These 3 String Players Founded Their Own Labels to Support Creative Freedom

THESE 3 STRING PLAYERS FOUNDED THEIR OWN LABELS TO SUPPORT CREATIVE FREEDOM
By Jeff Kaliss | From the January-February 2021 issue of Strings magazine

When Lara St. John sought a moniker for her own record label in 1999, she chose Ancalagon, to memorialize her recently deceased pet iguana, whose name in turn had been taken from a formidable creature in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Her love for reptiles harkened back to her upbringing as a violin prodigy in Ontario, Canada, where her mother rewarded her with a plastic dinosaur every time she topped a competition. “[The dinosaurs] made me practice,” she recounts by phone from her current home in New York City.

Bringing an artist-run classical label into the world in 1999 perhaps cast St. John in a role similar to that of Daenerys Targaryen, the confident and courageous princess of dragons in Game of Thrones. “No solo classical artist had done it,” St. John claims. “But I just wanted to be able to have control over whatever I put out there: what I recorded, how I put it out there visually, and that sort of stuff.” 

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