Ask Sarah Buzalewski if she’s excited, and she may ask you “what about?” Indeed, the second-year master’s student in violin performance has much to tout. In addition to her on-campus studies at the University of Tennessee, she is involved with three student-teaching programs, she founded a gig management service while an undergraduate at Penn State University, and she recently started an internship at the highly prestigious arts organization Silkroad.
Her vigorous pursuit of music as a passion was early and voracious. In her elementary school, the music program started teaching strings in the third grade. But it was every day in the second grade that Sarah told her music instructor she couldn’t wait to start learning the violin. And yet, this devotion was indicative of a core part of her that, she argues, started even earlier.
“Music has always been a part of me,” she said. “I was adopted, and it’s in my records that my biological parents were musicians as well. So it’s part of my identity as a Korean-American violinist, musician, and teacher.”
That existing passion took on a whole new meaning when additional hardship struck Sarah during high school. Both of her parents were diagnosed with cancer during that time. The violin, and music in general, became a sort of refuge for her, she says, especially after her father passed away in the summer of 2020.
“I ran to music because it was my way of expressing emotions I didn’t know how to verbalize. It was my creative outlet.”
Soon afterward, she was applying to graduate schools, nearing completion of her bachelor’s degree in music performance at Penn State University. It was a meeting with University of Tennessee Professor of Violin Miroslav Hristov that would bring these elements of her musical passion together. Not only did he see her potential and skill as a violinist, but he also encouraged her to pursue music education.
“I always wanted to teach and be a professor,” she says, “but I never thought about teaching a class here. Then in January of last year, Dr. Hristov told me about this great opportunity to teach in one of the schools here in the community. And I thought this would be a really great opportunity.”
“You can sense when someone has a gift in working with young people and passing on knowledge to them in a way that is so accessible and natural,” Hristov said. “She has a wonderful personality that makes her the ideal music teacher in the classroom, and this is in addition to her talent as a violinist.”
Sarah is now involved in not one, nor two, but three strings teaching roles, including Blue Grass Elementary School in Knoxville, the UTK String Project on campus, and a partnership afterschool program between the University of Tennessee and YMCA at Sarah Moore Green Elementary School in Knoxville.
“The intersection between music performance and music education is really important,” she said. “My love for music and the violin drew me to having a passion for teaching others and having an impact as an educator, touching the lives of a lot of students like me.”
This path has led Sarah to another exciting opportunity – an education programs internship with Silkroad. Originally conceived by world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the organization is named for the historic Silk Road, a network of trade routes used between China and the West for about 1,500 years. That globalization serves as the working ethos of the organization, which began as the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble, and has expanded to include social impact initiatives and educational partnerships. Sarah is working on the education team on a variety of initiatives, including the American Railroad Project, which uses multiple art forms – including new music commissions, a documentary series, and visual art installations – to illuminate the impact of immigrant communities on the creation of the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad.
“They teach us all of the really important skills related to running a non-profit organization, such as management, marketing, social media, and development. I was really drawn to that,” she said. “I want to make education accessible, high-quality, and diverse, especially with different music and different cultures.”
Sarah summed up the common thread connecting these webs of experience quite succinctly: “A common love for music also brings about a common compassion. Music makes us kinder.”
