Emily Lutz, a senior at Memorial High School in Madison, has never been able to resist the pull of the creative arts. When she was in third grade a teacher gave her a $3.00 plastic recorder, and this gift led to six years study of recorder with Lisette Kielson.  When she gets a chance, she travels to Britain to play recorder with Paul Baker, a British Tudor musician. One memorable day, Emily and Paul entertained a queue of canal boats waiting to go through a lock near Birmingham by playing violin and hurdy-gurdy duets from the roof of their own boat.

Entranced from a young age by the soaring voice of the violin, Emily has also studied violin with Janet Chisholm.  Emily joined the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras six years ago and has been a member of Youth Orchestra for the past three years. Although she can play Mozart or Bach, she is much more strongly drawn to Romantic pieces, such as those by Tchaikovsky or Paganini, and was once given an award for her “gypsy soul.”  Whenever she thinks she isn’t being observed, she retires to the bathroom and plays Celtic jigs and reelsat lightning speed. She hopes one day to play Celtic music at the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland.

            It would be difficult to say whether Emily is more dedicated to music or to art. Certainly, doodling has kept her sane through four years of high school, and she has the spiral notebooks full of cat people and languishing vampires to prove it. She has crammed art into her schedule whenever she could manage. In the end, however, she probably learned most from poring over art history books, sketching in art museums, freezing videos so she could draw portraits of her favorite leading men, and watching artist Molly Bang at work.  Emily was impressed by the fact that Molly threw out otherwise perfect paintings because the painted rat didn’t look “ratty” enough.  Lately she has begun to move away from the pencil and toward the pixel, spending hours on Flash animations done for Geof Herman, her art teacher at Memorial, and endlessly remodeling and redressing her Spanish-speaking avatar in the online virtual world Second Life.