Q: Why did the violist marry the accordion player?
A: Upward mobility.
“The viola is often merely a source of anxiety to the composer,” wrote British musicologist Cecil Forsyth in his 1914 book Orchestration. “We feel that he must have regarded its existence as something in the nature of a prehistoric survival. The instrument was there and had to be written for.” As a result, the great classical composers wrote orchestral parts in which the viola “either did nothing or something which by the ingenuity of the composer was made to appear as much like nothing as possible.”
Time has not mellowed that view. Type “famous violists” into Google, and until recently it would ask, “Do you mean famous violinists?” Type simply “violists,” and the top result was “Viola Jokes (part 1).”
It doesn’t help matters that the viola is ludicrously difficult to play. As with a violin, the instrument is held up not by your arm but by clenching it between your chin and neck. But because a viola is heavier than a violin, the strain of holding it up guarantees you a permanent backache, a throbbing between the shoulder blades that no spa day can soothe. The instrument is longer than a violin, too, which means you have to stretch your left arm far away from your body at an awkward angle to play it. It’s confounding to move your left arm, hand, and fingers in any coordinated fashion deftly enough to produce notes quickly and accurately. Altogether, it’s a lumbering, potentially graceless affair.
And yet when it is played well, there is no more beautiful instrument. Deep and mellow, the viola is the instrumental equivalent to an alto or a tenor voice in a choir. At its best, it conveys emotional depths and nuances that other instruments can’t. For me, it was perfect. As far as I was concerned, my three favorite violists—Paul Doktor, Raphael Hillyer, and Walter Trampler, all of them gods among viola cognoscenti—left the actual Three Tenors in their dust. Some of the great composers were violists themselves, from Johann Sebastian Bach—who was said to prefer playing the instrument above all others—to Antonín Dvořák to Paul Hindemith. So was Jimi Hendrix, before he switched over to electric guitar.
Mr. K had a special affinity for the viola, too. “I’m romanteek slob,” he often said, and he warmed to its soulful sound. It’s fashionable among music savants to be disdainful of melodic, romantic music. People who really know music will roll their eyes over the melodramatic excess of popular classics like the 1812 Overture by Russian composer Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky. They prefer instead the intellectually rigorous, often atonal, the-more-sterile-the-better challenge of contemporary music.
But Mr. K was unabashed. He programmed as many of the overwrought classic orchestral works as his kids could manage and often added in schmaltzy Ukrainian folk songs that he had written out and arranged himself. He would conduct them with great, grand sweeping gestures, throwing himself into the music with unapologetic abandon, stretching out one arm and shaking it as if to pull in more, bigger, sappier sound.
“Thees concert would not be complete,” he would tell the audience, “without raw Slavic sentimentality.”
As it turns out, if raw Slavic sentimentality is what you’re after, then the viola is for you. I never once heard Mr. K tell a viola joke.
My first viola lessons, with a group of other ten-year-olds, were in the summer after fourth grade, taught by two of Mr. K’s best violin students early each morning in the oppressively un-air-conditioned performance room at the high school. Each had a calloused, angry red welt under her chin, the badge of a violinist who practices hours each day. One had deep grooves etched permanently in the fingertips of her left hand, an imprint left by the strings of her violin.
Every morning, in shorts and a T-shirt, with my frizzy hair pulled into pigtails against the New Jersey humidity, I would laboriously fold my fingers into place as the teachers pushed my elbow out, my wrist back, my pinky up. One day, while practicing our bowing on the instrument’s four open strings—drawing the bow across the A, D, G, and low C strings, one at a time—I could feel the energy of the room change. Before I even turned around to look at the door behind me, I knew he was there. I straightened in my chair, focused on moving the bow as smoothly as possible, and looked up at the anticipation reflected in my teenage teachers’ eyes.
Mr. K strode into the room, wearing a white short-sleeved dress shirt with a tightly knotted tie despite the wilting heat. You could already see the muscles tensing in his forearms. With his trim mustache and fierce mien, he looked more like a union boss, or maybe an off-duty ironworker angling to pick a bar fight, than a violin teacher. He eyed us intently, unsmiling. Slowly, he walked over to the student to my right and jerked the boy’s neck into the proper position over the chin rest. Then he approached the girl to my left and jabbed her elbow. Finally, he walked over to me. I could feel my breath catching in my throat as he bent over to examine both hands and arms.
Here goes.
He gave my left wrist a sharp nudge.
Yikes.
He gave my right elbow a rough yank.
Ow!
He straightened up and fixed his cold, remorseless gaze on me.
Crap.
And then he spoke his first words to me: “Not bad.”
Clearly, Mr. K saw something the rest of us didn’t. With an unsharpened pencil in one hand, the better to poke and prod, he corrected me over and over again that summer, singling me out from the group. Then when my fingers were burning, he barked: “Again!”
When I look through my earliest music lesson books, they are filled with Mr. K’s handwriting in big red capital letters. Mostly, what he wrote was “AGAIN!” If you were to count up all the words he ever uttered in his entire life, I have no doubt that again would come out at number one.
It quickly became apparent that to Mr. K, there was no such thing as an untalented kid—just a kid who didn’t work hard enough. You are going to fix this problem, he said when he diagnosed whatever was wrong, and there was never any question. Of course you would. It was just a matter of trying and trying and trying some more. He yelled not because we’d never learn, but because he was absolutely certain that we would.
In the eternal debate over nature versus nurture, Mr. K came down unequivocally on the side of nurture. Admittedly, his students, including me, would have been hard-pressed to identify that quality in his particular brand of torture. But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear he didn’t care how much innate talent you had. He believed any kid could learn to play an instrument, even someone with a proven track record of failure like me.
“Now you listen to me, seester,” he would bark when he got frustrated. And eventually, no matter how much or how little God-given talent you started out with, you actually did get it right. You knew you did, because Mr. K would give you that highest compliment of all, the one that made you run home and practice even harder: “Not bad.”
There was already too much coddling of kids in school, as far as Mr. K was concerned. The school reform movement that started in the late 1960s had finally, in the 1970s, taken hold in East Brunswick, too. The women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the era of progressive politics all fed into a new paradigm of teaching that emphasized building up children’s self-esteem and that replaced discipline with praise. The teacher-led model of the classroom morphed into a student-centric model.
In East Brunswick, that translated into “open classrooms” presided over by sideburned teachers who wore Tom Jones–style shirts with tufts of chest hair peeking out and who you just knew spent their weekends at transcendental meditation retreats. The high school abandoned most of its rote learn-the-dates history courses in favor of fact-free seminars like “Racial and Cultural Minorities.” Years later I would say, only half jokingly, that I became a remedial history major in college—I needed to load up on so many courses simply to catch up on the basics that I ended up fulfilling most of the requirements of the major.
Mr. K had nothing but contempt for it all, sticking to his formula of discipline, repe
tition, and hollering. His insults were cutting; he didn’t care whose feelings he bruised. Once, when one of my classmates proudly displayed a Jackson Pollock–inspired abstract-art project on the rehearsal room floor, he called for the janitor, erupting, “What eez thees mess? Who let the dog een here?”
Yet there was something intoxicating about a teacher who had such absolute confidence—faith, really—in my ability to do better. Whatever I managed to achieve, he expected more. All I had to do was work harder. It was a simple formula, really, and it seeped into my consciousness without me even realizing it. If I imagined a ceiling on my ability, he raised the roof higher and then shattered it altogether. How far could I go? He gave me no sense of limits, so I set none for myself.
Mr. K required beginners to keep track of daily practice time. My first official “practice report card,” signed weekly by my father, documented my growing resolve: thirty minutes one day, sixty minutes the next, then ninety, then two hours. My determination was matched only by the patience of my parents, my sisters, and Skippy as I screeched and scratched my way through my exercises for hours at a time. Each time Mr. K doled out a criticism, I would go home and up my practice time by an extra half hour. A much more rare compliment, and I’d up it by an hour. I don’t remember now what I was practicing, but I do remember what I learned: Never give up. Never give in. Trust that I can always do better.
I’d been playing for less than a year when Mr. K approached my parents. I was sufficiently motivated, he told them, to study privately with him.
The first private lesson I took with Mr. K, in the sixth grade, is the first time I remember being truly scared, that kind of belt-choking-your-gut jitteriness that prevents you from eating your dinner. I went with Michele, who was already his private student and knew the routine. Mr. K’s house was on the other side of the highway. It was a plain house for such a grand personality: a slightly tired split-level with cement front steps leading into a small entrance hallway. Half a flight of stairs led up to the living quarters, where I caught a glimpse of Mr. K’s daughter Melanie clearing the dishes in the kitchen—the first time I had ever seen her not onstage and not holding a violin. Half a flight down led to Mr. K’s basement music studio. Both staircases were narrow, made narrower still by the chair lift that ran on a track attached to the wall, apparently for Mrs. K, whom I could hear doling out orders upstairs but could not see.
Michele had her lesson first. While I sat in the waiting room outside his studio, Mr. K’s younger daughter, Stephanie, darted down the stairs to introduce herself. She was a tiny scrap of a kid, giggling, her stick-straight dark hair flying every which way, her delighted expression looking like somebody just offered her an ice-cream cone, and she was holding out a crayon picture she had drawn for me. She plopped herself down on the arm of my chair, put her arm around my neck, and peered down at the book I was reading.
The book was called The Bog People, and it was about corpses that had been unwittingly preserved for thousands of years in Danish peat bogs. It had sublimely graphic photos—most of the “bog people” died macabre deaths from stabbings, hangings, throat-slittings, mutilations, and an assortment of other atrocities before being dumped by their Iron Age murderers into the bogs—and the photos showed bodies that were basically pickled, with everything preserved from their skin to their clothes to the last meals in their stomachs. I began reading aloud, forgetting my nervousness as we icked and eewed and shrieked our way from one deliciously grotesque photo to the next.
We were so immersed that we didn’t notice the studio door had opened, until Mr. K poked his head out.
“Stephanie, get your keester upstairs! You better practice, seester!”
“Sorry, Daddy!” She disappeared upstairs before he even finished yelling.
Clearly, this was a regular routine.
When my turn came, I was ushered into his studio, which turned out to be a small, cluttered room, overflowing with instrument cases and sheet music and metronomes and vinyl records pulled out of their sleeves, with no visible clear surface anywhere except the spot next to the battered upright piano where I was to stand. A rubber chicken dangled by its feet from one wall. When he rehearsed the high school orchestra, Mr. K regularly yelled at kids for plucking at their instruments’ strings while he was speaking. “Stop that cheeken plocking!” he would scream. One day, when he started going on about “cheeken plocking,” the rubber chicken came sailing toward him out of the percussion section. Mr. K had brought it home and strung it up like a hunting trophy.
Mr. K sat perched on his chair in front of the piano. One hand gripped a pencil, poised to jab at me as I played my lesson assignments. The other hand rarely strayed from the piano keyboard, where he would bang out notes to correct my pitch when I played out of tune.
I knew I didn’t have much to offer. I only had to compare myself to my sisters, both of whom were far more advanced on their instruments than I was. Sometimes I listened to recordings of their concerts. I had purloined one of my favorites from Michele’s room: a performance in Atlantic City a few years back, when Michele was playing with the junior high school orchestra and Mr. K’s daughter Melanie had performed Concertino, a solo written just for her. It was a spectacularly showy and difficult piece, full of complicated runs and ridiculously high notes that Melanie played at heart-stopping speed.
Meanwhile, I was just starting book two of the String Builder beginner series, written by pedagogue Samuel Applebaum. It had songs that were two lines long. The songs had names like “The Fishy Scales” and “The Elephant Takes a Walk.”
Mr. K sat coiled regardless, ready to strike as I played through the simple melodies. “Don’t crush bow een to strings!” he would say, stopping me. Then, “Sweep the bow!” Then, “Listen!”
While I was sawing my way through “Little Brown Jug” for the umpteenth time, trying to play with “smooth bow!” he barked into an intercom on the wall, connected to the kitchen upstairs: “Melanie, bring me my tea!”
Moments later, his redheaded daughter quietly opened the door, china cup and saucer in hand, silently handing it to her father. We had never met, though I had watched her perform many times before. Everybody in school knew who Melanie was. Probably everybody in town knew who she was, because the newspapers always wrote about her concerts and printed her picture. She was a celebrity. She may as well have been one of those child actors you saw on TV—remote, unknowable, not quite real, a world apart from the kids I played kickball with on the playground every day. It was hard to conceive of her doing anything ordinary. If Ali MacGraw had stepped out of the movie Love Story to hand Mr. K his teacup, it wouldn’t have been any more improbable.
I looked up awkwardly from “Little Brown Jug,” suddenly and acutely aware that I was playing out of tune.
She glanced back at me through a fringe of eyelashes and whispered an almost inaudible “hello” as she ducked out, closing the door quickly behind her.
Mr. K turned back to me and said simply, “Again!”
In music, the phrase double time means you play a piece twice as fast as before. With Mr. K, double time could also describe the speed with which he pushed me along.
Two months—and untold man-hours of practice time, pencil pokes, and shouts of “Again!”—after I started private lessons with him, I had finished book two of the String Builder series. Within a few months after that, I had moved on to my first “real” concerto, Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G Major.
I was named principal violist—the leader of the section—first of the beginner orchestra, then of the sixth grade orchestra. I would sometimes practice two hours or more a day. Every afternoon, I came home from school, raided the kitchen pantry, and wolfed down three or four packages of Yodels or Hostess cupcakes with a big glass of milk, stealing a glance at my mom while she scrubbed the potatoes for dinner, silently praying that she wouldn’t notice how much I was snacking and complain that I was ruining my appetite. Then I would rush through my homework so that I coul
d have more time to practice.
Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the extra practice time affected my schoolwork. My teacher noted it the night my parents showed up for parent-teacher conferences that fall. Like all Lipman girls, I was expected to get good grades. This time around, my teacher wanted to talk about something else.
As my parents folded themselves into the wooden school desks, they waited for the usual set of adjectives teachers used to describe me. Shy. Tentative. I needed to become “more forceful,” as my teacher the previous year had written on my fall progress report. But now, the teacher was using an entirely unfamiliar set of words like confident and assertive.
Maybe it was thanks to Ronni, who outfitted me in her cool hand-me-down bell-bottoms. Maybe it was because of Michele, who brought home her high school books so I could write reports on Love Story and Animal Farm instead of Hardy Boys mysteries. But just maybe the music had something to do with it.
I was still in elementary school, but Mr. K told my parents he was going to promote me into the high school orchestra.
Still, I wasn’t prepared for what came next, when Mr. K somehow got it into his head that I was ready to play in a string quartet with his talented daughters.
MELANIE
Joanne comes flying into the rehearsal room in the shortest shorts I’ve ever seen, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a pop-top shirt, her hair in pigtails. Miriam follows, laughing, easily carrying her cello in one hand, her long hair loose and falling past her waist. Steph and I are already waiting. Despite the August heat, we both have on long pants—not blue jeans, of course—and modest T-shirts with high necks. My dad doesn’t approve of short shorts. He doesn’t like skimpy shirts, either, and is always yelling at his teenage girl students, “Cover up you belly boot-ton!”
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