Katy Weatherly discovered her love for the violin at an early age. While attending Sacred Heart Canossian College, music quickly became Katy’s favourite subject, prompting one teacher to berate the Macao-born student for spending too much time on “outside activities,” – a thinly veiled reference to the hours Weatherly was spending on her musical instrument.
“Nothing carried the same appeal as playing music for me,” Weatherly tells Macao News.
Shrugging off her teacher’s comment, Weatherly’s musical endeavours took her overseas, where she attended the Juilliard School, the prestigious performing arts institution in New York whose alumni include composer John Williams, jazz musician Miles Davis, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
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The experience left her feeling unexpectedly isolated. “There was an open contradiction while performing at Juilliard,” Weatherly says, explaining that music recitals were the metric by which students were judged and assessed. Given the weight of those events, each student spent countless hours inside practice rooms, often in complete solitude, all in the pursuit of musical perfection.
The solitude continued even as students came together in an ostensibly harmonious whole. On stage, musicians “sat shoulder-to-shoulder, almost as competitors,” Weatherly says, “fuelling a sense of insecurity and isolation in spite of being packed together. I felt completely alone inside a crowded theatre.”
The frustration caused her to doubt her own career, and perhaps life choices. “Anyone can play the same instrument or recreate the same sound, so why am I even here? Do I really enjoy performing music … or am I being told that I should?”
The beauty of imperfection
Those questions burdened Weatherly’s tenure at Juilliard, but she found guidance in her past. As a secondary student, she remembers her Sacred Heart teachers instilling the importance of community service, which led her to perform at venues beyond the concert halls and away from the Juilliard name that hung over her.
It was those recitals that Weatherly enjoyed the most. “If strangers don’t enjoy your music, they leave. For those who stay, it is because they feel connected to what you’re doing,” she says.
Volunteering also gave her music a purpose. During a late autumn engagement in the waiting area of a New York City hospital, Weatherly recalls being approached by a woman in distress. The stranger requested a song, not one by the likes of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky or Johann Sebastian Bach, which Weatherly was accustomed to playing, but rather a Christmas melody, weeks before holiday decorations were to be set up.
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Weatherly obliged but was asked to follow the woman into a private room. Upon entering, Weatherly discovered a grieving family, huddled beside an elderly, dying patient. No words were spoken, yet Weatherly instantly placed her chin upon her violin’s resting piece, as a natural response to the moment, as if her body already knew what to do.
Weatherly began performing “Silent Night,” a song she had never seen the sheet music for but knew well enough to improvise. As the music resonated, Christmas filled the room. The family held each other tighter while Weatherly misplayed parts of the song, reflecting her unfamiliarity with its exact notes. Her musical bow stuttered across the violin strings in an attempt to prolong the moment.
But while each additional mistake became more obvious to the classically trained musician, the flaws were insignificant to those in the room. It was a profound lesson, and Weatherly struggled to hold back her emotions as the beautifully imperfect notes she was playing helped a family spend their last Christmas together.
Returning to Macao
After graduating from Juilliard, Weatherly stayed in New York. She attended Columbia University’s Teachers College, completing her doctorate before being appointed as the district manager of the public school centre in Washington, D.C.
Her ambition to marry music theory and general education was sidetracked when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Social distancing rendered shoulder-to-shoulder concerts a thing of the past. As the world stayed inside, Katy Weatherly reflected on that autumn day in the New York City hospital, deciding to prioritise her family and return to Macao.
Since 2023, Katy Weatherly has served as an assistant professor of music and music education at the University of Macau’s Faculty of Education, designing music programs that go beyond sheet reading and leverage music as a learning tool and confidence builder.
“What I learned on my journey is that performing is really a form of pleasing and should not be the goal of music. Instead, it should be viewed as a channel that develops communication skills and improves mental health. I want to equip my students for their own pursuit of perfection, but also teach them that failure doesn’t occur when they fall short of those aspirations,” she explains.
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Weatherly still joins the occasional recital when invited. Over the past calendar year, she has played alongside the Macao Strings Association, participated in a featured quartet at the Londoner, and given a solo performance at Clube Militar de Macau.
Her husband Chris and daughter Phoebe are frequent guests at those concerts. The applause is invariably rapturous, but Weatherly shares that her favourite sound often comes from Phoebe asking to sit next to her mother, sometimes in the middle of a performance. This often draws an empathetic giggle from those watching, causing a bit of self-consciousness for Weatherly when it occurs.
“But when it does, I suddenly feel like I know everyone in the room with me,” she says.
