Angela Cox-Daly and Ross Daly

Angela Cox-Daly and Ross Daly are professional musicians, and have been performing as a duo for 30 years. They met as teens at the Royal Conservatory of Music, where they both played violin and viola. They attended U of T’s Faculty of Music, graduating in 1987, and now live in Kitchener, Ontario, with three musical kids.

Ross: I started playing violin when I was 11. By the time I was 12, I knew that I wanted to be a musician and marry a musician – specifically, a violin player. To seal this, I bought a double violin case and waited patiently for my future wife and music partner to fill it. When I met Angela, I was dating another girl who played violin. Three years later, when my girlfriend broke up with me, I was devastated – but Angela was delighted. Eight days after graduating from U of T, we got married.

I love Angela because she always sees the bright side of things without being blind to the not-so-bright, and knows how to turn ordinary moments into extraordinary ones. The kids sometimes get embarrassed and ask their mother to “calm down.” They just don’t appreciate yet her marvellous gift for seeing life’s wonders.

Angela: Ross once got a call from someone asking him if he could play Latin music. “Sure,” he said, and afterward asked me, “What’s Latin music?” He knew nothing about the genre that he had agreed to perform. In one week, he learned how to play the upright bass, studied a new kind of music, got a band together, played the restaurant and turned the gig into a recurring event. I love Ross’s adventurousness.

He’s also a fantastic arranger. He arranged and scored the music for full symphony orchestra to accompany an ABBA and Bee Gees tribute show. It took him 400 hours to create the arrangements. I never thought I’d be playing anything other than classical music and here I am doing crazy things – like performing ABBA and Bee Gees music all over the world. I have Ross to thank for that.