Credit: Gary Adams
Kivie Cahn-Lipman
cellist, gambist, similar-instruments-ist
While all the other kids were learning addition in first grade, Kivie Cahn-Lipman was running around the classroom singing that he was a yeti. His kindly teacher said he was very musical, so Kivie was allowed his choice of instruments along with the therapy. He told his parents he wanted to play the drums, so they asked him what instrument he REALLY wanted to play. "The tuba," he replied, and they handed him a violin. The violin teacher was all "you can't touch the violin until you've learned to respect the violin," but Kivie picked his nose and wiped it on the violin, and then that teacher went away and Kivie's parents handed him a cello. And when he picked his nose and wiped it on the cello, the new teacher was like "ewww gross don't do that, here's a tissue, clean that up and let's play music," and that seemed like a good idea.
Eventually Kivie went to Oberlin and then Juilliard, and after awhile each school gave him a fancy document written in Latin, which hopefully indicates that he graduated. He finished up his education at the University of Cincinnati, and he's a doctor now. Not that kind of doctor. Kivie is the founding cellist of the International Contemporary Ensemble (and please don't abbreviate it to “ICE” anymore), and he still tours all over the world performing with them. He served on the faculties of Smith College and Mount Holyoke College from 2005–2012 and The College of New Jersey from 2015-2017, and he’s now an Assistant Professor of Cello at Youngstown State University.
Kivie also plays the viola da gamba for some reason, and he co-founded and performs/records with viol consorts LeStrange and Science Ficta, as well as Scottish early-music ensemble Makaris. He founded the baroque string band ACRONYM because he found a bunch of seventeenth-century music in old manuscripts and wanted to play it with his friends; they've got ten CDs of modern premieres released and more on the way. Kivie's 2014 solo recording of J.S. Bach's cello suites got a nice blurb in a trade publication called The Strad, but he's way more proud of the warm personal letter praising the disc which he received from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Kivie's mom also claims to like the recording, although she constantly opines that some of the tempos are too fast. You can find it on sale wherever you can still find music on sale, and the discs make great coasters.
Also, a recent review in the New York Times noted that Kivie's "long, flowing hair often covered his face as he played." Seriously, the New York Times printed that. Kivie mostly stopped picking his nose in 1985.