The truth is, there weren’t too many stunts Mr. K wouldn’t try, if it would win him just one more young student. He was especially eager to recruit boys. When he took the high school orchestra to elementary schools, he always called on the two tallest, most handsome violinists to perform a duet. “Now eef any of you boys in the audience steel think violin eez for sissies,” he would say when they finished, “these two young men weel be happy to discuss weeth you afterward on the playground. Eef you dare.”
The high school boys, the braver ones, were the ones who pulled pranks on Mr. K. Before each concert, they would hide a Playboy magazine centerfold in his music. When he was in a good mood, he would chuckle and give the boys an appreciative wink. But once, when his mood was sour, the boys mistakenly slipped the centerfold into the middle of the most difficult piece. As Mr. K turned the page mid-symphony, his eyes widened, his face contorted with rage, and he furiously tore the centerfold out of his music with a grand sweep of his arm. As the orchestra played on, Playmate of the Year Miss 1978 fluttered slowly over the front rows of the startled audience.
Senior year, when auditions for regional orchestra rolled around, Mr. K won the trifecta. Melanie made concertmaster of the orchestra for the fourth year in a row. Miriam was named principal cellist. I was principal violist. Stephanie, in her first year of eligibility, was a first violinist. In all, twenty-three East Brunswick students made the cut. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising when the Music Teachers’ Association announced its choice to conduct the orchestra: Mr. K.
For our final concert, the high school orchestra chipped in to buy Mr. K a present: a new podium. It was fresh and clean and sturdy, with not a scuff on it. It had a brass plaque with his name engraved on the side. Best of all, it had carpeting on top to muffle the stomping we’d been listening to for the past ten years. He thanked us politely but stopped using it as soon as he could. He preferred the worn, old, hollow wooden box—the one on which I had first seen him as a kindergartener—where his footfalls echoed out as loud as gunshots.
As we barreled toward graduation, Mr. K offered to help me make an audition tape for college applications. Walking into his studio for the recording session, I was struck by how small and dark it was. I hadn’t played for him in this room for a long time now. It seemed a lifetime ago that I had moved on to lessons with Paul Doktor at his apartment in Manhattan, with its airy high-ceilinged living room and two walls of windows looking out over Broadway.
Perhaps noticing my unease, Mr. K asked me about my thoughts on college.
I told him about my visits to campuses, about the schools I liked most. I told him I wanted to be a journalist. Then I confessed that I narrowed down my college list based not on journalism courses but on music programs. I had talked it over with my parents. We figured that any of the places we visited would offer a fine education—but only a few would also offer the chance to play with a great student orchestra.
“I love music. That’s why I could never do it for a living,” I said. “It would ruin it for me.”
Mr. K nodded. He understood. Then he turned to the tape machine, his finger hovering over the “record” button, signaling the conversation was over.
“Again,” he said.
He spent hours with me making that tape. I think I thanked him when he was done, but I don’t remember. When it came time to get a recommendation letter for college, I didn’t ask him. I figured colleges would rather hear from somebody important. I asked Paul Doktor instead.
One of the last times the quartet performed together was during our senior year of high school. There was a terrible car crash that weekend, just around the corner from my house. Two classmates died in the wreck.
Mr. K called us together afterward to tell us we would be performing at the funeral of one of the boys, a popular athlete. We gathered in the small high school classroom Mr. K used for chamber music rehearsals. He handed us the music selection: the Beatles’ song “Yesterday.” The boy’s little sister was a beginner violinist, Mr. K explained. “He loved to listen to her play.” Our quartet would symbolize that devotion.
The funeral was during a school day. Melanie, Miriam, and I drove to the church in silence, with our teacher Darlene Brandt at the wheel of her car. She was going to fill in for Stephanie on second violin, since Steph was still in junior high school on the other side of town.
Inside the church, we set up in the balcony and waited for our cue. From our perch, we looked down on an unimaginable sight: a casket being carried by teenage pallbearers wearing their varsity jackets buttoned up to the neck. In the front of the church sat the boy’s sister, a beautiful little blond girl. At one point she turned around. She glanced up at us in the balcony. I could see she was looking straight into Melanie’s eyes.
None of us spoke. When it was time to play, we gently eased into the bittersweet strains of the song, trading melody and harmony, one to the other. There’s a bond created by musicians who play together. It was clear to us then that the bond wasn’t something that comes and goes or depends on your mood. It stays with you and gets stronger with time; the more you test it and try it and push it, the more you punish it even, the more powerful it becomes. We played the song, and, without exchanging a word, we mourned together.
PART IV
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
—WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
13
The Conservatory
MELANIE
My dad narrows down my college choices for me. I am only allowed to apply to music schools and only those with a music education program, so that I can become a teacher. That eliminates Juilliard and the Curtis Institute of Music. Indiana University, with its superb music department, is too far away. The Manhattan School of Music is in New York City, according to my father a “wolfish” place where I might not survive.
After much thought, my dad settles on the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he knows a violin teacher, and the New England Conservatory in Boston. When I am accepted into both, we choose New England because it offers a larger scholarship.
My first day, Dad and Steph help me move into the eight-story dorm. We wait for the ancient elevator with a line of other families stretching almost out the door to Gainsborough Street. Milk crates overflow with sheet music, and garbage bags are crammed almost to bursting with bedding and clothes, all stacked high around tuba and cello cases, with barely enough room for the people squeezed in between. The elevators groan in protest as the doors laboriously slide shut. After we finally make it up to the top floor and unpack, I hug my dad and Steph good-bye near the stairs.
As they head down on foot, the stairwell is deserted and silent. Then Steph’s voice pierces the air.
“Daddy? Are you crying?”
If you listen hard, you can hear the faintest sound of sobbing.
“Just a little. Okay?” comes my father’s reply.
My dad may be the one crying, but I am the one who is worried. I have been running our house for four years. Before I leave for school, I go over the checklist with Steph: cooking, cleaning, laundry. I show her how to bake chicken with lots of garlic, the way my dad likes it. His roast beef must be so well done that it’s almost burned. No pink! Mashed potatoes have to come from a box: my dad, having discovered American convenience foods, thinks potato buds are like a small miracle from God.
I am afraid that with those two tempers on the loose in the house, their battles will get out of control. I can imagine Steph after a screaming match, flying out the door and slamming it so hard behind her that the windowpanes rattle. I can see my dad, alone in his studio late at night, after his last student has left, eating tuna fish from the can. Without me there to mediate, who knows what will happen?
My mom, still in the hospital, isn’t able to help. After I head off to college, she moves into a single room. It has the heavy air of permanence, rather t
han the transience of the room she shared with two rotating patients. She converts the shower stall into a closet for the dresses she continues to buy; a seamstress splits each one straight down the back so she can slip them on while in her wheelchair. The new room is a tangible manifestation of the realization we all share but that none of us speak aloud: My mother isn’t coming home. She will never live in her own house again.
At school, worried about my dad and Steph, I call home as frequently as I can. On Saturdays, I commandeer the lobby pay phone next to the cafeteria, watching the swarms of waist-high conservatory prep students carrying tiny violins, parents in tow. The little kids, some of them barely out of preschool, remind me of Steph and me, in what seems like a lifetime ago.
“How’s it going at home?” I ask anxiously, when Steph answers the phone.
Surprisingly, things aren’t as bad as I feared. In my absence, it seems, a truce of sorts is forming.
“Not bad,” she answers.
“Are you guys eating cereal for dinner every night?” I ask.
“Nope.” In fact, Steph tells me proudly, she tried a new recipe for egg-drop soup for dinner just the other night.
“How was it?”
“Awful.”
Steph giggles as she tells me how my dad choked it down anyway and tried his hardest to be diplomatic about it. “He ate most of it,” Steph tells me. “Then he said, ‘Eeet’s good… buuut let’s not haf eet again for a looooong time.’ ”
From a distance, I can see more clearly that the two of them—my father and sister—are far more like each other than either one is like me: short, dark, with fierce tempers. Passionate. Emotional. “Steph’s eyes were soulful from the moment she was born,” my dad’s old student Darlene Brandt always says.
For my dad’s birthday, Steph writes him a poem:
The father looked at his daughter
But he saw only rebellion in her gaze
Not recognizing it as the same fire which brimmed in his eyes
But insolence, which masked their light…
So alike—so unyielding
Emotional mirrors staring at each other
Yet not recognizing the images reflecting back
More than twenty-five years later, looking through my dad’s papers, I will find that poem carefully packed in a shoebox and tied with a frayed brown string. Beneath the poem lies a stack of all the cards and pictures, in bright crayon with bits of yarn and felt attached, that Steph had made for him since she was a little girl.
“Don’t play like a music educator!” My chamber music coach, Benjamin Zander, spits out the words as we rehearse Schumann’s Piano Quintet. “Play like a violinist!”
At the New England Conservatory, I quickly learn that life is all about performance, not academics. My double major in music education along with violin performance mostly earns me grief. Some of the students don’t know the school even has a music education department. My violin teacher, Eric Rosenblith, thinks there must be some mistake.
“My dear, my paperwork has you down as an education major? You’ll have to go see the registrar and correct this…” Shuffling through a sheaf of forms, Mr. Rosenblith peers at me over his glasses.
I’m unpacking my violin in his big, sparsely furnished studio for our first lesson.
“No, that’s right. A double major, actually, education and performance.” Nervously, I wipe my sweaty palms on my pale pink skirt. I’m eager to get started and determined to make a good first impression. I am also clueless about the implications of what I have just said.
As head of the string department, Mr. Rosenblith can have his pick of any student at the school, and places in his violin studio are highly coveted. Why should he squander one of them on someone who might end up conducting a high school band someday?
In my naïveté, I don’t realize then what a disregard for his stature I have just betrayed.
“But, my dear, may I ask why?”
I answer honestly. “My father wants me to. I mean, I want to, too.”
He regards me with curiosity.
Nervously, I plow ahead.
“He’s a teacher, the head of a music department actually. I’m going to be like him, I hope, do what he does someday. Also, he thinks it’s important to have a degree that will help me get a job when I graduate.”
My dad’s words still resonate in my head. He has ranted countless times, how “keeds grahduate from conservatory weeth useless degree, like piece of toilet paper, that qualifies them to do ahbsolutely nothing!” But I don’t think Mr. Rosenblith would want to hear that part.
He is silent, so I go on. “But I also love playing, I want to see if I can get really good…” I trail off.
Mr. Rosenblith nods and changes the subject.
We talk for a long while. He asks about my family, former teachers, pieces I know and would like to know, practice routines. When he finds out that I usually practice about two hours a day, Mr. Rosenblith is taken aback.
“I am surprised that you got this good on so little practicing. Things are different here, and that’s what concerns me about your schedule. How are you going to find the time to practice your thirty-five to forty hours per week?”
Forty hours a week? Is he serious?
“You will have to take so many classes…” He draws out that last word with obvious distaste. “I would hate to have to drop you as a student…”
I hastily wipe away the tears brimming in my eyes. “I’ll practice, I’ll work hard, I promise! I can do it, please just give me a chance.” I’m confused. I have spent my entire life surrounded by music, and in my world, music teachers are admired, even revered. It never occurred to me that there could be a stigma attached to pursuing a music education degree.
Mr. Rosenblith isn’t the only one who is puzzled. I notice conductors, coaches, and teachers looking at me quizzically. Sometimes they pull me aside, asking, “Why would you want to be an education major?” I explain that I want to be a teacher, and they walk away baffled, shaking their heads.
I don’t get it. They’re teachers, aren’t they? Don’t they value teaching? At my sophomore violin performance evaluation, one of the faculty members writes a comment: “Excellent talent. Don’t waste it!”
Juggling both majors leaves no time for anything other than rehearsals, lessons, coaching sessions, and classes. I get good grades, though I know better than to advertise this to Mr. Rosenblith. “If you are getting good grades it means you are working too hard in your classes and not hard enough on your violin. Can’t you get away with a gentleman’s C?” he queries one of my fellow students in our weekly master class after “too much studying” is given as an excuse for a poor performance. To me it is unthinkable not to do whatever classwork is required. Besides, I can’t imagine trying to explain a C to my father.
Somewhat to my surprise, it turns out that I love the extra practice time. The hours melt away as I find myself utterly absorbed in the regimen Mr. Rosenblith assigns. My dad is right: hard work really does lead to happiness. Actually, for me right now, hard work is happiness. And even though he is no longer there every day to tell me to practice or to say “discipline yourself,” I realize that somewhere along the way my father’s words have become a part of me. In return for my efforts, Mr. Rosenblith showers me with praise, affection, and extra lessons, all of which I eagerly accept.
Gradually, teachers begin to overlook my odd penchant for flute classes and choral conducting seminars, and to consider me a “real” violinist, though I never make it into the group that I mentally dub “the elite string players.” They are the principals in the orchestras, the concerto competition winners, the most sought-after chamber music partners. During their breaks they congregate in the cafeteria, smoking cigarettes and sipping black coffee while comparing opinions about Beethoven’s metronome markings. They ignore me as I trudge by with a stack of textbooks, a clarinet under my arm, and a violin strapped to my back, and I can’t help feeling envious. They are the conf
ident ones, the ones who never doubt that they’ll make it in the performance world, the ones who don’t worry about having a teaching degree so they can be sure to have a job someday.
The workload is crushing, but I don’t consider abandoning the music education degree. I never think about being anything other than a music teacher, just like my father. That’s what I’m meant to do… isn’t it?
With one semester to go, I finally reach the home stretch. Almost there. The final requirement for my education degree is student teaching in a classroom. Just before I start, I drop by the apartment of a friend, another music ed major who is already deep into his student-teaching gig.
He’s at the kitchen table, poring over his lesson plan. That is the moment it strikes me, the realization that for an entire semester I will be working at a school all day and planning at night. How will I find forty extra hours a week to practice the violin? So far, I’ve managed through a combination of long hours, skipped meals, caffeine, and no sleep, but I’m about to run up against the finite number of hours in a day. It will be mathematically impossible.
Can I get by for the next five months without enough time to practice? Can I imagine not playing the violin?
Maybe I can do it, I think.
No, I can’t do it! I can’t give up playing my violin for a whole semester!
My decision is made. Just one step away from getting my music education degree, I drop out of the program. I will graduate with a single major: performance.
Who knows if I can really make it as a performer? The vast majority of conservatory graduates don’t ever land jobs with major symphony orchestras, and many don’t make a living in music at all. But I am determined to give it my all to find out.
The next step is telling my dad.
I brace myself for recriminations. I rehearse in my head how I will explain.
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