Sidney Hahn Culver
10/16/06
A cellist for six decades, Sidney Hahn Culver was near retirement when she chanced to meet the sonorous cello she recently gave to the University of Kansas.
The sound of the rich amber Carl Becker and Son cello, now valued at more than $100,000, took her breath away in 1985.
"The tone that came out when I played it was like nothing I had ever had in my hands before," said Culver, KU '46, '68 and '72. "To hear a sound like that, so beautiful and easy to play -- I couldn't believe it."
Culver recently gave the cello to KU for the School of Fine Arts. Graduate students and faculty will play the cello periodically to keep it flexible and in top playing condition, said Larry Mallett, professor and chair of music and dance. The cello may be sold to create scholarships for fine arts students.
Culver is a Hutchinson, Kan., native who came to KU with the help of scholarships in the 1940s.
"Without scholarships, I could not have gone to college," she said. "I have remembered that and been grateful all my life."
Culver earned her undergraduate degree in music education and her graduate degrees in education. Along the way she also studied German at KU, and from 1961 through 1971 she taught German to 7th, 8th and 9th grade students in Lawrence. In 1972 she began an academic career at the University of Nebraska, where she was a professor of foreign language education until 1992.
Music has been a constant in Culver's life. She began piano lessons at age 8 and started learning the cello at 12. Culver noted that her piano teacher, who thought that no one could be proficient with two instruments, disapproved of her learning a second instrument. Piano continued to be her major instrument throughout college and afterward.
She began playing cello in orchestra and chamber groups in high school. For 30 years she performed and traveled to summer chamber workshops in the United States and Europe. She also performed with a Kansas City-based string quartet, Kanemo, comprised of residents of Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri. She was the principal cellist in the Lincoln Civic Orchestra until 2000, and she is a longtime cellist in Freitag, a quartet in Lincoln, Neb.
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