Love Quote by Lara St. John

There is something almost mischievous in how Lara St. John punctures the romance of “masterpieces” with a shrugging “basically.” It’s a demystification move, but not a deflationary one. She’s giving listeners and students permission to stop treating beloved repertoire like it descended from a mountaintop, untouchable and ineffable. Under the varnish of genius: scales, arpeggios, patterns. The building blocks you drill when nobody’s watching.

The intent reads as pedagogical triage. Classical music culture often sells transcendence while hiding the labor that manufactures it. By naming the mechanics, St. John drags the conversation back to craft: repetition, fingerings, harmonic scaffolding, the muscle memory behind “emotion.” That’s not reducing art to exercises; it’s revealing how the expressive is engineered. A fast run that feels like pure adrenaline? It’s often an arpeggio with good timing and a convincing accent map.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to gatekeeping. If the canon is made of learnable materials, then access expands: the student who thinks they “don’t have it” is being told they can build it. At the same time, she’s challenging the audience’s fetish for mystery. Loving a piece doesn’t require pretending it’s magic. You can adore the cathedral and still understand the bricks.

Context matters: St. John, as a high-profile violinist with a reputation for directness, is speaking from inside an institution that prizes reverence. Her line insists that intimacy with the classics comes not from awe, but from anatomy.