Years ago, when I graduated from high school, I had to choose between an education in the arts and one in the sciences. Although I had a passion for both, it was an easy choice to make: I was a cellist, obviously, and as a cellist I simply had to go to a conservatory. In a way it wasn’t even a choice; I simply kept doing what I was already doing, since I had already been following a preparatory course that the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag for a couple of years. I have always been lucky with my teachers; I studied with the great Dutch cellist Anner Bijlsma, who was both a cello nerd and a true homo universalis. Research and cello playing were never separated. I flirted briefly with a career as software developer (there are cows in New Zealand whose dietary requirements are still being calculated with software that has a few lines of code that I helped design), but when the dot-com bubble burst the fancy technology was the first to go and as a cellist I didn’t see myself writing C, or C# for that matter. For several decades I traveled the world with my cello, performing in well known concert halls in Vienna and Washington as well as in the slums of Soweto and Sao Paulo. I wasn’t much of an educator, but I always enjoyed teaching, especially in places where music seemed to be as essential as oxygen, and not some kind of luxury product. Then, just before the Great Collapse of the Dutch chamber music scene, I was invited to teach Artistic Research at Codarts Rotterdam; in addition I gave cello lessons to the cellists who wanted something different than a career in classical music. I feel right at home at Codarts, especially now that I am also working on the development of the new RASL initiatives. Codarts has generously supported my PhD trajectory at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where I graduated last year, with a thesis on the 19th century cello virtuoso Alfredo Piatti. For a moment it seemed that my research was heading towards a transdisciplinary approach, but I managed to stay on course. My contemporary music group, the Ives Ensemble, now deprived of all government funding but still going against the current, has been my transdisciplinary playground for over thirty years, although I never realized that before. We were just doing weird projects with other artists and artists-scientists.