A ‘caretaker’ and a ‘performer’
STORY BY DEE RIGGS, Foothills Magazine – October 2024
At age 6, the musician had not yet emerged.
“I detested piano lessons and I did not like recitals,” says Nikolas Caoile.
Piano lessons were his parents’ idea and, not wanting to displease them, he persisted.
“I was annoyed with the private lesson process — being assigned a piece, having to play that for the teacher every week,” he says. “I couldn’t just play, I had to adhere to a schedule.”
In junior high in Portland, Oregon, he joined band and found he enjoyed playing with other students. He took up the cello, the clarinet and orchestral percussion.
In high school, he was named principal percussionist for the Portland Youth Philharmonic.
“As a percussionist, you sit and count measures quite a bit,” he says. “I made a habit of going to the library and getting orchestral scores instead of just my part. I looked at the full orchestral score. I wanted to dig deeper into what makes the music better.”
At Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, Caoile was asked to use his piano skills to accompany student singers. “I found more joy in that than in playing by myself,” he says. “There is a non-verbal type of communication that comes with playing piano with someone else.”
“This,” says the music director and conductor of the Wenatchee Valley Symphony Orchestra, “is like when I am conducting an orchestra.”
Caoile, who is also director of orchestras at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, took the job with the Wenatchee Valley Symphony Orchestra.