KIVIE CAHN-LIPMAN, VIOLA DA GAMBA & LIRONE
While all the other kids were learning addition in first grade, Kivie Cahn-Lipman was running around the classroom singing that he was a yeti. His kindly teacher said he was very musical, so Kivie was allowed his choice of instruments along with the therapy. He told his parents he wanted to play the drums, so they asked him what instrument he REALLY wanted to play. "The tuba," he replied, and they handed him a violin. The violin teacher was all "you can't touch the violin until you've learned to respect the violin," but in their third lesson Kivie picked his nose and wiped it on the violin, and then that teacher went away and Kivie's parents gave him a cello. And when he picked his nose and wiped it on the cello, the new teacher was like "ewww gross don't do that, here's a tissue, clean that up and let's play music," and that seemed like a good idea.
Eventually Kivie went to Oberlin and then Juilliard, and after awhile each school gave him a fancy document written in Latin that hopefully indicates that he graduated. He finished up his education at the University of Cincinnati, and he's a doctor now. Not that kind of doctor. Since its foundation in 2001, Kivie has been the cellist of the International Contemporary Ensemble (and please don't abbreviate it to “ICE” anymore), and he still tours all over the world performing with them. He served on the faculties of Smith College and Mount Holyoke College from 2005–2012 and The College of New Jersey from 2015-2017, and he’s now an Assistant Professor of Cello at Youngstown State University.
Kivie also plays the viola da gamba for some reason, and he performs and records with LeStrange Viols. He formed ACRONYM because he found a bunch of seventeenth-century music in old manuscripts and wanted to play it with his friends; they've got eight CDs of modern premieres recorded and more on the way. Kivie's 2014 solo recording of J.S. Bach's cello suites got a nice blurb in a trade publication called The Strad, but he's way more proud of the warm personal letter praising the disc which he received from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Kivie's mom also claims to like the recording, although she thinks some of the tempos are too fast. You can find it on sale wherever you can still find music on sale, and the discs make great coasters.
Also, a recent review in the New York Times noted that "his long, flowing hair often covered his face as he played." Seriously, the New York Times printed that. Kivie mostly stopped picking his nose in 1985.