Early Years
As the daughter of Professor Dr. Edwin L. Carstensen, a biomedical engineer in University of Rochester, NY, Dee was influenced by her father and his musical talent on piano and clarinet. Dee and her four siblings began to take music lessons, with Dee first playing piano.
At the age of eight, Carstensen was selected as one of five children tapped by the Eastman School of Music's experimental program to study harp with a classical harpist from the New York Philharmonic. Although the program only lasted one year, Dee studied the harp for nine. She also developed an interest in singing and songwriting, which eventually caused her to move from the conservatory path to a career as a singer-songwriter.
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