Music Stories

Through the Bus RFT Music Stories 40 Through the Bus I learned one of the most important violin lessons of my life, out on the streets of Los Angeles. I was a street player in LA for several years and learned many things, like: 1.) being able to pace the numbers in a musical set, so as to get the most money out of the audience (start cheerful and familiar, then something beautiful and singing, then something intense and fast (that's to coax the quarters out of their pockets), then something boring to move them along to make room for the next crowd); 2.) learning how to play into a big space, 3.) learning how to play amid numerous distractions, 4.) learning how to give energy to and to get energy from an attentive audience; 5.) learning to read people's minds—I actually became a little psychic and could tell when somebody was going to give me money and when they weren't. One day...

Getting Better Unaware RFT Music Stories 41 Getting Better Unaware/The Puppy When I was in college, I played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. In the middle of the first movement there is an extended double-stop passage which is very difficult. The first time I played it for my teacher, he said, "This is so badly out of tune I can't even hear the tune!" Well, you can imagine how an arrogant stubborn little undergraduate violinist would take offense at such a remark; I walked out of there with my back completely up, determined to show this jerk what I was made of. I practiced more that week than at any other time in my whole four years of college. And yet, it seemed to me that the more I practiced the worse the passage got. I slaved and struggled to make it better, but at the end of each session it still sounded horrible to me. The next week I slouched into my lesson with my tail between my legs, and whined...

Monterey Symphony RFT Music Stories 43 The Monterey Symphony Story My violin teacher, Paul Rolland, was an internationally known teacher, and teacher-of-teachers. He had lots and lots of students, but, like me, he was a pig for talent, and whenever he stumbled across a gifted kid, he wanted to add him/her to his list. He picked me out of a crowd at the University of Illinois' Summer Youth Music Camp, and offered to teach me. This was one of the most significant events in the history of my life. Remember, this was the 60's; everybody was experimenting with everything, fleets of sacred cows were being put out to pasture, and new ideas were flooding every arena of civilized human activity. In this spirit of investigation and experimentation, Rolland was re-figuring the essentials of violin technique; and he freely used his students, including me, as the subjects of his laboratory experiments. He would try one technique w...

Movement Stories RFT Music Stories 47 Movement Stories Movement is one of the cornerstones of my teaching. Both my great violin teacher, Paul Rolland, and my great piano teacher, Richard Bunger, taught me characteristic ways of engaging the whole body in music performance. The quality of my sound, and the density of my interpretive nuances, come from my ability to relax my muscles, and lets them respond intuitively to the flow of subtle energies of higher spiritual reality through my body. When I can't move I feel trapped, constrained, muted. Consequently, when people watch me play, my performance energy appears higher than the usual run of sideman string players sitting around me. The fact is that most players are not normally as uninhibited in their movements as I am; and yet people want to move, they want to let the music into their bodies and let it dance around—they only have to be given permission. I have pla...

Cat Anderson's Lip RFT Music Stories 49 Cat Anderson's Lip Cat Anderson was one of the great jazz trumpeters of the 20th- century; the most distinctive aspect of his style was his ability to play very, very high notes, almost like a violin—a mode of trumpet playing called "screech trumpet"; the technique of making tiny, tiny streams of air requires the player to have a very strong lip. This story, about how he got his lip, was told by Cat Anderson to a friend of mine, who took a trumpet lesson from him, when he and Duke Ellington played the bowling alley in our town. It seems that when Anderson was a boy he didn't like practicing any more than any other normal kid likes to practice; he liked to play darts, and play ball, and read comic books, and run around with his friends after school—anything but practicing music. However, his mother, bless her heart, made him practice every day; so he, clever boy, de...

Kreisler and the Soap RFT Music Stories 52 Kreisler and the Soap Fritz Kreisler was one of the most important musicians of the 20th- century; he was one of an age of heroes, an age when all the famous players had distinct, inimitable musical personalities which towered above the crowd—unlike today's current collection of soloists, a homogenized blob who all sound the same. Kreisler's individuality as a player is preserved for all time on some of the first classical music recordings ever made. His contribution to the violin literature of the 20th-century, as a composer, of a large group of very worthy encore pieces, has proven to be of inestimable value to several generations of music students, and listening amateurs. Kreisler has recorded, perhaps not the definitive, but certainly one of the great performances of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto; every violin student ought to hear this recording. But that's not wha...

Learning to Play Soft RFT Music Stories 54 Learning to Play Soft I already told you how I learned to play loud by playing "through the bus". I also need to tell you how I learned to play soft. I had just finished taking classes for my master's degree at UCLA, and Louise, in an exchange program with UC Santa Cruz, was going to go to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, for a semester. I was invited to go along. So, in the fall of 1978, we found ourselves cohabiting a dorm room and on one of the most prestigious Ivy League campuses in the world. I got a chance to see New York first, hated it, and returned to New Hampshire, looking forward to a bleak winter. I got a job bagging groceries at the local store, and settled in. Very soon after, I made contact with the University Orchestra conductor; I came to play a rehearsal that same night, and by the end of the evening I was hired to play in four orchestras. ...