Step back with me to August of 2004. It was summertime in Chicago, I had just started dating Akiko, and I was about to fly across the world for my first ever international competition. Things were good. Here’s 2004 Nathan looking ahead to that summer’s doings:

Before a competition or audition, it’s not a bad idea to schedule one or more warm-up performances so that you can wrap your mind (and your hands) around playing your repertoire on stage. As Dr. Seuss said in Oh, The Places You’ll Go:

“out there, things can happen
and frequently do”

On this particular day in August, something did indeed happen, something I’m not proud of. Finally, after more than a decade, I’m ready to laugh about it with all of you. Turn up your speakers or pop in your earbuds, because you’re visiting the Chicago Cultural Center for the Dame Myra Hess concert series. Kuang-Hao Huang joined me on piano, and the listeners of WFMT joined us live on the air. Carl Grapentine was our genial radio host, and fortunately he was quick on his feet that day!

Before the concert, I was a bit nervous because just a day earlier, I had broken an E string. I worried that the new one wouldn’t hold its pitch. I worried that it might whistle. I was blissfully unaware of what should have been my biggest worry.

After some Beethoven (the Romance in F and the Sonata №8 in G), we launched into Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen. Things started off without incident:

https://www.natesviolin.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/intro.mp4

Just before the devilish final section of the piece, there is a long lamentation that climbs ever upward, finishing on a high C. As we reached that moment of calm, I could feel the blood start to course through my arms, preparing my hands for the frenzied fun ahead. Kuang-Hao handled the sudden mood change, and I nearly jumped in early:

At first, both hands kept going as if nothing was wrong, but my left hand quickly realized that there was no wiry E string underneath its fingers. As I turned to Kuang-Hao, I gritted my teeth imagining the hasty retreat backstage, the hurried string change, the brief retune, then a desperate attempt to refocus the dissipated energy in the room.

Then I had a sickening realization: that new E string I had put on the day before had been my last. There were no more. I remembered thinking, as I had unwrapped the string, “Make sure to get another one before tomorrow’s show.” But other things must have seemed more important: a new episode of Fear Factor, perhaps. Now tomorrow was today.

And this wasn’t a concerto performance, where I could just switch fiddles with the concertmaster. It wasn’t even a string quartet concert, where my fellow violinist might have a spare string in his case. I was well and truly sunk unless someone there had a spare violin or at least an E string.

Akiko was in the audience, but she didn’t have her violin with her. Plus, I remembered her telling me that she had never broken a string in performance. How is that even possible? I thought. We just started dating…is that one of those lies you tell to make yourself more attractive? Well, this isn’t going to help my standing with her.

My cry for help, “Do we have an extra E string in the house?” got a nice laugh. Carl Grapentine carried on the broadcast for our remote listeners, while the live audience murmured away. Carl’s pause and “Hmmmm!” pretty much said it all:

After what felt like five minutes but was really just fifteen seconds, I saw that I was out of options. Short of digging up Paganini (or maybe Roman Kim) and having him play the end of the piece on three strings, I had to call it. My goose was cooked. I managed something between a bow and a curtsy, which brought the audience to its feet, in order to leave. There was applause, though I assume most of it was for my intrepid pianist.

Let’s throw it back to Carl Grapentine for the call:

So, to recap:

• Don’t be like 2004 Nathan.
• Every time you change a string, make sure you have another…better yet, two!
• Every time you perform, make sure you have a friend in the audience with a spare violin.
• It turns out that a guy who would later become a good friend was in the audience, with a spare violin. That was the first time he had ever laid eyes on me, and when disaster struck, he thought: I’ve got this violin. But it isn’t even mine. I’m borrowing it. Should I run up and offer it to him? I can’t be the only person here with a violin. Oh wait, he’s bowing. Was that a bow? Wow, I guess it’s over. I’ll never find out if he had a decent left-hand pizzicato.

Step back with me to August of 2004. It was summertime in Chicago, I had just started dating Akiko, and I was about to fly across the world for my first ever international competition. Things were good. Here’s 2004 Nathan looking ahead to that summer’s doings:

Before a competition or audition, it’s not a bad idea to schedule one or more warm-up performances so that you can wrap your mind (and your hands) around playing your repertoire on stage. As Dr. Seuss said in Oh, The Places You’ll Go:

“out there, things can happen
and frequently do”

On this particular day in August, something did indeed happen, something I’m not proud of. Finally, after more than a decade, I’m ready to laugh about it with all of you. Turn up your speakers or pop in your earbuds, because you’re visiting the Chicago Cultural Center for the Dame Myra Hess concert series. Kuang-Hao Huang joined me on piano, and the listeners of WFMT joined us live on the air. Carl Grapentine was our genial radio host, and fortunately he was quick on his feet that day!

Before the concert, I was a bit nervous because just a day earlier, I had broken an E string. I worried that the new one wouldn’t hold its pitch. I worried that it might whistle. I was blissfully unaware of what should have been my biggest worry.

After some Beethoven (the Romance in F and the Sonata №8 in G), we launched into Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen. Things started off without incident:

Just before the devilish final section of the piece, there is a long lamentation that climbs ever upward, finishing on a high C. As we reached that moment of calm, I could feel the blood start to course through my arms, preparing my hands for the frenzied fun ahead. Kuang-Hao handled the sudden mood change, and I nearly jumped in early:

At first, both hands kept going as if nothing was wrong, but my left hand quickly realized that there was no wiry E string underneath its fingers. As I turned to Kuang-Hao, I gritted my teeth imagining the hasty retreat backstage, the hurried string change, the brief retune, then a desperate attempt to refocus the dissipated energy in the room.

Then I had a sickening realization: that new E string I had put on the day before had been my last. There were no more. I remembered thinking, as I had unwrapped the string, “Make sure to get another one before tomorrow’s show.” But other things must have seemed more important: a new episode of Fear Factor, perhaps. Now tomorrow was today.

And this wasn’t a concerto performance, where I could just switch fiddles with the concertmaster. It wasn’t even a string quartet concert, where my fellow violinist might have a spare string in his case. I was well and truly sunk unless someone there had a spare violin or at least an E string.

Akiko was in the audience, but she didn’t have her violin with her. Plus, I remembered her telling me that she had never broken a string in performance. How is that even possible? I thought. We just started dating…is that one of those lies you tell to make yourself more attractive? Well, this isn’t going to help my standing with her.

My cry for help, “Do we have an extra E string in the house?” got a nice laugh. Carl Grapentine carried on the broadcast for our remote listeners, while the live audience murmured away. Carl’s pause and “Hmmmm!” pretty much said it all:

After what felt like five minutes but was really just fifteen seconds, I saw that I was out of options. Short of digging up Paganini (or maybe Roman Kim) and having him play the end of the piece on three strings, I had to call it. My goose was cooked. I managed something between a bow and a curtsy, which brought the audience to its feet, in order to leave. There was applause, though I assume most of it was for my intrepid pianist.

Let’s throw it back to Carl Grapentine for the call:

So, to recap:

• Don’t be like 2004 Nathan.
• Every time you change a string, make sure you have another…better yet, two!
• Every time you perform, make sure you have a friend in the audience with a spare violin.
• It turns out that a guy who would later become a good friend was in the audience, with a spare violin. That was the first time he had ever laid eyes on me, and when disaster struck, he thought: I’ve got this violin. But it isn’t even mine. I’m borrowing it. Should I run up and offer it to him? I can’t be the only person here with a violin. Oh wait, he’s bowing. Was that a bow? Wow, I guess it’s over. I’ll never find out if he had a decent left-hand pizzicato.

Before my first rehearsal as a member of the Chicago Symphony, I asked my grandfather how I’d know the exact moment to come in after Barenboim’s downbeat.

“Ha! You’ll know.”

I had hoped for something more illuminating from a veteran of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Even though I’d been playing professionally for two years, it was with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which was more like a large string quartet than a small symphony. I was completely unfamiliar with the giant machinery of a Philadelphia or a Chicago.

“But how will I know? How did you know?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “When you see the downbeat…just don’t be first!”

A musical family

There’s a concert series at the Los Angeles Philharmonic called Casual Fridays. We play a program without intermission, then collect two drink vouchers apiece in order to mingle with the audience downstairs. I love everything about this series. But there is a question I can always count on at the after-party: “Do you come from a musical family?” There’s a hopeful air, as if a positive answer on my part would excuse a lack of musicality on theirs. In any case, there’s relief when I reply that nearly all my relatives were musicians of some sort. I don’t go on to explain that because of that, music was always something I did rather than something I loved. It’s a life’s work, after all, to reconcile those two verbs, which is why I wear a bemused smile when someone remarks, “It must be wonderful to do what you love!”

As a child, I considered it mandatory to play an instrument: both my parents were professional flutists, and everyone they associated with seemed to play something as well. Since I was an only child (at least until I was six), it meant that literally every person in my experience spent their time playing instruments (and from what I could see, playing cards, drinking beers, and generally having a wonderful time). When I was four, I asked what my instrument was. At that age, there were really only two choices: piano and violin. Flute, for example, would have been out of the question until around nine or ten, owing to the generally anemic lung capacity of the average toddler.

I have a feeling, though, that even if the flute had been a viable choice, my parents would have had me steer clear. Both of them had studied with my father’s father at the University of Wisconsin, so the flute had been a family affair. If being raised by professionals is a mixed blessing, it’s decidedly more mixed when those parents play your instrument. Picture the children of immigrants, who will always have a greater command over the new language than their parents do. Now imagine that those children are forbidden to speak anything but the old tongue at home. The musical mixes with the familial in strange ways.

As a budding violinist, I had the luxury of assuming that my parents didn’t know anything about my new endeavor. By design or default, my mother was given the task of sitting in my Suzuki lessons and handling my daily practice. One day when Dad was assigned to me instead of Mom, I protested, “Mom knows how to read music. Do you?” Much later, when I was old enough to feel the weight of professional expectations, as well as the sting of parental criticism, I lashed out at my mother: “You don’t know about pitch because all you have to do is press the keys!” It was only after hearing hundreds of hours of flute lessons in our home that I realized it was, indeed, possible to play hideously out of tune on the instrument.

So I have to consider myself lucky that I escaped the cycle of flute playing that had ensnared our family for two generations. According to my parents, their desire to keep me away from marching band steered me toward the violin. But I also heard about a brief period, during my father’s teen years, when his father attempted to be his teacher. Grandma put a stop to that, at least until it became clear that my father was going to play the flute no matter what his parents had to say about it. Then it was clear that his dad was the best teacher he was ever going to find.

From the coalfields to Curtis

About my grandfather’s childhood I know relatively little, except that he was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the very western part of the state, near the coalfields that his forebears had worked. Thanks to Grandpa’s interest in genealogy, and his father’s careful preservation, we have wonderful paintings and even photographs of many of his ancestors going back generations. My favorite will always be a family portrait outside one of those humble clapboard houses fronting the coalfields. Grandpa’s father Harry is just a small boy standing in front, and his father, Emory, sits proudly above him, a tremendous mustache on his lip and a violin and bow in his hand. He was apparently the fiddler for local gatherings, and we have that violin still. The label reads “Straduarius”.

From the few conversations we had about his early years, I gathered that Grandpa was a hard worker on his chosen instrument but “nothing special”. He certainly had the necessary support from his parents, as well as the means to take lessons. A glance at a portrait from his teen years reveals how far the family’s fortunes had grown in one generation. Here, old Emory has traded his work clothes for a three-piece suit and spectacles:

Of course, the Depression hit when Grandpa was six years old. His tales of a single orange in his Christmas stocking, a far cry from the wrapped boxes spilling out from under my trees, still spoke of a middle-class life rather than one of true privation. But his harrowing stories about automobile travel — the narrow roads, spare inner tubes, hissing radiators, and complete lack of air conditioning — truly convinced me that he had endured a painful childhood! When I asked what kept him working at the flute, he told me that he wanted to know how much of the world he could see by playing music.

So it must have been quite a journey from Erie to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, at a time when many men spent their whole lives within a fifty-mile radius of their birthplace. Grandpa’s excitement was short-lived, however, as the instrumental departments of Curtis were just about to shut down for the duration of the Second World War. Most of the male students (which is to say, most of the school) were entering the armed services, and he was eager to do his part. But when he went with the rest of the incoming boys for his medical exam, he was deemed physically unfit: at five feet five inches tall, he needed to weigh 115 pounds, and he was several pounds light.

According to his pals, this was due entirely to his “chicken legs”, a trait that he would pass along to his sons. My father embarked on a comprehensive weight training program to combat this, but fortunately he married into a German family with well-developed thighs. Thus, ever since I was a toddler, I have never had a problem meeting any minimum weight requirements.

In any case, Grandpa’s remedy was simple: “The boys took me home and made me eat bananas and drink water until I was ready to burst! Then I went back to the doctor and tipped the scales all right.”

I didn’t hear much about Grandpa’s Coast Guard service. I remember a few tales of monstrous waves and strange shores. I have no idea how, or even if, he attempted to keep up his flute playing, but it was definitely a secondary consideration. Winning the war and getting back to their sweethearts occupied most mens’ minds. When the war was over, Grandpa returned to his place at Curtis along with his mates. Shortly after, he married Doris. And in 1949, he graduated in the spring, welcomed my father to the world in the summer, and started his dream job in the fall.

The Philadelphia Sound

Grandpa’s years at Curtis prepared him specifically for a career with the Philadelphia Orchestra in a way that could only have existed at that time and place. His teacher, William Kincaid, was the superstar principal flutist of the Orchestra. And Curtis lay only a few blocks from the Orchestra’s hall, where the students would line up each week to attend sold-out concerts. Group woodwind classes were conducted by Marcel Tabuteau, who had not only been principal oboe of the Orchestra for four decades, but who had modernized and systematized the instrument’s technique. The students’ weekly guest conductors were the same international stars that conducted down the street. And while the rest of the world could only marvel at the famous “Philadelphia Sound” through recordings, Grandpa and his schoolmates experienced, firsthand, just how it was created.

Thus from a purely musical standpoint, Grandpa had an enormous advantage over any other flutist who wanted to join the Philadelphia Orchestra under music director Eugene Ormandy. His work habits, which he would keep up as long as he played (and would pass down to his children), sustained that advantage. But of course one crucial factor in his favor was the teacher-student connection that held so much sway two generations ago.

What kind of an audition did Grandpa play? I never got the details, but it was surely a much less rigid affair than the anonymous, screened ordeals that we endure today. Back then, you stayed hungry, you stayed ready, and when your turn came (through hard work, connections, or pure luck) you played what was asked of you. And even that was a standardized system compared to a generation earlier, when Kincaid had been named principal! If conductors were autocrats in the 1940s, in the ’20s they were absolute dictators. Leopold Stokowski, who preceded Ormandy as music director, had Kincaid waiting in the wings during a 1921 rehearsal. At a mistake by the then-principal flutist, Stokowski fired him on the spot and ushered Kincaid into the vacant chair. “Gentlemen, your new principal flute…”

Fabulous Philadelphians

Thus when Grandpa joined the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1949, his teacher became his colleague. They were part of a worldwide sensation. The Fabulous Philadelphians, as they were known, had just become the first orchestra to appear on national television. Their recordings under Stokowski and Ormandy set the standard that Karajan hoped to surpass years later in Berlin. And no matter where in the world the orchestra traveled, they were treated like royalty. Grandpa even remembers Jean Sibelius welcoming the entire orchestra to his home in Finland in 1955.

Perhaps it isn’t fair to compare orchestras between such different eras, but today, as symphonies search for ways to increase their relevance to their communities, they must often graft themselves onto other art forms. The Chicago Symphony plays The Lord of the Rings! It’s Back to the Future…live in the present! But when Grandpa joined the Philadelphia Orchestra, that relevance was built in. In 1940, Philadelphia under Stokowski was the other art form, as they collaborated with Walt Disney (and several dead composers!) to make Fantasia. When Philadelphia opened a concert with Rossini’s William Tell overture, the audience was hearing the theme song to one of the most popular shows on television, The Lone Ranger. And they would have recognized other themes in the concert from the Warner Brothers cartoon shorts that played in their local movie theaters.

Dmitri Shostakovich (who had graced the cover of Time magazine in 1942) traveled to Philadelphia in 1959 to witness the American premiere of his cello concerto with Mstislav Rostropovich as soloist. They made the first commercial recording of the work that same week. Here I can’t resist telling a story from Grandpa about Rostropovich’s first rehearsal. He was apparently excited to meet the orchestra’s principal cello, Lorne Munroe. Another cellist, who spoke Russian, introduced them and told Rostropovich just how prolific a family man Munroe had been up to that point (he would go on to have ten sons and one daughter with his one and only wife). The esteemed Russian soloist widened his eyes, and announced to all present, “Senza sordino!”

A traveling band

But if the Philadelphia Orchestra was musical royalty, they were still hired hands in terms of creature comforts on the road. In general, Grandpa’s descriptions of touring sounded like an extension of his Coast Guard days. He never got tired of contrasting my tours with his. He would hear about my one-week residencies or two-week jaunts, with the nice hotels and the chef’s tables, and he would just laugh.

“Did I ever tell you about our eight-week tour of Europe?” I would smile, having heard about it many times. One day he dug up the actual schedule book from that 1958 tour, and gave it to me as a keepsake. “We played a different program every night!” A study of the book showed that he was right. They played more than fifty concerts on that tour, and every one was unique! To a modern orchestra administrator, this would be beyond unfathomable. How many rehearsals would it take to prepare more than one hundred pieces for a single tour? In Chicago and Los Angeles, we might tour for two weeks and bring but two programs.

So how was it possible in 1958? There were several reasons. First, Philadelphia was in the midst of a remarkable run, one that will certainly never be approached: during a nearly seventy-year period, they had exactly two music directors. Stokowski reigned from 1912 until 1938, then Ormandy until 1980. These days, a music director is considered an institution if he or she lasts ten years!

Second, traveling was exponentially more difficult in those days, even for wealthy conductors. Therefore a music director worked with his home orchestra much more than he would today. For example, Ormandy occasionally performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra more than 150 times in a single season! This allowed the orchestra to build up an enormous repertoire with him, along with a signature sound and interpretation. Extra tour preparation was unnecessary.

Finally, although American musicians were beginning to flex their collective muscles, their “rights” could still be easily summarized in a compact agreement between each musician and the management. If Ormandy wanted you to learn a stack of music the size of the Yellow Pages, and leaf through it night after night, then that’s what you did. Otherwise you worked for the telephone company.

As for that 1958 tour, Grandpa snorted, “Forget about your private rooms! We got one night a week in a hotel.”

“What do you mean? Did you sleep on the street the rest of the time?”

“Of course not! On the train. We’d play the concert, get on the train, then ride to the next city while we slept.”

“What about showers?”

“On the train. We called them birdbaths.”

A musical fraternity

Hygiene and grooming figured heavily in Grandpa’s Philadelphia stories. All the stereotypes about the various sections of the orchestra came alive in his telling: prissy violins, cut-up double basses, acid-tongued winds, oafish brass. One such “oaf” whose name I can’t recall would end each season by balling up his tails and throwing them into the depths of his locker. Grandpa remembered, “‘That’s one more in the can’, he’d always say. And that locker room wasn’t climate controlled like today. The next season, he’d open up his locker, and the tails would be green! He’d put ’em on anyway!”

Then there was the time Danny Kaye led a concert at the orchestra’s home, the Academy of Music. His shows were half symphony, half variety act. At one point he instructed the gentlemen of the orchestra (nearly the entire group, of course) to remove their jackets. One wind player hesitated, thereby drawing Kaye’s mock anger: “You there, off with that jacket! Let’s not be modest!” The reason for the delay became obvious as soon as the man finally peeled off his coat. He was wearing only a dickey! This bit of pleated cotton, held together by molecules of starch, covered just the parts of the body that the jacket revealed: a strip running from the neck down to the navel. Surrounding the dickey, according to Grandpa (who never could get through this part of the story without hysterical laughter), “was the hairiest torso you ever saw! Kaye made him turn around to show the audience, and his back was just as hairy as the front!”

Star-studded seasons

Grandpa also told me about playing with Jack Benny, one of the titans of twentieth-century media, and a much better violinist than his long-running act suggested. Years before I came to play his Stradivarius, I heard about his charity appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He began to play the Mendelssohn concerto (badly), only to be tapped on the shoulder by the concertmaster: “Excuse me, Mr. Benny, let me show you how to play it…” Benny’s sideways look of exasperation brought the expected applause. Then as he tried again, even worse than before, an usher jumped up on stage to say that he had heard the piece so many times, he would show Benny how to do it. Of course the “usher” was another violinist from the orchestra in disguise. Another signature turn to the crowd, another round of applause. Finally, after a third go, a “janitor” sweeping the aisles threw down his broom, leapt onto the stage, and angrily grabbed the violin from Benny. That brought the house down!

The complete list of conductors and soloists that Grandpa played with during his time in Philadelphia would simply be a roll call of the biggest names of the age. Some famous figures were loved by the orchestra, others loathed. Of the nearly two thousand concerts Grandpa gave as a member of the group, most receded into the far reaches of memory by the time I came along to ask about them. But some were unforgettable, and not always for musical reasons. He was on stage at Carnegie Hall in 1951 when the piano soloist Simon Barere suddenly collapsed during the Grieg concerto and died in the wings.

In general, Grandpa shied away from describing those moments of artistic triumph that surely marked his years with such an elite group. Was it that the words to describe them eluded him, or that he felt they were unnecessary? I always felt that I could tell by a hesitation in his speech, or a faraway look in his eyes, when he was recalling a special time.

I asked him about the violinists most of all.

“Heifetz? Was he as great as they said?”

“Yeah. But I couldn’t tell if he really loved playing the violin. There was electricity in the hall, though. People came expecting something, and they got it.”

The summer after I turned fifteen, I fell in love with the recordings of Michael Rabin, who left a tragically incomplete legacy when he died at age thrity-five from a fall in his own home. Grandpa saw the CDs lying next to my Sony Discman and told me about how Rabin used to stand back almost with the woodwinds when he soloed with Philadelphia.

“He had a fear of falling off the stage. I remember just before the concert, I passed by his dressing room and the door was open. His violin was lying there in pieces! He had taken off all the strings, the chinrest, everything, and he was putting it back together.”

Oistrakh, Stern, Elman… even now, I can scarcely believe that my grandfather shared the stage with legends who exist to me now only as names and recordings.

A priceless book

One of Grandpa’s favorite mementos from his days in Philadelphia was a book of caricatures by Alfred Bendiner entitled Music to My Eyes (1952). These pictures were originally drawn to accompany reviews of concerts by the Philadelphians, but as a collection complete with personal reminiscences by the artist, they provide a captivating look at the iconic figures of the time. Grandpa had the gumption to ask many of the subjects to sign his copy of the book, and I’m honored that he gave it to me when I started my professional career.

Leafing through it, my first surprise was to discover a program tucked inside the front cover: it’s from 1953, and from this exact week: the last of December. The Philadelphia Orchestra concert that week concluded with the suite from Petrouchka, conducted by none other than Igor Stravinsky! Grandpa must have approached him, as Stravinsky’s signature is crammed beside his caricature in Bendiner’s book. Just four Christmases before, when Grandpa first joined the orchestra, “Frosty the Snowman” became a sensation, while nobody sang “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” because it hadn’t yet been written. But it had been forty years since Stravinsky set the world on fire with The Rite of Spring.

Continuing on, I marveled at the signatures: Pierre Monteux is the only other “autographed” conductor, even though the space next to Ormandy (who Grandpa performed with more than a thousand times!) remains bare. Read into that what you will.

Pianist Rudolf Serkin gamely signed and dated his likeness. Most happily for me, violinist Nathan Milstein also donated a robust autograph. I’m often asked if I was named for that “other” Nathan, whose career lasted longer than that of almost any other violinist. According to my parents, our names have no connection. But I do find it remarkable that his beloved Stradivarius resides in Pasadena, California, not far from me. What a thrill it is to occasionally play that violin, knowing that Grandpa once performed with it (and its former mate), and shared at least a few brief moments of conversation!

Yehudi Menuhin needed an entire page to fit his signature, while Mischa Elman must have held the book sideways since his name and date run from south to north. Zino Francescatti lent his autograph as well. I’m embarrassed that for most of my teen years, I assumed that the incredible violin virtuoso was simply an editor at International Music Company, since his name (and unbeknownst to me, his bowings and fingerings) adorned so many of the solo pieces that I toiled over.

Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky was the only one to sign specifically to Grandpa, writing, “To Bob Cole, With my very best wishes”. His mentor Kincaid didn’t even give a personal dedication! Only a neat and tidy autograph appears next to his dashing picture. Did he always consider himself the master, and my grandfather his pupil?

You can’t eat prestige

I do know that there was great camaraderie within the section. Kincaid delighted in entertaining the rest of the woodwinds with an elaborate routine any time Ormandy (originally a violinist) would tinker with the strings’ bowings. To show how little difference he believed these changes actually made, Kincaid would take a single piece of cigarette paper and carefully place it under one leg of his chair. After testing the chair’s stability, he might take the paper away, move it under a different leg, or begin the charade all over again with another piece!

And of course there was tremendous pride in the band overall. There was a code of conduct. Principals like Kincaid had more leeway for showy behavior than did the rank-and-file. Grandpa told me about one rehearsal shortly after Joseph Silverstein joined the back of the violin section. Silverstein, of course, would later go on to become concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, but at this point he was perhaps twenty years old “barely out of short pants”. The orchestra was rehearsing Beethoven’s Second Symphony, whose last movement features a fiendishly quick bassoon solo. “Sol (Schoenbach) really flubbed it, and there was Joey in the back of the violins, laughing out loud! He just about got one ‘haw’ out before he realized he was the only one laughing. Sol had him by the shirt collar at the first break!”

For many years, that pride, and the tremendous rush that came from playing the greatest music with the greatest colleagues, had to take the place of financial compensation. No American orchestra was paid year-round during my grandfather’s time, and while the money was fine for a young man just out of school, it didn’t quite stretch to cover a growing family. My uncle followed shortly after my father, and my aunt not long after that. So, like most of the Philadelphians, Grandpa looked for other work when and where he could get it. He did some teaching, partly because he enjoyed it, but also because he needed to pay the bills!

The Woodwind Quintet

With Kincaid as principal, Grandpa’s time to shine was not onstage at the Academy in the biggest repertoire. So he took his chances elsewhere. Kincaid declined to play most summer concerts, then at a venue known as The Robin Hood Dell, so Grandpa played principal for those. He also excelled at the piccolo, proudly standing with the rest of the flute section during the piccolo chorus of Sousa’s Stars and Stripes. And he was asked to be soloist for a brand new concerto that paired him with the orchestra’s principal timpanist. I remember sitting with him in his retirement home as we listened to the live recording of that performance. I marveled at the guts it took to stand in front of a microphone in those days, knowing that editing was an expensive luxury reserved for the biggest names.

But Grandpa’s greatest opportunity, and the way that most woodwind players know his name today, was as a member of the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. This quintet was made up of the five principals from the orchestra, but shortly after Grandpa’s hiring, Kincaid asked if he might like to take over some of the work with the group. Thus Grandpa found himself in the dream situation of making music on an intimate basis with four of the greatest woodwind players of that or any age: John deLancie (oboe), Anthony Gigliotti (clarinet), Sol Schoenbach (bassoon), and Mason Jones (horn). Among the group’s lasting contributions is a series of television programs entitled 200 Years of Woodwinds as well as several landmark recordings. One of these was an early recording of Summer Music by Samuel Barber. Any time I meet a woodwind player who asks about my last name, all I have to do is mention a certain bright orange record cover featuring a formally-clad quintet sitting in a straight line (for the love of God, why the music stands?). Then they know exactly who Robert Cole was!

Incidentally, Grandpa told me that as the quintet were preparing Summer Music, they finally decided to ask Barber why he had made it so difficult. “We said, ‘Didn’t John Barrows (horn player in the New York Woodwind Quintet) give you some woodwind tuning charts to help you write this?’ He said yes. So then we asked him why the piece was so damn hard to tune! He said, ‘I took the charts and picked the chords that would sound the least in tune.’ At least we had an answer.”

Time to move on

By the time the Philadelphia Orchestra was poised to become the first American orchestra to win a full 52-week season in the early 1960s, my father was thirteen and his younger siblings were not far behind. Those multi-week tours started to wear more and more on Grandma as she managed a full house alone. And for his part, Grandpa worried about the kids growing up on the city streets without his guidance.

From a musical point of view, though he’d only been in the orchestra for thirteen years, he’d played the standard repertoire several times over. And in terms of workplace happiness, 1960 brought an unwelcome development: the departure of William Kincaid. This was still the era of mandatory retirement in the US, so once William Kincaid turned sixty-five, his days as a Fabulous Philadelphian were over. Grandpa struggled to find the same chemistry with a succession of guest principals and decided that the orchestral life, though it was gradually becoming more lucrative, was not for him.

Higher education

When the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin in 1962, the stage was set not only for the remainder of Grandpa’s professional career as a teacher, but for my parents’ eventual meeting. My mother, who grew up in nearby Janesville, first met my uncle John (who played horn) and soon after met my father and grandfather.

I heard fewer stories about Grandpa’s years teaching at UW-Madison, even though his time there was more than twice that in the Philadelphia Orchestra, eventually overlapping my childhood. I suspect that his family assumed greater importance once they made the move to Wisconsin, and that the cast of characters at the University was both smaller and less audacious (one notable exception was the new symphony conductor, Otto-Werner Mueller, who would later be my conductor at Curtis). But the students whose lives he touched have told me that he made a far greater impact in Madison than he ever could have in Philadelphia. My mother remembers him as a kind, patient, but exacting teacher before she knew him as father-in-law. And one of his last students was Catherine Karoly, who performs with my wife and me every week as Assistant Principal of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Grandpa kept playing in Madison, taking his place in an unusually strong faculty woodwind quintet. Richard Lottridge, former member of the Chicago Symphony, was the bassoonist. John Barrows, who gave Sam Barber the ill-used woodwind tuning charts, took the horn part. Harry Peters was the oboist, and according to students of the day, the group was known informally as “Four Guys with Harry Peters”.

My father began teaching at the University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1976 (after a term in the Army Field Band), so that his teaching career and his father’s coincided for twelve years. As Grandpa’s retirement neared, at age sixty-five, I was about to turn ten. It was becoming more and more likely that I would stick with the violin for the long haul, so his students, including Cathy Karoly, were forced to endure monthly updates (not to mention photographs) of my musical exploits.

Man about town

I have a distinct memory of Grandpa’s retirement party in 1988. It’s stuffy, even itchy: that feeling a ten-year-old gets when he’s surrounded by adults he doesn’t know, but who know of him. I was set to perform a short piece whose melody escapes me now. But as a prelude, the lights dimmed and the entire gathering watched a slide show emceed by one of Grandpa’s soon-to-be-ex-colleagues. It was part roast, part This is Your Life, and there was some salty language, which delighted me. As I began to enjoy myself, I thought, people really like being around Grandpa! I wasn’t shocked, but I’d simply never thought about it.

In fact, back in 1973, Grandpa had been one of the founding members of the National Flute Association, and its president five years later. Had I seen him at the annual conventions, my parents tell me, I would have understood how important he was to the American flute community. I’ve often noticed how much more connected flutists seem to be, compared to string players (with the notable exception of double bassists). Surely the NFA, its competitions, and its publications deserve much of the credit.

Childhood memories

I saw my dad’s parents once or twice a year growing up: always in the summer, and sometimes during the Christmas holiday as well. The summer visits were invariably longer. We might spend time at their home in Madison, or at the farm they eventually bought just a mile down the road from their daughter’s farm. Or we might live at their lake cottage for a week, a stone’s throw from a similar one owned by Richard Lottridge, his old quintet-mate. Both my grandparents’ knowledge of the outdoors, of hunting, fishing, farming, and navigating, never ceased to amaze be. My father seemed to know about all these things as well, but it was only in a rural setting, and in his parents’ company, that I fully appreciated it.

I performed with my parents seldom enough during their playing days, and my grandfather even less. But as a Suzuki student, I did spend my first several years learning the violin under the watchful eye (and flute) of my mother, whose faultless intonation I hoped to blend with during our daily practice sessions. And when the weak spot of Suzuki training (note reading) couldn’t be papered over any longer, I began sight-reading training with both of my parents. I would have been about eight years old.

To put it plainly, I hated everything about reading music. I had finally reached a level of comfort with the instrument such that I could play anything I heard with ease. Now, with a page of notes in front of me, I was reduced to a beginner’s level all over again! Sight-reading practice meant playing flute duets with one or the other of my parents, with the requirement that I could not stop no matter what happened. It was torture having to listen to myself play badly, and to be told that it had to continue until the page was over.

One of our visits to the lake cottage must have coincided with this unhappy period, since I have a clear memory of playing not duets, but flute quartets (by the indomitable Friedrich Kuhlau) with both my parents plus Grandpa. Now I had six eyes trained on me, making sure that I kept my place in this batter of semi-sweet harmonies.

When my parents had decided that I’d had enough (or, more likely, when I had whined one too many times), the session was over. Grandpa began to reminisce about a more pleasant Kuhlau experience.

A legend comes to town

“Do you remember that Rampal visit to the house?”

While my parents were still studying at Madison, the great Jean-Pierre Rampal had come to give a master class and a recital. After the program, he had gone to the Cole residence for dinner: very late for the Coles, l’heure juste for a Frenchman. “Like Itzhak Perlman coming to our house,” my father said.

“Remember how he told us that he never knew when he’d get nervous for a performance?” Grandpa asked. “Carnegie Hall, he’d be cool as a cucumber, but in a little college town, his knees would start shaking. Meanwhile we must have gone through three bottles of wine!”

Rampal apparently liked to talk, and drink, and eat, and when he’d had his fill of those, he liked to play the flute. So as the clock struck midnight, my parents, Grandpa, and the greatest flutist in the world unearthed the Kuhlau books. I believe they kept the wine going as well. I wonder if anyone walked by the house that night, pausing to look in at the one lighted room on the block, hearing faint laughter mingling with four intertwining voices?

Grandparental advice

I went to Curtis about fifty years after Grandpa, and he helped me find my apartment in Philadelphia. Sol Schoenbach still lived nearby, and he knew a guy, and that guy had a son, and he owned a bunch of buildings. My one-bedroom was $480 a month, which must have been more than my parents’ mortgage. It turns out that my Grandpa had lived less than two blocks away!

“Is that Chinese laundry still on the corner?” Grandpa asked. I suppressed an eye roll, then remembered that indeed there was a dry cleaners at the spot he had named. There was a sandwich place too, though not the one he remembered, and certainly not as good.

“Be careful in Rittenhouse Square!” he warned. Apparently, Grandpa’s small-town habit of whistling as he walked had attracted the attention of older men who gathered in the small park that sat across 18th Street from Curtis. I promised I wouldn’t do the same.

My first audition was for the Philadelphia Orchestra, just down Locust Street. I was cut from the semi-finals, disappointed to have missed my chance to follow in Grandpa’s footsteps. Apparently it wasn’t a close thing: when I called co-concertmaster William DePasquale afterward to get feedback, there were a few seconds of silence. Then, as if the fact should have been self-evident: “You played like a pig!”

As the years passed, and I began accumulating my own trove of orchestra tales, I vowed to ask more specific questions about Grandpa’s career. But I was too timid; I never wanted our conversations to feel like interviews. I shouldn’t have been concerned. He was a lively storyteller, and he had so much material to work with that he could have gone on for hours without circling back. I assumed there would always be time later on.

The perfect partner

Grandma died nearly ten years ago, after living with Parkinson’s for long enough. She kept her sense of humor until the end, and I knew that he would as well. Each of them harbored a competitive streak, individually and between them, and some of the funniest stories had that edge. Each summer at the lake, my parents would point out a certain spot on the asphalt lane leading to my grandparents’ cottage. A blob of yellow plastic appeared to have sunk into the crevices there. But it was apparently no passive melting: one evening Grandpa, after one too many unlucky rolls of the dice versus the Lottridges, had grabbed a hammer along with the dice, and run out of the cottage. The visiting couple, peering through the dusky doorway, could just make out a figure bent over the road, hammer furiously pounding, the sounds reaching them a split second later.

Then there was the infamous coffee war over the course of one week at their farmhouse. For quite some time, Grandpa had made his preference for stronger coffee known. Grandma had spoken out for a more moderate brew. As the years went by, slight preferences became concrete desires, which became dogma. The morning coffee duty fell to whoever got downstairs first upon waking, so during that fateful week, reveille became a race for the coffee pot. Day by day they managed to alternate, each decrying the other’s swill. Finally, upon having to consume one of Grandpa’s bitter cups, Grandma declared that he had finally done it: he had brewed something totally undrinkable. He countered that it was his favorite coffee yet. The war ended later that day, when Grandma cleaned the machine and found that in Grandpa’s haste, he had managed to run part of the power cord through the brewing basket. His favorite pot had been thirty percent melted plastic.

The two of them traveled widely. Grandpa had seen the world twice: once in the Coast Guard, and again with the orchestra, but neither time on his schedule or with the woman he loved. So they made the most of their golden years, touring China in the mid-1980s (when it was practically a different country from today), Alaska by cruise ship, and the rest of the United States in their RV. Grandpa took pictures wherever they went, and his slideshows (with actual slides) upon their return undoubtedly inspired the computer slideshows I inflict on all my friends to this day.

The last portrait I took of Grandma and Grandpa together was at their apartment in Madison in 2002, while I was in the midst of a major photography kick. My father had given me my first camera when I was eight, and he must have gotten the bug from Grandpa. At this point, my weapon of choice was a 4x5 cherry-wood field camera, with a bellows and a dark cloth: I only needed a twirly mustache to resemble the photographers who had taken his ancestors’ portraits in the mid-1800s. Grandma and Grandpa sat patiently while I painstakingly prepared the film and camera. My log tells me that I exposed the 4x5-inch sheet of Kodak TMAX film for a full half-second at f/8. I can’t remember if I let them know to be extra still because of the long exposure, but their serene expressions, combined with a slight distortion from my wide-angle lens, always arrests my attention.

Impeccable timing

Grandpa continued traveling solo until he was ninety years old, and one of his annual stops during his last decade was my hometown of Lexington. He came at the end of each August to see Akiko and me play at the chamber music festival we started there. During one of his last visits to Lexington, I got word from a friend that Jerome Wigler was about to retire from the Philadelphia Orchestra. I mentioned this to Grandpa.

“Wigler? The violinist? He still there? He’s older than I am!”

I said that I didn’t know about that, but that Wigler had joined the Orchestra in 1951, just two years after Grandpa.

He was silent for a few moments, then cracked a smile. “Well, that’s the violin, I guess.”

I granted him that jibe. Menuhin and Milstein had gone on playing concerts into their eighties, and the same can’t be said for many flute players. The flute, after all, requires the literal breath of life, and that never lasts as long as we wish. But Grandpa always seemed to know when it was time to move on. May we all share the time we have left with those we love.

Of all violin techniques, vibrato is the most misunderstood. In fact, I feel sorry for vibrato: sometimes people talk about him like he’s the most important guy in the room:

“You’re the fingerprint of the sound! You’re what keeps me coming back for more!”

Then a minute later, he’s an unwelcome bore:

“Everyone vibrates everything these days. Give it a rest already!”

A vibrato to forget

Sometimes it seems like the best solution is just to “get by”: to produce a violin vibrato that doesn’t intrude on the sound, doesn’t mess up the pitch, and doesn’t tire out your arm in the process. That way nobody can complain, right?

It is true that your vibrato should not do any of the following things:

• Change the fundamental character of the sound your bow is drawing
• Distort the pitch
• Introduce tension in the arm or hand

But that doesn’t mean it can’t also be a beautiful, distinctive feature of your playing!

A vibrato to remember

The key is flexibility: flexibility of speed and width, all while decorating the pitch rather than distracting from it. My favorite exercises for developing and maintaining that flexibility come from the Simon Fischer book, Warming Up.

I use this book every day to maintain the key components of my playing. Unlike Fischer’s other books, I haven’t seen this one for sale on Amazon, but you can order it directly from his website:

Simon Fischer’s Warming Up

I especially love the way he lays out the section on vibrato. His key concepts make so much sense:

• all vibrato derives from finger flexibility
• vibrato relaxes down from the pitch
• just one impulse: “up”, rather than two (“up, down”)

But I have found that many people need help understanding the four specific exercises that Fischer describes in the text. I’ve seen some interesting interpretations, some of which I fear won’t bring about the desired results!

A video to point the way

So I made a video showing how I use Fischer’s vibrato exercises. In the end, the four motions combine for some rhythm practice with the metronome. If you do these exercises daily, you’ll find that your vibrato starts more easily, passes from finger to finger, and adapts to different tempi and characters. In a word, effortless!

My first meeting with Professor Stephen Shipps did not go well. In my defense, I was only sixteen at the time. But Professor Shipps is not a man to be trifled with, and I most certainly trifled.

Seconds before he announced my name and program to the jury at the 1994 American String Teachers Association national competition finals, Professor Shipps asked me what piece I would be playing in addition to the required Wieniawski Scherzo-Tarantella.

“Mozart D Major Concerto, sir!”

“And what cadenza will you play?”

“I… don’t know.”

This was true. But whether I had never known the name of Joseph Joachim (only one of the most celebrated virtuosi of the 19th century and close collaborator of Brahms) or had simply blanked in the moment, that answer was unfortunate.

“You don’t know? Well… I guess we’ll all find out in a few minutes.” He shook his head and went on to announce, “From Lexington, Kentucky…” He might as well have concluded, “…a screw-up and all-around dunce!”

Minutes later, I suffered my first-ever memory slip. And do you know who was in the audience for my public humiliation? Noa Kageyama, fellow finalist and current Bulletproof Musician! I sometimes wonder if he witnessed my breakdown and decided then and there to dedicate his life to helping others avoid a similar fate.

More than just a scary face

A few months after the ASTA competition, my teacher Dan Mason put the first page of Don Juan on the music stand in front of me. I was sixteen, and though I didn’t know it, I was already preparing for orchestra auditions.

At the end of the lesson, Mr. Mason handed me an article xeroxed from the official ASTA journal, 1992, written by Stephen Shipps. I saw the title: A Guide to Survival Repertoire, and then I noticed the author’s name. When I looked up, I noticed that Mr. Mason wore a mischievous grin.

“Wait… is that the guy from-”

“Why, yes!” he replied, as his grin widened.

The article I tried to forget

I took the article home, went to my room, and closed the door. I knew that everything Mr. Mason handed me had a purpose, whether it was the strange piece by Strauss or this article by Professor Shipps.

The “Survival Repertoire” from the title seemed to refer to orchestral excerpts like the first page of Don Juan. I was doomed to learn the Strauss… if I was to survive, of course.

I tried to make sense of the article, but it was addressed to teachers like Mr. Mason rather than to me. It contained a scary-looking table and lots of music that I’d never heard of. And, let’s not forget that it was written by the man who had (just maybe?) caused my mental collapse. So I put the article into a box and tried to forget about it.

But usually when you try to forget something, it bubbles up from subconscious to conscious. And it didn’t help that Mr. Mason kept assigning orchestral excerpts at my weekly lessons.

Eventually I had to take Professor Shipps’ article out of the box and give it another try.

Excerpts, not etudes

Re-reading the Guide now, I have to smile. It makes so much sense: the kind of article I’d like to write, if Professor Shipps hadn’t written it twenty-four years ago! His premise: only a small percentage of violinists are lucky enough to have been given a thorough training in the standard violin etudes, during those years when they are impressionable enough to work without understanding why. The rest enter college or conservatory with an unenviable choice: give up on professional performing, or try to make up for lost time by going through all the etudes at lightning speed?

His conclusion: replace the etudes with orchestral excerpts, and build a solid technical foundation while preparing for orchestra auditions at the same time!

For example, if you haven’t already learned Rodolphe Kreutzer’s etude №8, a look at left-right hand coordination with string crossings, then learn Beethoven’s Leonore Overture №3 instead so that you have it in your back pocket when it appears on an audition list.

It was a brilliant idea in 1992, and it’s just as relevant today. But it’s more than an idea: the Shipps Guide to Survival Repertoire contains a complete table of standard etudes and their orchestra excerpt equivalents.

My thoughts on the Shipps Guide

Over the years, I’ve gotten to know Stephen Shipps in various professional settings. But it wasn’t until a few months ago, here in Pasadena, that I reminded him of our first meeting. He had forgotten the particulars, so his face lit up when I recounted the Mozart cadenza story.

“Oh wow. I bet I really lit into you for that!”

“You did.”

“And right before you went out to play. Wow! But I bet you never forgot who wrote your cadenzas after that!”

I conceded the point. Then I moved on to his ASTA article that Dan Mason had handed me. I hadn’t read it in more than twenty years, and I couldn’t find my copy. But I knew that it would be relevant to my teaching these days, especially since during the New York Philharmonic Audition Challenge, so many violinists told me how much they loved the etude work. In fact, I got question after question about what other etudes would help in audition preparation.

I thought about it, then realized that someone else had already done my work for me. So I asked Professor Shipps for his permission to share it with you.

The Shipps Guide really needs to be read in its entirety, because it’s about much more than just a table of etudes and their excerpt equivalents. Professor Shipps isn’t suggesting that etudes have no value: in fact, he recommends a major course of etudes for those students who are able to handle them before college. Neither does he mean that excerpts alone constitute a complete violinistic or musical education. In the Guide, he places them in their proper context along with scales, concerti, solo Bach, sonatas, and short pieces.

If I were writing the Guide myself, today, it would look a bit different. Shipps’ choices of orchestral repertoire reflect not only the audition lists that were prevalent at the time of publication (1992), but the lists that his teacher, Josef Gingold, put together a generation earlier. Operatic overtures and miniatures from the classical and romantic periods figured heavily in these lists, and they do in the Guide as well.

Today, we don’t see much Euryanthe or Fingal’s Cave at violin auditions. Modern lists are shorter and skew more toward symphonies, a few tone poems, and twentieth-century music that was “too new” for auditions of yesteryear. More to the point, auditions one or two generations ago rewarded experience and depth of knowledge of the repertoire: lists may have been short or long, but sight-reading was a common and accepted part of the process. Woe to those candidates who were unfamiliar with any of the pieces that were staples of the Big Five orchestra programs!

Now it is no longer assumed that candidates for major jobs have studied or performed the major works. Blind, or screened, auditions, have something to do with this, since “experience” and “knowledge” in the unscreened days were often code words for “we know this guy, and we like him”. Today, sight-reading is included in the fine print, but it’s largely an empty threat. Deliberately or not, today’s orchestras value players who can deliver under pressure over players who know the repertoire. The best orchestras can demand both if they draft a big audition list. But in general, today’s shorter lists give everyone a shot as long as they are technically and musically prepared to play the pieces asked of them.

That said, I enjoy seeing all the pieces in the Shipps Guide. It’s well worth a violinist’s time to look at an etude in the “Long Bows” section, say Kreutzer №1, and then look at Elgar’s Enigma Variations: Nimrod and see how success in one leads directly to success in the other, and to other pieces of the same type. So if it seems more appealing to work on Elgar than Kreutzer, go right ahead! Nimrod is a great tune, after all.

And I’m constantly advising violinists to work on technique outside the excerpts from their audition list. It’s counterproductive, for example, to try and learn a spiccato stroke while working up the Schumann Scherzo for an audition. You’ll only graft bad habits onto a work that you’re supposed to be able to play in a few weeks’ time. I would normally prescribe a spiccato etude in such cases. But with the help of the Guide, you could choose Verdi’s overture to La Forza del Destino instead, as long as wasn’t also on your upcoming audition!

How to use the Shipps Guide

There are two main ways to dive right into the Guide:

• If you’ve worked through an etude and you’re looking for repertoire to expand on what you’ve learned, the Shipps Guide shows you which excerpts to tackle.
• If you’re preparing for an audition and need to brush up on fundamentals, the Shipps Guide shows you which etudes relate to each excerpt.

And for those who want to get the most out of the Guide, remember Professor Shipps’ original audience: the readers of the ASTA Journal. These were teachers familiar with all the standard etudes and many of the standard orchestral excerpts. If you want to understand the Guide as they did, you must gather the source material. This means the etude books to which Shipps refers. Luckily, these are in the public domain and thus free to download:

Schradieck
Ševčík
Dounis
Kreutzer
Rode
Dont

The vast majority of the orchestral excerpts are public domain as well.

If you are already familiar with any of the etudes mentioned in the Guide, my advice is to look at and listen to the orchestral excerpts that are listed in the table next to them. Find the connection between the etude and the excerpt. Then, when it’s time to work on the excerpt, you will already know the fundamental skills necessary to master it.

If instead you are familiar with the orchestral pieces but not the etudes, then you have a golden opportunity: look up the etudes listed in the table next to the excerpts, and mine them for all they’re worth! You will then find that the excerpts yield to you much more readily in the practice room.

Download the Shipps Guide

If you’re already a member here at natesviolin.com, you’ll find the Shipps Guide in your Member Library.

If you’re not already a member, click here and register to download the guide for free!

What do you think about the Shipps Guide? Let me know in the comments below!

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we were bodybuilders?” my wife asked me last month, after a tough practice day. “After all the pain, we could walk down the street and people would actually see how hard we worked!”

I had to agree. How gratifying would that be? Imagine if we could wear our practicing like clothing. Think of the looks I’d get: How about that guy. I bet he really hits the arpeggios hard.

Then again, maybe it works both ways. Perhaps bodybuilders hit the showers saying, “If only I were a violinist. Right now instead of being ripped, I’d be able to play Paganini!”

Progressive training

I’ve learned a lot about the violin while playing golf. But I’ve also learned plenty at the gym. And while I’m no “gym rat”, I’ve been fascinated by weights ever since I was young. My dad even got me a used Soloflex from the local prison for my 16th birthday! What attracted me to weights back then was the idea that I could do a little work each day and actually see my progress, both in the mirror and in the journal I kept.

That idea still attracts me to the gym today. But it also directs my daily violin practice.

Here’s the lure of bodybuilding in a nutshell: progressive results through progressive training. “Progressive” simply means that there’s progress involved. You ask more of your muscles over time, and they respond by growing bigger over time.

We’re accustomed to thinking of violin practice as a more creative process: worlds away from a bunch of he-men pumping iron over and over. But while music is certainly a creative art, what is the ultimate point of practice? Isn’t it to make progress, both technically and musically?

And while you may swear that you do make progress in the practice room, how do you really know? If you’re like many violinists, you start the day with good intentions, but by day’s end you’re not sure just what (if anything) you’ve accomplished. Your mind has gone in too many directions, and you feel frustrated.

Bodybuilders keep it simple. And it’s not because they’re muscle-bound jocks! It’s because simplicity works. Simplicity gets results. So let’s look at how bodybuilders practice…I mean work out…then apply it to ourselves.

Turning expectation into reality

It’s natural for bodybuilders to make steady progress, for several reasons:

• They use consistent routines
• Their improvement is easy to measure
• They focus on internal rather than external comparisons

Routine

A bodybuilder wouldn’t dream of walking into the gym without a specific plan for the day. Instead he looks at last week’s workouts and builds the current week based on them. He makes sure that by the end of the week, every part of the body has gotten its due.

And the planning doesn’t stop there! Each exercise’s workload is based on last week’s performance. If last week’s Exercise A was three sets of twelve repetitions at 50 pounds, then this week’s Exercise A might be three sets of twelve reps at 55 pounds. The extra five pounds is a small but manageable step. Therefore success is expected and built into the routine.

Compare that to a typical practice session: some noodling, perhaps a few scales, maybe an etude, then repertoire. Lots of stopping, lots of cursing and personal recriminations. Each day resembles the last. You might say that the usual practice day is more like a Groundhog Day!

Improvement

In the gym, whenever you wonder whether all the work is worth it, all you have to do is open your notebook to see where you were one month or six months ago. There you’ll see the evidence that you are stronger now than you were before. The numbers stare you in the face! And they make perfect sense: 50 pounds for a time, then 55, then 60. You can assume that 65 and 70 won’t be far behind.

In the practice room, how do you know where you stand? Unless you have audio or video evidence, the equivalent of your notebook, you don’t know! You’re relying on your memory, which is anything but objective. It’s riddled with emotional holes and scarred over from previous failures. If you trust memory, you’re setting yourself up for continual disappointment.

Comparison

At the gym, bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Chances are you’re neither the smallest nor the biggest. When you see someone lifting more weight than you, it’s obvious to you that they’re further along on their journey. You don’t beat yourself up about it, because you compare yourself to your past self, rather than your journey to someone else’s journey.

Unfortunately, we musicians are trained from a young age to compare ourselves to the best. Not just the best at our age or stage of development, but the greatest in the history of the world. Instead of measuring your Bach against last week’s Bach, you measure it against Milstein’s. Not last month’s Brahms concerto, but Perlman’s. And while ideally you would draw inspiration from the practice habits of the greats, in truth you only get to see their triumphs: not the steady work it took to reach those high points.

Staying healthy to stay on track

If you can’t train, you can’t gain. So say the bodybuilders. Therefore, their first priority is staying healthy and injury-free. And they do it by maintaining proper form.

Each exercise is designed to work a certain muscle or group of muscles. When you use good form, all is well. But when the going gets tough and the muscles you’re working start to fatigue, it’s tempting to “cheat” by allowing other muscle groups to help out. When you do that, you run two big risks: one short-term, the other long-term.

The short-term risk, of course, is immediate injury. If you unwittingly allow your lower back, for example, to “help” in a chest exercise, you may find, to your dismay, that your lower back is far too weak to handle the workload. Injury brings your training, and your progress, to a dead stop.

The long-term risk of bad form is that of faulty expectations. Let’s say that two workouts ago, you successfully lifted 75 pounds for an exercise. But at your last workout you couldn’t quite manage 80. This time you do barely make 80, but only by “cheating”. At the next workout, naturally, you hope to lift 85. But your body wasn’t even ready for 80! The risk of injury next time around is even greater.

But just as importantly, you’ve set expectations that you can’t hope to fulfill without more cheating. By trying to rush your progress, you’ve ensured that you’ll taste failure or injury. The only solution is to go back to where you last touched solid ground: at 75 pounds. Then you can pick up where you left off.

The risks of “bad form” in the practice room

Our risk of injury isn’t as immediate, or as constant, as that of the bodybuilders. We have the freedom to select any weight on the floor, as it were, without fear of anything catastrophic.

But that freedom brings the same long-term risks. If bodybuilders are tempted to “cheat” in order to move from 75 to 80 pounds, how often are you tempted in the practice room to crank up the metronome and “go for it” at 100 bpm?

With no immediate consequences, it may seem worth a shot. And many violinists do just that, day after day! They spend most of their time attempting feats that they’re simply not capable of handling at their current level. The inevitable result is repeated failure. And once failure becomes built into the routine, progress becomes impossible.

No matter your instrument, the marks of “good form” are easy to define:

1. pitch
2. rhythm
3. sound quality

Simply put, if you are not achieving these marks, then you are cheating. You need to modify your routine so that you’re back on solid ground again. Otherwise, steady progress will remain just wishful thinking.

The cycle of success in the gym

There are so many parallels between the practice room and the gym that it’s hard to find a piece of advice that doesn’t apply to both! But let’s focus on my guidebook, 8 Practice Mistakes, and see how bodybuilders avoid the traps we set for ourselves as musicians.

If you haven’t read 8 Practice Mistakes, follow the link above to grab your free copy, then come right back!

Now, let’s turn my 8 Mistakes around and see what bodybuilders do to ensure steady progress:

1. They succeed. Their routines build incrementally, so they know that they are capable of completing each day’s work. Success builds on success.
2. They use good form. Their equivalent of making a good sound is performing each exercise as it’s laid out: using the prescribed muscles and no others.
3. They work smart, not hard. Since their workouts are tailored to their level, completing them doesn’t require a Herculean effort. They expect to finish with energy to spare.
4. They have specific and appropriate short-term expectations. This one is a no-brainer! Bodybuilders know what they’re capable of and expect to improve incrementally, one step at a time.
5. They have goals that are worth attaining. Perhaps they’re in it to lose weight. Maybe they want to compete and win. But imagining that target weight, or that trophy, keeps them going in the right direction day after day.
6. They work out in order to achieve their goals. Jerry Seinfeld poked fun at this when he quipped, “The only reason that you’re getting in shape is so you can get through the workout. So we’re working out, so that we’ll be in shape, for when we have to do our exercises.” Seinfeld isn’t wrong, but there’s a bigger picture too! Serious bodybuilders treat each workout with importance, knowing that it brings them one step closer to a goal. Similarly, when practice becomes performance, you knock down an arbitrary wall that may keep you from realizing your best playing when it counts.
7. They’re willing to adapt. If an exercise is painful, they substitute another. If they need extra work in one area of the body, they add another exercise. And as a matter of course, they switch up their routines once a month or thereabouts. They know that both body and mind can get stuck in a rut, and when that happens, progress slows to a crawl.
8. They get feedback. Besides the natural camaraderie of the gym environment, bodybuilders take advantage of some of the most objective feedback known to man: scales and rulers. If their goal is to lift a certain amount of weight, they always know where they stand in relation to that number. If they want to lose weight, they can easily chart their progress.

How to “pump up” your practice routine

I want you to be excited about each day’s work on the violin, so here’s how to do it:

• Set a long-term goal such as a performance or audition date
• Set three sub-goals, with dates, on the way to the big goal
• Start a daily practice journal where you record what you practiced and for how long
• Each day, before you play, devise a routine based on yesterday’s session
• Maintain “good form” through attention to pitch, rhythm and sound quality
• Expect incremental progress and some plateaus
• Record your progress, with audio or video, at least once a week
• Draw inspiration from the greats, but realize that you’re seeing only the end of a journey

If you’ve been inspired in the gym, I’d love to hear about it! Let me know in the comments below.

’Tis the season for audition videos!

It wasn’t always this way. Let me do my best Church Lady impression: Back in my day, we didn’t make videos for college auditions! We drove the interstate to every school and played fifteen concertos at each one, and we loved it!

But times have changed, and serious music students are applying to more and more schools during their senior year. And faculty at those schools still have the same (tiny) amount of time to hear live auditions. The solution? Make everyone submit a pre-screening video to limit who gets those coveted audition spots!

That would have been a grossly unfair requirement when I was applying to schools back in 1996, because very few students had the means to produce a video that didn’t look like a local-access cable show run through the VHS duplicator.

Wow, Dana Carvey again!

But today, it’s easier than ever to make a video of your playing that looks and sounds professional. You don’t need lots of money to pull it off. But you need to know where to put that money so it really counts.

What is the pre-screening committee looking for?

Before you make a video, you should know what kind of video your audience (the committee) wants:

Committees want to see and hear an accurate representation of you and your playing.

That’s it! Your video succeeds if the people watching it feel as though they’re hearing you live. It fails if it gives a different impression, either deliberately (because you tried to fool the committee) or, more likely accidentally (because of poor picture or sound).

Here are the three basics you need to nail so that the committee gets an accurate impression of your playing:

A normal frame

Your audition video should focus on you. Don’t include the entire room in the shot, even if it’s a stunning cathedral, because you will appear too small in the video. And don’t zoom in so close that your body doesn’t fit in the frame. Committees need to see how you get around your instrument in addition to hearing your wonderful playing.

Shoot from a normal perspective. In other words, treat the camera as you would an audience member: give it a good seat for the show! Don’t make a committee look up at your chin while you play. Don’t ask them to look at your back. Put the camera just where you’d like to sit or stand as an attentive listener.

Decent lighting

In the old days, you had to worry a lot more about light when making a video. How much? What color? With today’s digital sensors, those are practically non-issues. As long as you are easy to see, and there aren’t any light-related distractions in the frame, you’ll be fine.

Sound that faithfully represents your playing

Audio is more difficult to get right than video. Again, you don’t need to spend tons of money to get good sound, but you do need to understand some basic principles of sound recording. Just know that if your budget is limited, you’ll get better results putting most of it into your audio. Here’s why:

Video is the easy part

Weird, isn’t it? Historically, after all, audio recording came well before moving pictures. And anyone old enough to have used a dial-up modem will recall that video was out of the question in the early days of the World Wide Web. When video finally started appearing on web pages, it was postage-stamp sized and the quality was pathetic!

Rest assured that nowadays, it’s easy to capture quality video. You just need a camera (which could be a smartphone), something to hold the camera, and light.

The camera

It doesn’t particularly matter what kind of digital video camera you use. Imagine that: when making a video, your video camera is one of the least important factors.

It’s true! A cheap camera or a smartphone will work just fine. Of course, there are expensive (and ultra-expensive) video cameras out there, but we won’t see much benefit for our purposes. Expensive cameras are expensive for reasons that go far beyond the scope of an audition video.

Pro video cameras include features like the following that are critical for big-money productions:

The ability to use pro lenses

Directors need many different lenses to get just the shots they want, so their cameras need to be able to accept those fancy lenses. You won’t need such a lens. While limited depth-of-field is a nice feature (you’re in-focus while the background is blurred), it’s overkill for your audition video.

Ultra-high resolution

Even smartphones can shoot in HD these days, and that’s more than enough for an audition video. Pro cameras shoot ultra-high resolutions so that the big-budget projects they capture will be ready for any audience on any size screen. If your audition video ever gets viewed by a wide audience, it will either be because you’ve hit the big time, or because your video was really entertaining… in a viral way.

Pro usability

Big-budget projects can’t risk downtime due to malfunctioning equipment. Pro cameras are built to handle moisture, heat, cold, sand, you name it. You won’t need to worry about any of that (please don’t shoot your video on the beach)! In addition, big-budget projects use manual focus. There’s a guy whose job it is just to pull focus all day long. Therefore pro cameras include manual focus knobs that are easy to “mark” for focal distance. If you’ve ever heard of an actress hitting her “mark”, it means she moved to the right spot at the right time for the focus puller. You won’t be moving (much), and just about any camera can detect your face and focus automatically.

Camera support

The camera shouldn’t move. At all. If you’re using a dedicated video camera, it probably came with some kind of tripod. If you’re using a smartphone, you can find tripods and other supports at Walmart, Target, or on Amazon.

Relativity of light

This sounds like an Einstein theory, but it’s a lot simpler: out of everything in the frame, the best-lit thing should be you. As long as you make that happen, your camera will automatically adjust its exposure appropriately. Just watch for these two common mistakes:

Backlight

This should be common knowledge by now, but it bears repeating: if you have a strong light source behind you, your camera will almost certainly be fooled and you will show up dark on your video. You don’t want that. Position yourself so that the strongest light sources are shining on your front, your side, or some combination of the two.

Overhead light

In some rooms, the only light comes from directly overhead. That may look fine to our eyes, since they’re used to making adjustments and compensating for shadows. But if the lights are strong enough and narrow enough (like spotlights), those shadows get pretty harsh. And on video, you’ll end up with dark shadows under your eyes and chin. This isn’t as big a deal as total backlighting, but it’s still something to avoid when possible. If you’re stuck with overhead lighting and a dark floor, you may consider putting a large square of aluminum foil on the floor as a reflector. Just make sure that foil doesn’t appear in the shot!

Use battery power

One last note about cameras: whenever possible, run on battery power and bring spare batteries. AC power lines carry noise, which will find its way onto your recording if you’re using on-camera audio (which you shouldn’t be — read on to see why). Power lines are also susceptible to outages and power spikes. For example, if you’re on AC and someone turns on a light somewhere else on the same circuit, your video may dim momentarily.

Audio: where planning matters

There are a million great cameras out there, from your smartphone to a rig costing tens of thousands of dollars. Not one can capture pro audio on its own.

How can that be? you ask. That makes no sense!

It does if you understand two facts:

• Most folks don’t care about audio for their video
• Those who do care use a separate device for audio, so there’s no incentive for camera-makers to build good audio into a camera

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, I’ll admit. One day, we’ll all band together and demand a single device that will capture amazing sound and picture together! But until that day, remember that unless you separate your audio from the camera, you will have mediocre results.

The ideal setup

When money is no object, here’s how you capture audio:

• A wonderful-sounding room
• A dedicated audio recorder
• Multiple expensive microphones
• Optimal microphone placement
• Minimal processing

Makes sense, right? Pick the best of everything. But you can get great results even if you cut a few corners. Here are the different variables and how much they matter.

The room (i.e. recording space)

The room you use will shape all of your other choices. A great space means that you don’t have to work as hard for great sound. But you’d be surprised just how much you can get out of a space that isn’t ideal!

The basic idea is this: the better your room sounds, the further away you can put your microphones. That’s it in a nutshell.

If you’re recording in a concert hall, you can put your mic in the middle of the hall, far away from you, and call it a day. That’s because the hall was (hopefully) designed to sound great where the audience sits.

In a parking garage? Try putting the mics 30 feet away and all you will hear are reflections: echoes of echoes. Recording space and microphone placement go hand in hand.

A “too dead” space is far preferable to one that’s “too live”. At the extreme end of live, you have small rooms with hard surfaces and right angles. A garage is a perfect example. Without some kind of sound treatment (sound dampening), don’t even think about trying to get good results in such a room. You’ll be wasting your time.

The audio recorder

A digital audio recorder should do just that: record audio and nothing else. That’s because the more complex a machine gets, the more ways it can fail. Today’s digital recorders use memory cards, so there are no moving parts. They run on disposable batteries, so there are no power issues. They aren’t running Facebook, so they don’t crash. Yes, a DAR will be your best friend when making your audition video!

The microphones

It shouldn’t be a surprise that you get better sound with better microphones. And we’ve already covered the fact that video cameras don’t record great audio because they have crummy microphones built in. Simple, you think, I’ll just plug in a nice external mic! It’s not so simple. Besides the fact that the vast majority of cameras don’t have professional microphone inputs (XLR), most cameras introduce noise when a mic is plugged in.

The bottom line is that if you’ve spent any money on a decent mic, you don’t want it plugged directly into your camera. Yet another reason to use a DAR!

This post isn’t the place to go into the detailed aspects of different microphones, but in general you get what you pay for. Better microphones capture the same sound that you hear with your own ears, without introducing hum, static or other undesirable noise. The best mics do impart their own “flavor” to the sound; professionals pay a premium for the flavor that they like best.

In addition, while most inexpensive microphones are omni-directional, meaning that they pick up sound coming from everywhere in the room (including potentially undesirable reflections from walls and the ceiling), quality microphones come in many different “patterns”. One standard pattern is cardioid, which allows the microphone to ignore sound coming from behind.

This directional aspect of microphones leads into the next major advantage of using off-camera audio:

Microphone placement

Getting your microphone away from your camera works wonders for your recordings. For one thing, cameras make noise and that noise can get onto your audio track. But even if your camera were silent, why assume that the camera’s viewpoint is the best place to “hear” the music?

Again, if you record in a concert hall, then you can stick your camera in the expensive seats and put your mic there as well. You’re pretty much guaranteed a good sound. But what if you’re in a smaller room with sound that’s not ideal?

Here’s the beauty of using off-camera audio: you can put the mics wherever you want! When I make YouTube videos in my garage, you’ll see that I wear a mic on my shirt lapel. It sits about six inches from my voice and my violin. I put the mic there because if I put it further away, you’d hear more of my garage and less of me.

It’s what you might call a “close” sound. It isn’t ideal for audiophiles, but it’s honest (and it happens to be perfect for teaching videos where I want to replicate the sound violinists hear under their own ears). So go for the best space you can, but don’t throw in the towel if you can’t get a concert hall. Just get creative with where you place your microphones!

Processing

Ideally you won’t need much help “post-production”, but conditions aren’t always ideal. Processing takes that close, direct sound and “helps it out” in a subtle way using software. The key word is subtle. Committees aren’t fooled into thinking you have a huge sound just because you hit the “cathedral” button in post! But a bit of warmth and reverb can make a close sound work quite well.

Your action plan

You may have all or most of the equipment you need to make a fantastic video already. The playing… that’s the real trick, isn’t it? Here’s a quick step-by-step that summarizes the above info:

1. Choose your room, avoiding tight spaces with too many hard surfaces and right angles
2. Notice where the light comes from and plan the location for you and the camera accordingly
3. Get a reliable support system for your camera and set it up in a nice “audience member” spot
4. Check the frame for lighting distractions such as backlighting
5. Use a Digital Audio Recorder but keep the mediocre on-camera audio as a backup
6. If using external microphones, place them based on the size and type of room you have
7. Process minimally using software such as Audacity (free) or Adobe Audition (subscription)

Next up: specific equipment recommendations as well as step-by-steps for microphone placement and the recording process!

Have you made a video of your playing? Let me know how it went in the comments below!