The Masuko Ushioda Dean’s Scholarship Fund

About Masuko

Masuko Ushioda was born April 4, 1942 in Shenyang, Manchuria. Her father was a graduate of Waseda University and became an architect, and her mother was a folkloric dancer and choreographer. It was her mother’s dream that her two daughters (younger sister, Fusa) could achieve independent lives as professionals. Because Western music was of great interest to her parents, they started Masuko on the violin and her younger sister on the flute. Family lore says that in the aftermath of World War II, the Ushiodas had little money and bought Masuko a violin because it was the cheapest instrument in the secondhand shop.

Masuko’s first important influence as a violinist came from Anna Bubnova Ono, a pupil of the great Leopold Auer, who had moved to Japan in the wake of the Russian Revolution and married the scientist Ono Shun’ichi, uncle of Yoko Ono. During those years, she formed friendships with many fellow students, most of whom went on to become important artists and who, like her, dispersed to all parts of the musical world. Masuko’s primary education was at Futaba, a well-known private school where the teachers were European nuns. When it was time to begin high school, she was already an accomplished violinist and moved on to the Toho Gakuen School of Music, where a powerful influence was Hideo Saito. 

At age 14, Masuko received widespread attention by winning the First Prize in the Mainichi Competition, the most prestigious event of that kind. This was followed by high school years in which she juggled many concerts and her musical studies at Toho. In 1961, the Russian violinist Mikhail Vaiman was asked to invite two young Japanese students to work with him at the Leningrad Conservatory as part of its centenary celebration. Masuko and Teiko Maehashi went there that August. She stayed for more than two years. Her “Russian life” was filled with lessons and concerts and all the adventures one can imagine experienced by a college student in a new country. While there, she made many lasting friendships.

As that period drew to a close, she prepared for the 1963 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. She won sixth prize, but decided she needed to continue her studies. On the jury was Joseph Szigeti and he agreed to teach her in Switzerland, where he lived. Masuko moved to Szigeti’s small village above Montreux. Her life centered around her lessons and she immersed herself in yet another new culture. Her next goal was preparation for the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Returning to the Soviet Union for the competition was a kind of homecoming for her. She won the silver medal and great acclaim for her playing. Equally important, as it turned out, Moscow is where she and Laurence Lesser met. He won fourth prize in the cello part of the competition. As a result of her victory, Masuko embarked on an international life as a violin soloist while maintaining her link to Szigeti and her home in Switzerland. She came to the U.S. for three summers, beginning in 1967, to participate in the Marlboro Music Festival.

Laurence Lesser is from Los Angeles and taught at USC but moved to the Peabody Institute in 1970. He and Masuko were married in his parent’s home in Beverly Hills in December 1971 and then lived in Baltimore. During the first twelve months of their marriage, Masuko played 93 solo concerts on three continents and was away from home for a combined total of six months. But Masuko wanted to cut back on touring and start a family. At first, she said she wanted to stop playing and have twelve children!

In 1974, on the advice of friends Scott Nickrenz and Paula Robison, then President Gunther Schuller invited Larry and Masuko to join the faculty of New England Conservatory. They arrived during the summer and on October 31 celebrated the birth of their daughter Erika. Almost six years later, they welcomed a son, Adam Manjiro, born on September 10, 1980. Over 39 years, Masuko taught a total of 140 students at NEC.

Masuko’s life was a balance of family, concertizing, and teaching. She made regular trips to Japan for solo appearances and also as one of the concertmasters of the Saito Kinen Orchestra and the Mito Chamber Orchestra. She and Larry shared a love of cooking and good food, and her life of travel influenced them to visit places they both wanted to know better. Over the years this included trips to Italy, Switzerland, Morocco, Egypt, Hungary, the Czech Republic, China, Korea and South America.
Masuko’s last trip to Japan to play in Mito was in October 2012. It finished with a few free days in Kyoto with her sister’s family and son Adam. When she returned, she was immediately caught up in teaching and in rehearsing for the First Monday concert of November 5. The next morning she was given a diagnosis of acute leukemia.

Masuko’s attitude to life was very open — all her life she thought of each experience as a new adventure. During her hospitalization at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, she came to know that this would be her last adventure. She was deeply interested in people and found in the hospital a group of new friends who were her caregivers. While she wanted her privacy, she saw family regularly and invited her last group of students one by one for bedside lessons. She died at the hospital on May 28, 2013.