CAPE GIRL CLAIMS STATE FIDDLE TITLE

The new Missouri state junior fiddle champion, 12-year-old Liesl Schoenberger of Cape Girardeau, usually practices four or five hours a day but admits she's been spending some time on the phone lately.

Liesl has been away so much this summer -- on a performing tour to Europe, a month-long music camp in Indiana and most recently at the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia -- that she has lot of catching up to do with her friends.

Liesl is a seventh-grader at St. Mary's Catholic School and the daughter of Dr. John and Brenda Schoenberger.

Already known at fiddle competitions as "the girl with the sunflower" because of the decoration on her always-present hat, Liesl won the state fiddle contest last Sunday over 13 competitors, some of whom were as old as 16.

Before a standing room-only crowd of about 800 inside a tent, she played a breakdown standard called "Tom and Jerry," "The Canadian Waltz" and a personal favorite called "Limerock."

Liesl, who finished fourth the last time she entered the contest in 1994, wasn't tense. "Sometimes I'm nervous at auditions and really big recitals," she says. "But especially playing bluegrass I'm hardly ever nervous."

She won $100. Half her trip to Europe was financed with her winnings from fiddle contest.

The two-week tour to Europe occurred in June as part of the String Academy of Wisconsin and the Young Violinist Program Liesl is enrolled in at Indiana University. The young musicians, ages 12 through 18, performed in Paris and Switzerland, and Liesl played bluegrass for some of the audiences. "They really liked it," her mother said.

Not long ago Liesl wanted to be a prosecuting attorney when she grows up, but now she's decided to be a violinist.

Not a fiddler?

"Just a violinist," says.

She's sold on music.

"I think music can change a person's life," she says. "... It can bring happiness or bring somebody to tears."

She thinks there's an important difference between a musician who is technically proficient and one who plays with musicality.

"That separates the amateur from the professional," she says.

Liesl already has played at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, the cathedral of country and bluegrass music. The occasion was a fiddle camp last year led by country fiddler extraordinaire Mark O'Connor.

Her next performance will be in the fiddle contest at the upcoming SEMO District Fair.