the template. A teenage soloist, the two most bankable Romantic concertos, a major label, Carnegie Hall, a distinguished conductor. Nothing about that trajectory required her to change anything for the following forty years; a great many violinists have made entire careers by not changing it.
She changed it. Josefowicz became the leading interpreter of new violin music of her generation, and she did so by attaching herself to living composers rather than to dead ones. She has recorded for Warner Classics, Deutsche Grammophon and Nonesuch — the last a label defined by contemporary repertoire.
The Composers Who Write for Her
Her reputation rests on works that were written because she existed. She is acclaimed for championing new compositions by John Adams, Oliver Knussen, Thomas Adès and Luca Francesconi. Steven Mackey and Colin Matthews have both written concertos that she premiered.
Three Premieres
Three premieres define the record. In the 2008–09 season she gave the world premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen's Violin Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic — a work that went on to win Salonen the Grawemeyer Award, the most significant prize in composition. In 2014 she premiered Francesconi's *Duende*. In 2015 she gave the world premiere of John Adams's *Scheherazade.2* with the New York Philharmonic.
The Salonen is the load-bearing case. A concerto's first performance largely determines whether it enters the repertoire or disappears; a premiere that is merely competent can bury a piece for a decade. Salonen's concerto did not disappear — it won the Grawemeyer and became one of the most performed violin concertos written this century. Josefowicz played it first.
Why Leila Is Called a Genius
She is the rare figure here for whom the word has an institutional basis: the MacArthur Fellowship of 2008 is popularly the genius grant, and she holds one. But it is worth being exact about what the foundation actually recognised, because it was not virtuosity. It was advocacy of new contemporary works for the violin.
The faculty involved is a specific and undervalued kind of musical intelligence: the ability to make sense of a score with no performance tradition behind it. When Josefowicz learns a Salonen or an Adams concerto, there is no recording to consult, no received wisdom about tempo, no consensus on which passages are the emotional centre. Every interpretive decision has to be reasoned out from the notation and from conversation with a living composer, and the result establishes how everyone afterward will hear the piece.
The honest counter-case is that no critic, composer or conductor is on record calling her a genius in those words; the claim rests on the colloquial nickname of an award rather than anyone's stated assessment. Her distinction is also inseparable from an underlying physical craft — contemporary concertos are frequently more difficult than Romantic ones, and none of her interpretive intelligence would matter without the hands to execute it. Her genius, such as it is, is a genius of allegiance — she bet her career on music that had not yet proved itself, and enough of it proved itself.
Legacy
The recognitions arrived in the order that tells the story: an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994 for a promising young soloist, a United States Artists Cummings Fellowship in 2007, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, and finally, in 2018, the Avery Fisher Prize itself — the American establishment's highest honour for an instrumentalist, given twenty-four years after the career grant that started her.
Josefowicz was formerly married to the conductor Kristjan Järvi and has one son. Her lasting importance is measured not in her own discography but in other people's catalogues: a body of violin concertos written in the past twenty years that exist, in part, because a violinist who could have spent her life on Tchaikovsky decided she would rather find out what came next.
