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.
Read more about this topic: Dee Carstensen
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“The real stumbling-block of totalitarian régimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men’s inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)