Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  As we streamed into the high school practice room after dinner and took our places, I waved my bow in greeting to Melanie, Stephanie, and Miriam, who wiggled their bows back at me. In that first blush of adolescent friendship, each time we saw one another was a fresh thrill, even when we’d only been apart for a few hours. Then I settled into my seat in the back of the viola section, and the other girls sank out of view in the farthest reaches of their own sections. It was unfortunate that the four of us were so spread out that we couldn’t even see each other, because Mr. K chose this moment to show us off to the older kids. The whole orchestra apparently had been screwing up the staggered entrances.

  “Quartet weel demonstrate proper way to play,” he announced. “Girls, you play.”

  The hair on my arms stood straight up. My heart dropped to somewhere in my bowels. I had never been singled out in front of older kids. I noticed that the other violists were now craning around in their seats to get a good look at me. Their faces betrayed a bit of curiosity, and a bit more of hope that the uppity young new kid would fall on her face.

  The four of us timidly tried the passage. We were used to looking to Melanie to give us a nod to start, and then to each other as we played. But the other girls were nowhere in my line of sight. As we started to play, they sounded impossibly far away. This was so unlike our rehearsals in Mr. K’s tiny waiting room, when we were within fingertip distance of one another. The notes came out all wrong, the timing out of sync. My heartbeat sounded louder to me than my own playing.

  Mr. K scowled. “Again!”

  Tentatively, we tried it once more. I was so nervous that my bow skittered along the strings. Melanie sounded louder, more insistent this time, as she tried to lead us—will us, really, or more like pull us—from the other side of the room. You could tell the rest of us were straining to follow.

  “Again!”

  I took a deep breath, mustered my courage and attacked. This time, the four of us cut through the silence in the rehearsal room with a precision I had no idea I was capable of. Mr. K glanced at the high schoolers arrayed in front of him with a look of satisfaction. “Like that,” was all he said.

  As the performance got closer, Mr. K upped our rehearsal schedule. Almost every day it seemed we were rushing off to the high school in the afternoons or after dinner. We practiced so frequently that my fingers almost bled. The marks that violin and viola players get on their necks from gripping their instruments—the aptly nicknamed “violin hickey”—grew raw and inflamed. Mine started oozing and I had to slather it with antibiotic ointment each night.

  Mr. K didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t care. But it was a pointless exercise. The orchestra simply wasn’t able to play the Brahms. I knew it. My sisters knew it. Mr. K was the only one who hadn’t figured it out.

  One night at rehearsals, Mr. K finally realized it, too.

  “Who eez idyot who play wrong note?” he yelled, cutting off the orchestra with a dramatic “you’re out!” crosswise sweep of his arms, looking like a crazed umpire in an undertaker’s suit.

  “You play eet!” He was pointing his baton square at Michele’s face, as he sought to find the culprit in the first violin section. This was among the most dreaded of Mr. K’s methods. He would single out the players, sometimes two at a time, sometimes all by themselves, and make them play in front of the whole orchestra.

  Michele played the passage without any mistakes, then sat back with a visible sigh of relief.

  “Now you!” The baton was shoved between the eyes of the violinist sitting next to her. This girl, too, dispatched the phrase without error.

  “Now you!” he yelled, moving on to the next violinist.

  “You play!”

  “You play!”

  And down the line of violinists he went, one after the other, in search of the culprit, the idyot who dared play a wrong note.

  It was an excruciating moment. The violinists started to tremble when he got that diabolical look in his eye. You’d get heart palpitations just watching the kids with their sweaty palms and shaky fingers.

  As he went down the line, toward the less advanced players in the back, each violinist played worse than the one before—their hands shaking, their arms cramping up, their notes sounding like painful screeches. More than one broke into a flop sweat. They wiped away the grimy drops trickling down their acne-covered faces with the backs of their bow hands. Sometimes they started tearing up.

  Usually, when Mr. K finally did single out the idyot who played the wrong note, he forced the poor violinist to play over and over again alone, exposed, until he got it right. The unfortunate soul would miserably try to play while simultaneously trying to disappear, and you could see him physically shrinking down into his seat as he stared at the music and willed his fingers to move. Mr. K sang along for emphasis, his big coarse voice always off-key.

  The problem now was there wasn’t just one violinist who couldn’t play the passage; almost the entire section was muffing it. It was just too damn hard. Mr. K’s face was darkening. I saw something else there as well: defeat.

  It’s about time, I figured. We’ll never get it. Mr. K’s shoulders sagged and he lowered his arms. His conducting baton hung limply at his side. Maybe he’ll just send us home, I thought.

  But then you could just see it. He raised his head and looked out toward the back of the violin section.

  “Melanie!” he barked. “You play.”

  She played the passage quietly but spotlessly. The other violinists leaned in to listen.

  “Again!” Mr. K said. But this time, he pointed to one of the violinists having trouble, barking: “You play along with Melanie.” The kid picked up his violin, furrowing his brow as he strained to mimic the correct notes she was playing. It was a noticeable improvement.

  The gleam returned to Mr. K’s eyes.

  After that, Mr. K employed a new solution when somebody screwed up. He motioned Melanie to play along with whoever was having trouble, while he stood there clapping out the rhythm and singing along the notes. It worked surprisingly well, this method of the strong helping the weak.

  The closer we got to the performance, the harder Mr. K drove us. At rehearsals, he waved his arms wildly from side to side and leaned so far forward that it looked like he would topple from the podium right into the second violin section.

  His giant, exaggerated motions, accompanied by his ever-stomping feet, had an effect akin to putting a gorilla in a tutu on-stage in Swan Lake. I had played under a couple of other conductors by now, and my parents had taken me to see professional orchestras, and it never failed to surprise me how small those conductors’ gestures were. It seemed that they barely moved; their baton motions were economical and precise. Mr. K used an oversized baton that only made his exaggerated waving that much more frenetic. He seemed certain that big sound required giant gyrations and that soft sound… well, that required giant gyrations, too.

  One day, through the music, we suddenly noticed an odd sound. A distinctive slap-clomp slap-clomp slap-clomp. Up on the podium, Mr. K had stomped his feet so hard that his soles had separated right from his shoes. As he kept pounding out the beat, oblivious, the tips of the soles flapped open and smacked together with each step.

  All around the orchestra, you could see the smiles on the faces of the kids as they furiously played the notes. Nobody dared tell Mr. K.

  Michele was one of Mr. K’s top violin students. Pretty and popular, she had a penchant for tight bell-bottom pants worn with midriff-baring shirts.

  “Cover up your belly boot-ton!” Mr. K said every time she walked into his studio.

  For months on end that year, Mr. K gave Michele just one assignment: the first violin part for Academic Festival Overture. Every week he rehearsed that piece with her during her lessons. He drilled her on it as if it were a concerto for a solo competition. He did the same with me and his other private students. Before long, we all knew the piece almost by heart.

  Michele play
ed piano, too, and for fun would make up songs of her own, sometimes writing out duets that she could perform with Ronni on the flute. One day at school, after she packed up her violin at rehearsal, Michele handed Mr. K a piece of music she had composed herself. For the first time, she had tried orchestrating it for string instruments.

  Mr. K walked her into his office as he looked it over. You could see he was singing it to himself in his head. “Not bad,” he said, glancing back up at her.

  He sat down at his desk with a pencil and called her over. He talked through the piece with her, just as if she were a professional composer, a peer. He praised the harmonies, dissected the structure. Then he offered a suggestion—“Thees part eez awkward for violin”—to improve on a section that needed work. She took his advice, sitting at the piano in our living room and noodling over the harmonies for days. When she handed him the reworked piece, he looked it over and sang it to himself again. Then he nodded in approval.

  The piece had no name, so he gave it one: Petite Fugue. “Let’s haf orchestra geeve eet a try,” he said, and if Michele were to pick a moment when she decided to become a music teacher herself, that would be it.

  Our gala spring concert that year included the premiere of Petite Fugue, with Mr. K introducing Michele to the audience for a round of applause. Then we launched into the finale: Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture.

  In the audience, the first emotion that registered was surprise. The seats were filled with parents who had been driving back and forth to endless rehearsals and listening to their kids sawing away alone on their parts in their bedrooms. In truth, most of those kids had sounded pretty awful. The parents didn’t expect much. On their own, there wasn’t one kid in the bunch who would make you sit up and take notice. But that night, mothers and fathers turned to each other with looks of astonishment. Could this really be our kid up there on the stage?

  It was uncanny. While Mr. K was sweating and spitting and stomping on the podium, I felt myself happily disappearing into the music. The violists in front of me were swaying with the beat. Around me, the other kids were doing the same. Mr. K had achieved the impossible: he made us better than we had any right to be. It’s an extraordinary feeling, when you realize you’ve exceeded your own limits. Maybe Mr. K knew that all along. We had just figured it out.

  We couldn’t quite believe what we were doing and how much fun we were having. Apparently the audience couldn’t believe it, either. It was spectacular. It was impossible.

  It was insane.

  When it was over, the audience members leaped to their feet in a standing ovation.

  7

  The Mendelssohn

  MELANIE

  “Dammit, we are going to be late. You girls spend too much time vacuuming you hair!”

  I stifle a laugh. “Blow-drying, Dad. You mean blow-drying, not vacuuming.”

  We are in the car, lurching our way toward Maplewood, New Jersey, where my dad’s mentor, the famed violin pedagogue Samuel Applebaum, lives. My dad can’t understand why, no matter how late we are running, Steph and I will still take the time to fix our hair. We are old enough to appreciate the irony of his complaint, coming from a guy who uses about half a bottle of hairspray every day trying to coax his one overgrown lock of hair to cover his entire balding head.

  “Quiet back there! Stop that asinine laughter!”

  Steph and I started weekly violin lessons with Mr. Applebaum about a year ago, when I was in sixth grade. Lots of teachers jealously guard their best students, insisting that they not study elsewhere. My dad is the opposite. When his students reach a certain degree of proficiency, he pushes them from the nest, introducing them to colleagues who teach at more advanced levels. As we take our weekly drives up the Garden State Parkway to Mr. Applebaum’s house, my dad alternates between railing at us for being late and issuing instructions.

  “As soon as I stop the car, you run inside, unpack as fast as you can, and apologize to Mr. Applebaum for keeping heem waiting.”

  “Steph, deed you remember your lesson assignment card?”

  “Mel, I hope you really learned your étude thees time. Last week eet sounded like you were sight-reading. Sheet! Look at thees traffic! Thees eez why I wanted to leave on time!”

  Of all Daddy’s colleagues, Samuel Applebaum is perhaps the most well known. He is one of the most influential string teachers in the world, the author of dozens of instruction books. Daddy follows the Applebaum method for all of his students, and uses Applebaum arrangements of songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Au Claire de la Lune” for his beginner orchestra. In music circles, Mr. Applebaum is famous for his fourteen-volume series on teaching, The Way They Play, featuring interviews and photographs of him with the great musicians of the day, from cellist Pablo Casals to violinist Yehudi Menuhin to his son, violist Michael Tree. In book two there’s one of him teaching me, at age eight.

  My father first met Sam Applebaum as a Rutgers student. Since I started playing violin, Daddy has taken me to see him regularly, so he can check on my progress. I am frequently used as a guinea pig to demonstrate various teaching techniques in workshops he leads for string teachers and in master classes he teaches for students. He taught me vibrato, onstage, when I was six.

  Mr. Applebaum’s house is modest, no bigger than ours, but every room is stuffed with books, manuscripts, and memorabilia. The studio is crowded, with overflowing shelves full of crumbling brown music and stacks of crisp, colorful method books all over the floor. There’s barely enough space for me to stand beside his big reclining chair that is placed strategically between the piano and his pupil. The ceiling is so low that even though I’m not yet five feet tall, I sometimes smack it with my bow when I do the dramatic flourishes he asks, and I wonder how his adult-size students manage. Photos covering every surface are inscribed by the world’s great musicians, most of whom at one point or another have made a pilgrimage to his home for meals cooked by his poet wife and for impromptu chamber music sessions in the living room.

  Mr. Applebaum’s first assignment for me is real, grown-up music: the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E Minor, my mom’s all-time favorite. I have long dreamed of playing it and making it my own. It’s one thing to listen to recordings of great artists performing, but that is nothing compared with the magic of being able to create the sounds myself.

  Guided by Mr. Applebaum, I practice furiously, learn the concerto relatively quickly, and it soon becomes my “go-to” piece. My father leaps at the opportunity to show me off and, with the aid of the mother of one of his students, who accompanies me on the piano, I take that Mendelssohn concerto on the road, from Pennsylvania to Maine. For me, it’s fun to perform a challenging piece that has everything, including beautiful melodies and enough fast, brilliant, showy passages to impress anyone. At eleven, it still hasn’t really sunk in that performing is supposed to be a nerve-racking experience.

  But that’s about to change.

  When school lets out, my father and Mr. Applebaum put together a workshop for the summer ASTA conference that will include a performance of the Mendelssohn. I am used to doing these workshops. But my father, who already has his hands full running the growing conference, seems unusually stressed about it.

  His stature is growing—he is president of the state chapter of ASTA—and so is his visibility. As he gets more acclaim, rivals are taking notice and sometimes taking aim. The audience will be made up almost entirely of musicians, including the colleagues he admires most. His reputation is on the line.

  Samuel Applebaum gives a lecture about musical interpretation while Melanie, age eleven, demonstrates passages from the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

  Before the performance, Mr. Applebaum speaks while I demonstrate. We’re comfortable together, and he never fails to charm and entertain his audience. When the time comes to play the piece through, I feel calm as I move into place beside the piano on the stage of Hickman Hall, not feeling the air-conditioned chill even in my blue-flo
wered minidress as my adrenaline begins to flow. Soon I am deeply engrossed in my performance, playing the piece from memory, as usual.

  But then something happens, something that has never happened to me before. My mind wanders, just for a split second—maybe it’s the flashbulbs popping from the audience, or perhaps I’ve just absorbed some of my dad’s nervousness—but all of a sudden I’m lost. I have no idea where I am, what to play next. Behind me I can hear Mr. Applebaum frantically flipping the pages of my music, in an effort to find my place and rescue me.

  I never use the music in performance, never need to use the music; I know this piece cold. I could perform it in my sleep. Except here I am floundering away, dying onstage right in front of all my friends, my teachers, my father and all his respected colleagues. Time stands still, and the moment feels like it lasts forever. I don’t remember how it finally ends; I get back on track somehow, miraculously get to the end of the piece alive, but all I want is to get off that stage as fast as I can and never, ever, ever, ever get back on it again.

  Mr. Applebaum gives my arm an affectionate squeeze as I hurry toward the wings. He has seen this happen countless times and will later regale us with stories of famous artists’ worst memory slips.

  My dad isn’t so sanguine. Afterward, in the hallway outside the auditorium, with the applause inexplicably still lingering in the air, he scowls: “If you had practiced harder, that would never have happened.”

  JOANNE

  Melanie was already a seasoned soloist by the time she performed the Mendelssohn that day. In a demure minidress, her long red bangs swept back dramatically with a barrette, she would always stride with quiet confidence onto the stage, commanding the room even before she started to play. I lost track of the number of times I sat in an audience, watching her perform. The Mendelssohn was my favorite.