Nancy Dunetz’s life has been steeped in music, from listening to classical greats like Mozart on the radio with her grandmother as a young girl and taking up the violin at age 9 to using songs to enhance the curriculum for her English language learners when she was a teacher in New York City public schools.

But it was in retirement that she found a new calling as a violist for two ensembles in New York City.

“Playing music is and always has been a focal part of my life,” said Dunetz, an 84-year-old retired English as a new language teacher who got hooked on the viola after a friend loaned her one to try when she was 52.

“I had never played one and I loved the sound — it was so much better than the violin,” she said. “On the violin, the high notes always hurt my ears.”

Since retiring from the International HS at LaGuardia Community College for newcomer students in 1995, Dunetz has played the viola with the Broadway Bach Ensemble, an all-volunteer orchestra of roughly 60 musicians, a third of whom are retirees. Dunetz serves as strings coordinator for the orchestra, which performs three free concerts a year.

Dunetz, a Columbia Univeristy alumna, is the only member of the Columbia Klezmer Ensemble who is not a current student. She fell in love with klezmer, a musical tradition among Ashkenazi Jews, during travel in the 2010s to Lithuania to study Yiddish.

Dunetz also performs with other musicians at her temple’s Friday evening services, attends chamber music workshops abroad and plays in friends’ homes.

After teaching English in the Philippines with the newly founded Peace Corps from 1961–63, Dunetz worked with English language learners in city public schools for 32 years. She taught at two elementary schools before joining the faculty at the International HS at LaGuardia Community College, a position she described as her dream job.

In addition to music being a lifelong passion, it also keeps her active. “It’s not just the enjoyment of the music, but it really helps you physically,” said Dunetz, explaining that she finds that music stimulates her brain.

The viola also has positively shaped her personality, she said, “first by inducing a calmness and then by mediating my relationships in the same way that the viola does in ensembles,” acting as “the glue” between the other instruments and serving “as the motor, maintaining the rhythm.”

Dunetz’s love of music, language and travel has taken her around the world — including throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East and New Zealand.

She played klezmer during the weeklong Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow six years ago. In May, she, along with two Broadway Bach colleagues and a longtime friend, will attend a chamber music workshop in Tuscany as a string quartet.