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:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Why wont they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, cant they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping—rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas—But, goodness, why need they do it?”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)