A Talent for Improv

Catherine Marie Charlton fashioned her own engineering degree to support a career in music.

For Catherine Marie Charlton, music and engineering are two gods in one pantheon. Graduating in 1995 with a self-designed major in engineering acoustics and a minor in music, she says with a laugh, “On graduation day, I didn’t know who to go to. The chairman of the music department gave me my engineering diploma.” While at Cornell, she was named a Laureate of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, an award given each year to no more than five members nationwide who excel in areas outside of engineering. Charlton used the grant money for a down payment on a Steinway grand piano. 

She studied classical piano from the age of eight, practicing so incessantly her parents often asked her to stop. An opportunity to work at NASA, however, during her junior year in high school moved her to apply to Cornell engineering. “Plus,” she explains, “everyone in my family is a scientist.”

Although she enjoyed her engineering courses, Charlton says her goal was not a career in engineering. “I just really liked math and problem-solving. My favorite class was Systems Dynamics.”

To design her own major, she worked with Professors Leigh Phoenix and Wolfgang Sachse in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, under the rubric of the College Program (now called the Independent Major). “I wanted to study as much music as possible. I looked through the catalog for classes in acoustics and audio engineering.”

Charlton says that for her there is no particular connection between engineering and music. “I don’t improvise with my mind. All my music comes from an emotional and kinesthetic place. The way I create music is not the same way that I solve problems. That said, when I was at Cornell immersed in engineering studies, I wrote a lot of math-inspired pieces.” The piece “Fuzzy Boundaries,” for example, commissioned in 1995 for the 30th anniversary of the mathematical concept Fuzzy Logic, has been featured at international math symposia in Croatia and Brazil.

Her engineering degree has helped her tremendously, she believes, to attain what later became her goal: a career as a professional musician. “Right out of college,” says Charlton, “I was able to get an amazing job in statistical analysis and technology management at First USA Bank.” Starting out on firm financial footing enabled her to buy a house and a car and to pay off the balance on her piano.

She worked at First USA for five years, teaching piano in the evenings. Getting chosen by her employer for an expenses-paid master’s program in technology management, however, was the turning point in her career path. “After one semester of working full-time, teaching 10 piano students per week, going to grad school, and preparing for concerts, I was exhausted. I went to visit my brother in California and shared a new recording with him. He was particularly moved by the overwhelming emotion in the piece ‘Winter Mist,’ and said ‘If you know the answer already, why haven’t you acted on it?’ I quit the master’s program that week and quit my job a year later.”

She increased her teaching load, and between grants, concerts, and sales of her recordings, Charlton has been supporting herself as a musician since 2000. Her four albums are broadcast on traditional, Internet, and cable radio around the world; her two most recent rose to the top of the worldwide instrumental music charts, including “River Dawn,” which debuted at No. 3, higher than new releases from Grammy winners Kitaro and George Winston. (For more information, see her web site: www.catherinemariecharlton.com.)

Last spring Charlton brought her trio home to the Ezra Cornell Memorial Room in Willard Straight Hall on the Cornell campus as the 2006 selection for the Lauren Pickard Emerging Artist Series. On April 10—a lovely spring evening in Ithaca—Charlton played in the same room and on the same piano where she had played her first recital 14 years before. As the sky slowly darkened in the huge casement windows, Charlton and her bandmates, flutist/saxophonist Elliot Levin and drummer J. Jody Janetta, performed jazz standards, original pieces, and improvisations, several of the latter based on descriptive phrases collected from the audience. As Charlton played, she danced on her bench, swaying and stamping her feet. Turning around with a huge smile, she observed: “It’s always fun to see where a piece is going to go.”

One could say the same of an engineering degree.

—Melanie Bush