From Cornhusker to Classical Bae, she’s merging the sounds of violin and hip-hop
By Angel Jennings (’08)
In a tiny Manhattan apartment, Meredith Ezinma Ramsay propped her iPhone on an Ikea shelf and pressed record.
She stepped back, cradled her custom Italian violin under her chin and allowed the melody of Future’s 2017 trap hit Mask Off to wash over her.
Her bow jumped across the strings to the rhythm of the song as she jammed out, putting her own classical flair to the hip-hop beat. A mountain of golden curls stacked atop her head bounced along.
Satisfied, she uploaded the one-minute video to her 5,000 followers. The next day, her Instagram following grew to 22,000. Then 100,000. Now more than 360,000.
“What do I share? What do I post to all of these fans?” she recounted during a video interview from her hotel room in Mexico in early June, where she is working on new music. “Now I have fans. Before I just had friends.”
That viral video commanded an audience that could have filled a concert hall or arena many times over — and catapulted her from an unknown violinist to the Internet-crowned “Classical Bae.”
Her sound reached the ears of megastar Beyoncé who invited Ezinma to join her all-girl band at the Southern California music festival Coachella in 2018. She has toured Europe, played with Stevie Wonder, Kendrick Lamar, SZA and the late Mac Miller. This spring, she released her debut EP Classical Bae.
At first glance, it appears Ezinma’s success happened overnight, but it has been decades in the making. And it all started at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where her parents met and fell in love, where a community embraced, nurtured and challenged her and she gained the skills and confidence to upend the classical music world.
“UNL genuinely prepared me for life,” Ezinma said, reflecting on her time on the sprawling campus. “I feel like I was given a really safe incubator to be myself. After that, I felt like I could do anything.”
***
Ezinma has been a fixture on Nebraska’s campus since she was a baby.
Her mother, Dr. Lisa Knopp, would rock an infant Ezinma in her arms during her office hours in Andrews Hall when she was a Nebraska doctoral student earning her Ph.D. in creative nonfiction and American literature. Her father, Colin Ramsay, would strap a toddler Ezinma on his back as he taught actuarial science courses in the College of Business Administration. She would peer out into the class of students and wave, her father recalled. They would wave back.
“I remember drawing on the marker board in my dad’s class,” she said. “In many ways, I feel like I grew up at UNL.”
Back then, everybody knew her simply as Meredith.
She fell in love with the violin when her teachers at Prairie Hill Montessori School brought in violin instructors who taught the Suzuki method.
“These little kids were playing these tiny violins and she bugged us,” Knopp, now an English professor at University of Nebraska Omaha, recounted over the phone. “She wanted one.”
She was 3. Her parents assumed it would be one in a long line of interests their young daughter would take up as she explored and found herself. They conceded and rented a miniature version of the string instrument that could fit her tiny fingers.
Practice, for preschoolers, consisted of learning how to hold the instrument, playing the musical scales and learning to play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. It would take a young Ezinma five minutes to complete.
Her mother got an idea. Knopp, who studied the piano and flute as an undergraduate in Iowa, would pull out her flute and join Ezinma in her practices. The time would fly by as they played folk music, soulful church hymns and freestyled.
“She and I would just screw around and have fun,” Knopp said. “I think she had the association that music could be really enjoyable. Then to go from five minutes to 30 minutes (of practice) when you’re six, that’s a huge deal. At a very early age, she was practicing way more than the other kids.”
By the sixth grade, Ezinma’s skill had outpaced her mom and Knopp could no longer keep up with her on the flute.
Others began paying attention to Ezinma’s musicality. She had a big sound and knew how to make mundane pieces musical and expressive.
“There was something kind of extraordinary. She could really make her violin sing,” Knopp recalled.
When Ezinma was in the eighth grade, she was yearning for a new challenge. Her parents signed her up to study under David Neely, a Nebraska professor of violin. She took lessons from him for five years.
“She was skilled like any athlete would be and very focused on her routines,” Neely said. “She practiced very hard and I always loved that about her. She was very diligent about her music making.”
“But now she’s doing it. That’s what happens when you really follow your heart and put the
work in.”
–Dr. Lisa Knopp
Additionally, Ezinma attended national and international music camps to sharpen her skills and challenge herself. She was often the only Black musician in the room.
It was at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a prestigious music program in Michigan, where Ezinma encountered another Black string player for the first time. She was 14 or 15.
“Seeing that I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a deficiency,’” Ezinma said, reflecting on that moment. “I didn’t realize how underrepresented I was until I finally saw somebody. It’s kind of interesting. You don’t realize you’re lacking until you’re finally given water. And you’re like ‘Oh my God, I’m thirsty.’ That was a big moment for me.”
She called her mother.
“It was like naming some obvious thing that you’ve never paid attention to,” Knopp recalled. “For the first time she saw another Black violinist. Doesn’t that make you want to weep with joy and sadness?”
Ezinma would return from these prestigious training camps, eager to show others her growth.
“She would go away to these international camps and come back and not be seated very high in the orchestra,” Knopp said. “So, I’m like ‘what the hell is going on here.’ ”
Ramsay, her father, who was raised in Guyana, a country on the Caribbean coast of South America, knew what it was.
Before he had Ezinma, he had considered America the land of opportunity and said he did not fully understand the role racism played in the lives of Black people in America. Ramsay would have spirited debates with the late Michael Combs, a political science professor who taught at Nebraska for decades, about race and identity. But raising Ezinma showed Ramsay another side of his adopted home country.
He saw, in ways large and small, how some minimized Ezinma’s talent, questioned her abilities and tried to chip away at her confidence.
“It was like somebody breaking your legs, crippling you so when you’re an adult you can’t even walk,” Ramsay said, who is still an actuarial science professor at Nebraska. “Working hard is not enough. It’s necessary but not sufficient.”
He would speak up for her, questioning the motives of her teachers. But at home, he would pull Ezinma aside and issue hard truths, “You’re Black. You just have to be better.”
***
When it was time to apply to college, Ezinma only submitted one application: To the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
She had graduated from Lincoln Southwest High School a year early and at 17, she didn’t want to go too far from home.
At this point, she was 14 years into a love affair with the violin. She could see herself pursuing a career in music but her dad pushed for her to study medicine.
“I came from the Caribbean and in our culture, you only have three choices if you’re smart: doctor, lawyer or engineer,” Ramsay said. “Music felt like entertainment. That was never part of the equation.”
Father and daughter reached a compromise. To make sure Ezinma was not attempting to shy away from the harder STEM courses, Ramsay said she could major in music if she took math and science courses.
“I came from the Caribbean and in our culture, you only have three choices if you’re smart: doctor, lawyer or engineer. Music felt like entertainment. That was never part of the equation.” –Colin Ramsay
“After you get an A in all of these subjects then you can make a decision based on love and not fear,” he told her.
Ezinma arrived as a freshman in 2008. She declared a double major in biochemistry and violin performance and a minor in mathematics with a pre-medicine emphasis. She aced her courses. When she wasn’t studying, she was practicing at Westbrook Music Building into the wee hours with her musician friends.
“We were really intense,” Ezinma said. “We would be there until the janitors came in and closed the building.”
At the end of her sophomore year, she confessed to her dad: “I’m a musician.”
He conceded.
“You don’t choose to do music. Music chooses you,” said Neely, Ezinma’s former violin professor. “There’s something inside your soul that you just can’t put it away. It just draws you back no matter what you do.”
“Music called her and she couldn’t not do it.”
***
Ezinma graduated in 2012 and by then she had soaked up every opportunity a young violinist could in Nebraska.
She honed her craft studying with Hyeyung Yoon of the Chiara String Quartet, a Grammy-nominated, world-renowned music group. She was a member of Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra and performed at Meadowlark Music Festival. She learned to captivate a crowd while touring rural, western Nebraska with the Ezinma Piano Trio, a group she formed with pianist Michael Glur-Zoucha and cellist Timothy Paek.
It was time for her to spread her wings.
She accepted a scholarship to the New School’s Mannes School of Music in New York, where she completed her master’s degree in violin performance. A teacher saw something different in her and encouraged her to be the “Beyoncé of the violin.”
Ezinma absorbed the words. She bought an electric violin and began experimenting with her sound.
Her mother knew Ezinma was talented, but her daughter told her that getting seated in an orchestra was like landing an appointment on the Supreme Court. You have to wait for somebody to die to move in and move up.
Ezinma had other plans. “I’m going to go my own way and create the music I love,” her mother recounted.
Knopp gasped.
“We are going to be paying your rent forever,” she thought. “But now she’s doing it. That’s what happens when you really follow your heart and put the work in.”
“We were really intense. We would be there until the janitors came in and closed the building.”
–Ezinma, on her days in Westbrook Music Building
Ezinma has crisscrossed Europe with the British pop band Clean Bandit, rocked out on stage with her violin, in heels, dancing along to a roaring crowd. It was during this time that she began seeing herself as more than a violinist but as an artist.
“As an instrumentalist in the classical world, you see yourself as your instrument but know that you’re much more than that,” Ezinma said. “Your instrument is merely a vehicle for expression.”
She started uploading more music on Soundcloud and social media. Then her video of the Mask Off challenge caught on fire. Next came the calls from the big-named artists.
Her strings can be heard on the Grammy- and Oscar-nominated All the Stars, the lead song by Kendrick Lamar and SZA off of the Black Panther movie soundtrack. The sound of it makes her mother teary-eyed every time she hears it on the radio. Ezinma also played on Beyoncé’s 2019 Homecoming album and performed on stage with Queen Bey during the filming of Netflix’s Homecoming documentary.
With the release of her EP, Ezinma is now devoting her attention to earning another master’s degree at the Berklee College of Music. This one in film scoring in hopes of one day winning an Oscar in that category.
She’s also doing her part to train up the next generation of Black classical musicians, a cohort that only makes up 1.8% of the nation’s orchestra players.
Two years ago, she created the nonprofit HeartStrings, a music-based youth development program for elementary school age children from diverse backgrounds that provides quality instruments, lessons, access to concerts and performance. She offers an affordable educational program for children and adults to learn how to play the violin, a monthly masterclass and online curriculum.
“I’m a violinist, a musician and an artist but my purpose is to share music and inspire people to go after their dreams,” she said.
As Ezinma reflects on how far she has come from a Cornhusker to Classical Bae she credits Nebraska with instilling in her the culture of hard work and niceness that has allowed her to stand out in a field of talented violinists.
And her mother, Knopp notes, “we are shaped by geography as much as we are by our genes and, in some way, that has affected her. There’s a real wide openness here.”
“When we think of openness that can be scary because you don’t have any place to hide,” she added. “But it can also represent the openness of possibilities.”
Or a long runaway to launch into superstardom.