Two interesting things:  one, Znaider was quite taken with my Heifetz mute, although he refused to use it for the concert.  “I could not sleep at night,” he said, “knowing that I had deprived you even for one hour of such a mute.”  I guess I’ll hang onto this piece of rubber.  Two, Znaider broke his E-string near the end of the Brahms, much to the delight of the audience.  People always get a kick out of that!  We wondered whether he had rigged it to go off during the Beethoven concerto later in the week.

Then on Saturday, a trio concert with Brant and John Novacek.  Another limited-rehearsal deal, but at least this trio has played together many times.  What a fun group!  Too bad we only get once or twice a year to do this kind of thing.  That program was Haydn E-flat, Rachmaninov Trio Elegiaque, Sibelius Canon for violin and cello (to tie in with that week’s CSO program) and Mendelssohn c minor.  Plus we threw in John’s Intoxication rag as an encore.  That should be heard often, as it’s a thrilling 2 minutes!

Akiko reminds me that another time Znaider was in town, also playing Schoenberg (the concerto) the second half of the concert was Mahler 5.  Maestro Barenboim allowed the soloist to sit in the back of the firsts and play the Mahler, after little or no rehearsal.  Akiko, doing duty in the back of the firsts that week, was his stand partner!  She reports that he acquitted himself quite well, although his height made him stand out among our section.

Today’s other activity is listening to violin juries at Roosevelt, that semi-annual tradition that I’m not sure anyone looks forward to… but that’s nonetheless an important tool in the learning process.  If a 10-minute snapshot of your playing in front of the full faculty doesn’t make you nervous, you’re well on your way to achieving veins of icewater.  Luckily I never had to go through this in school!  Good luck to all jury-players today.

I realize I go too far in claiming ownership of four string players at the Mimir Chamber Music Festival in Fort Worth, Texas. But I did coach them quite a lot over the last two weeks, and this is their only chance to show the audience of colleagues, coaches, family, friends and local chamber music lovers what they have learned this July.

The summer of 2005 was my third as an artist faculty member at Mimir. Along with eleven colleagues, I worked with approximately twenty students, almost all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. All of them auditioned for the festival, either live or via recording. Like the students in years past, most had professional aspirations, but few had experienced anything like Mimir. Executive director Curt Thompson has focused the festival exclusively on chamber music, which provides the students an opportunity not found at festivals where they must also prepare solo repertoire and attend orchestra rehearsals. Of course, with such focus comes greater challenge. Since students study only two works during their two weeks here, and often perform only parts of those two works, both faculty and students desire to have all the rough edges polished smooth.

We began with a big block of stone. One player in my group had never played chamber music before, and the ones who had brought varying levels of experience and proficiency. The Debussy quartet was new to all of them. And even though I had performed the Debussy many times, I had never coached it. At our first meeting, they had had only two hours together to read through the piece and begin what would be, both for them and for me, a maiden voyage.

We were looking at less than a week—only three sessions of two hours each—before my group would perform some portion of the piece for students and faculty. We would then meet two or three more times before the culminating public performance. I knew that other faculty would see my group on the days I did not, but at the final performance, I would be the one in the audience receiving uncomfortable glances should there be any train wrecks on stage!

Rehearsal time without a coach was limited to two hours each day, the bare minimum for the Debussy. This was necessary because each student participated in two groups during the festival. Thus every day contained four hours of rehearsal with a coach, plus four hours without. Every session at Mimir, whether coached or not, must build measurably toward the performances.

For members of a permanent, professional ensemble, preparing a piece of chamber music is second nature: after the first reading, most of the major building blocks are in place. Such a group may jump immediately to the fine-tuning of phrases, the blending of sounds and the delicate balancing of dynamics. Not so at Mimir. The first reading, even by accomplished individual players, is likely to derail several times. As members of the faculty with long memories, we are responsible for warning the students that these things can and will happen to them. But I do not think we have ever shown them the video from the very first Mimir, where during a faculty performance of an obscure Scandinavian quartet, four brave souls fought desperately to keep things together while one (or more) were hopelessly lost. It’s not whether you fall in, but how artfully you dig yourself out!

As a coach, my job would be twofold: to guide my four players toward a performance of their work and to teach them how to teach themselves. I had to share my experience working with other players so that these four might work together. I remembered my frustration at age eighteen, berated for my every dynamic choice by the more experienced members of my quartet and by coach Felix Galimir alike. However, a fog was lifted with his words: “You must have three ears! Two where you sit and one where I sit.” From then on I learned to pursue and teach awareness. Only by honing a constant awareness of their group’s true sound could my students hope to recognize and solve problems.

At the first session, I was impressed with the spirit and energy evident in my students but dismayed by the rather shapeless mass of sound. I immediately shared with them my opening strategy for such pieces, what many call “wood-shedding”. Before the very first reading, I get a score and “read through” the piece in my head. While not particularly talented at score reading, lacking fundamental piano skills and totally inept while looking at more than four or five parts, I can still get a sense of the challenges that will confront me. I mark my part with simple directions for cues and balance. At this point in my narrative, the player without chamber experience broke in, “That sounds like homework!” “Yes it does,” I answered, “and you haven’t done yours yet! Why should you expect to get through Debussy on your first try, much less make sense of it?”

So we began the work together. We started with the premise that no problem left unrecognized could be solved. I asked them to rehearse as if I were not there, so that I could sense their style of communication. As a full-time symphony player, this is a hassle I have largely left behind! In my job, there is only one person stopping and starting the group, and while not always enjoyable, the process is efficient. My group quickly made the same discovery: when one player stopped the playing to make a comment, all was well. But if the playing simply broke down, the first priority was to figure out why. I generally favor solutions through playing over talking, and with my Debussy I sensed that I had a quartet reluctant to make bold and immediate proclamations. So I imposed the “fifteen-second” rule. Only fifteen seconds of talking allowed before the playing resumed. This left time for one person to recognize a problem, suggest a solution, and provide a starting measure number. If another player disagreed, he or she waited until the proposed solution was tried before suggesting another. This rule had three benefits: more problems were recognized, more solutions were tried, and the group best benefited from the most valuable resource it had: time to play together. I often tell my groups that they could do much worse than to spend their two hours playing a movement ten times in a row, from start to finish. My colleagues and I have all been members of groups where so much time was wasted on unproductive arguing that a series of playthroughs would have been absolutely therapeutic. As another of my coaches at Curtis (and Orion Quartet violist) Steve Tenenbom said, “Practice the language you will speak to the audience.”

My summers at Mimir have shown me that the ideal use of time in a coaching is similar to that in a rehearsal. My first summer, I often found myself looking at glazed eyes while in the midst of paragraphs of explanation. Finally it dawned on me that I was transgressing my own rule. Again and again, I found the violin to be my best friend as I picked it up to demonstrate exactly how I wanted a passage to sound. What could be more effective than distilling hours of my own practice into a few demonstrations? I found myself acting in coaching sessions as a “virtual quartet member”: unburdened with the responsibility of playing but sharing the same respect for efficiency. I possessed the “third ear” that Galimir had described. Many exchanges resemble this one: “Second violin, can you hear the viola?” “Yes.” “Something doesn’t match between you; listen as the four of you play it again and tell me what it is.” I learned that when I gave a student the task of listening to just one other player, even when four were playing, the concentration and results increased dramatically. The next step would be to decide who each player should listen to at any given time.

I showed my quartet how this question is often answered visually through a sign, or cue. This sign may signify the beginning of a phrase, a shift in tempo, or the release or cutoff of a long note. What difficulty most of us have in understanding just how sharp and incisive a cue must be! As a beginner, my cues were plaintive and questioning. After being browbeaten by my colleagues, I learned how to give any manner of sign, depending on the character of the music to follow. But it was a strange discovery that sometimes, a sharp sign must be given even when the music is not so. There are moments when the need for precision demands it. I often paraphrased Crocodile Dundee as I demonstrated increasingly obvious cues:

“That’s not a sign. This is a sign!”

Now that our signals were in place, we got to the real meat of rehearsal. The cellist may have successfully given a sign and the others followed it, but why the cello and not the viola? We could not ignore the subject of balance any longer. In early classical quartets such as Haydn and Mozart, the first violin line dominates most of the time. Is it any wonder that the quartets of the time were composed of a strong first violinist (who often lent his name to the group) and three supporters? Even though quartets rarely work this way today, such repertoire is helpful for the beginning quartet since its clean lines and relative scarcity of tempo changes promote confidence and good rehearsal habits. But the piece at hand was by Debussy, whose aim was often to blur the clean line. As a master of color, he knew well how instruments could combine to form a sonic impression independent of melody.

“We have a long way to go,” I said in one of our first sessions, stating the obvious. The time had come for action and results. The fifteen-second rule was in effect. I showed the inexperienced group members how I mark my quartet parts, and then we played the marked sections. A shape began to emerge. “I wish I had recorded yesterday’s playthrough so that you could hear what has happened to this section!” I cried. “No you don’t,” replied the cellist with a smile. A veteran of several summers at Mimir, he was familiar with the rapid gains most groups make in the first couple of days. The challenge then, as always, was to keep the group working as if they were still just beginning. I asked them to completely mark their parts for the two movements we would work on this week, and to spend tomorrow’s rehearsal continuing the kind of rehearsing we had just begun.

By equipping my quartet with efficient means of interacting and productive rehearsal methods, the preliminary work was dispatched as quickly as possible. And with efficiency would come solidity. Though the conventional wisdom “haste makes waste” was drilled into me from childhood, I had come to learn that solutions which come quickly tend to stick. No wonder those early quartets took not only the names of their first violinists, but their playing styles as well: like a symphony, a totalitarian regime is more efficient and unified than a democracy. But where is the art in that? My four players would soon have to make the painful transition from workers to artists of Debussy. The danger of conflict loomed, but with it appeared the promise of exploration and discovery. And while I would equip my quartet with more subtle and varied rehearsal methods to encourage this discovery, no method would prove more important than a practiced awareness of what was actually coming out of their four instruments. Just before their final performance, each of the four players had an answer for my last question: “If you were listening from here, what would you say?”

This article appeared in Chamber Music magazine.

A few months after I formed the Grancino String Quartet with Zach DePue, Jessi Thompson and Priscilla Lee, we were fortunate enough to go up to New York for a quartet coaching with Mr. Galimir. At this point he had stopped coming down to Curtis except for rare visits to hear one or two people or groups. I remember that he hadn’t heard any groups yet that year, so we were excited to play a Haydn Quartet, Op. 55 No. 1, that we had been working on.

We played for him in the very room in which I had had my first lesson, and it somehow seemed smaller this time. It was indeed a cozy room, and four people could easily fill it with sound. After one too many of our exuberant dynamic changes (which we thought were exciting and daring), he let out a yell! He breathed hard for a few seconds; evidently he had been getting worked up for a while and we had failed to notice.

“You don’t have to–blast me out of the room! Yes, I know that this measure you have piano and the next you have forte. But this is Haydn, and piano and forte are next-door neighbors!”

As it happened, his yell was louder than any forte we made before or since.

I still had to address his question, however, and I was at a loss. What could I suggest that he would find interesting? “I don’t know…what have you always wanted to play here?”

“What?” he asked, squinting at me.

“I mean, what have you not played that you’ve always wanted to work on?”

“You know,” he started laughing, “in my long life, I have played just about everything.”

I never got to play with Mr. Galimir, though I am one of the few who studied violin with him in addition to chamber music. A few days later, Mr. Galimir left a Marlboro concert in an ambulance. After recovering at a hospital in Vermont, he returned to his home in New York. Plans to play for him in September and October never materialized, and he died in early November while I was on tour with the Curtis Orchestra in Vienna.

Once upon stopping us, Mr. Galimir addressed the lower voices. But he began fumbling for words, and when he did get going it appeared that his speech would take a while. Soovin Kim and Ning Kam, who were playing first and second violins, welcomed the moment out of the spotlight and began talking quietly. When Ning laughed silently at a joke from Soovin, she caught the attention of Galimir, who never needed much prodding to pay attention (always in fun) to female group members!

“Hey, hey, HEY!” he shouted. We all fell silent. “No flirting!” he commanded Ning. “If you flirt, you must flirt with me!”

As if on cue, the door to the adjoining bathroom burst open, and along with the sound of the toilet flushing we experienced a verbal barrage. “No! Why so short and picky, the sixteenth notes? I cannot hear the second violin! And you, cello, you must really play here!” Evidently our coaching had begun on time. Mr. Galimir had simply been multitasking from an alternate seat.

Over the next few years I witnessed the full range of emotion from our coach, whom we addressed as “Mr. Galimir” but who was known among us by his last name alone. Though he was 86 when I began working with him, I experienced everything in Technicolor, for Galimir never dialed anything down. He jumped into the air and roared, crouched low and whispered, stomped around like a big game hunter, and at every moment seemed much larger than any of us, though the opposite was the case. Happily married, music was still his first love, and to play her with less than total dedication was to slap her in the face. To play sloppily, even with deep feeling, spoke to a lack of dedication in the practice room and earned the same scorn. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Galimir was sincerely loved, for every chamber musician at Curtis had his or her own version of the man’s rusty-door-hinge Viennese accent.

In sports, an “old-school” coach demands results and brooks no excuses. This was our chamber music diet at Curtis, yet with Galimir in the coach’s seat it was not all gruel. The knowledge that we had to perform for such discerning ears each week actually freed us from endless discussion and pointed us in the direction of progress through playing. Music, not English, became our first language during rehearsal, and the true test of any theory was its worthiness in performance.

Of these practical considerations, the one most important to Galimir was balance. We were usually able to recognize the melodic line and to let it be heard. But woe to the group who achieved this at the expense of vitality in the other voices! As the second violinist in our quartet, I bore the brunt of many assaults when I failed to play up to the others’ sound. Since the second violin, from the audience’s point of view, traditionally sits behind the first violin, I often had to make more sound than the first in order to give the illusion of equality. In this I was a slow learner. Galimir’s repeated voicing of “not enough second violin!” became an instant refrain in our quartet.

One coaching session took place in Curtis Hall, on Beethoven’s “Harp” quartet, Opus 74. Near the end of the first movement, the first violin explodes into an extended passage of diminished arpeggios. The second violin adds a singing melody, increasing the tension, and at the exact point when the arpeggios finally resolve into the home key of E-Flat, this melody must soar. As Galimir’s favorite role was that of second violin, this was a special moment, and he was not happy.

To the first violin, who seemed to be hitting all the notes, “Soovin! Your arpeggios…I cannot hear a thing, it is a jumble! Please accent the first note of every four.” We played again, a loud foot stomp interrupting us.

“You don’t understand. Accent only the first note of every four!” Again we played the passage, and Soovin etched the requested notes into the string. Was this not what Galimir wanted?

“NO! Am I going deaf, or can I simply not hear…the first note of each four!” This time, we could not hear any notes but the first of every four, since Soovin blasted these with articulation I did not think possible. I expected satisfaction from our coach, but I had forgotten one thing.

“Wait wait wait! Where is the melody in the second violin?” After a moment of angry silence, even Galimir broke into a chuckle.

Rare as they were, there were other quiet moments, but even these struck with maximum force, such as his hearing of the slow movement from Mozart’s g minor viola quintet. At the end, he remained motionless in his chair, eyes closed, finally opening with obvious effort. “You must play this…when I go.”

“When you go where?”

“When I go.”

There were no other comments. Was this coaching? For the rest of my life I will never remember what else Galimir said about the piece, but I will be unable to play it without investing all that I have.

This story appeared in Chamber Music magazine.