The Open World of Marv Rabin

Want to see a guy go from his mid-nineties to about age fifty in thirty seconds or less?

Marvin Rabin does it, unbelievably, just by talking about music, his lifelong passion and profession.

Interesting what you know and don’t know about adults when you’re a kid. Rabin was the founder of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra; he was imported—OK, lured—to the UW from Boston. So I figured he was from a musical family, a long line of cultured, genteel, well-heeled patrician people.

Wrong, his father was a store keeper, and didn’t play an instrument. But his father, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, did realize—vaudeville kept a lot of musicians fed and shod. Remember, the talking picture hadn’t been invented, and that meant every movie house had a pit orchestra. So his father put a violin in young Marvin’s hands, which changed his life and a lot of other lives.

Mine, for example. When Rabin believed in you…

But wait…

Rabin believed in EVERY kid, which is to say that he was always looking for that special talent, or spark, or curiosity that made a kid unique. Nor was he just a music teacher, a conductor, an educator; he came to music relatively late, having gotten a Bachelor’s degree in history and political science. He wanted kids to grow up and develop and keep developing through their lives, and if that meant music—great.

“Don’t commit closure,” he told me once, and as you can see, he’s still banging that drum.

But it’s a message that’s worth spreading, and that I may have heeded. My brothers didn’t play an instrument, went into their careers of journalism and law, stayed there, and have done well.

They haven’t, however, been a musician, a nurse, a teacher or a writer. And if I’ve had four professions and moved to a foreign (in a domestic sense—it’s like being pregnant in a virginal sense…) country and learned another language, well, to what do I attribute it?

Hours of practice at the cello.

It does something to you neurologically—something that was discovered only in the last twenty years. Musicians’ brains are different, wired differently. Significantly, the same areas of the brain that are activated in speaking and comprehension are activated when playing an instrument. Giving a kid a cello is really giving him a second language.

And like language, it can be done both singly or in a group. So every Saturday for four years in High School my father would drive me in the green Buick Skylark to the Humanities Building. For many of those Saturdays, Marvin Rabin would be charging down the halls shortly before 9AM, shouting “Sharon!”

Sharon Leventhal, now a fine musician, then a fine musician and concertmistress of WYSO. Which meant she stood up, gestured to Emily Auerbach who tweeted an A, and tuned the orchestra—winds, brass, and finally strings.

He was mercurial and temperamental. Yes, he could throw a temper tantrum, explode, rage. But it was always followed by an impassioned appeal—he knew we were great, he knew we had it in us, he couldn’t stand our not giving our best.

“HOWIE!” Rabin would shout, and the orchestra would cringe. It was Howard Metzenberg and Shostakovich Fifth, which Rabin didn’t much like but everybody else did. And Howard played the contrabassoon, for which there is a gorgeous solo in the Shostakovich.

It was almost comical, almost a personal thing going on between them. The solo was never right, the phrasing wasn’t there, the notes cracked, Howie entered at the wrong time or got the rhythm wrong. The orchestra would tense just before the solo—how would Howie screw it up this time? It was unbelievable that there was any new, fresh disaster to be found in the solo, but Howie never failed in mutilating it in new and terrible ways.

Until, of course the day that Howie—perhaps having practiced that week?—played it perfectly. The orchestra stopped spontaneously and cheered, Rabin leapt off the podium and bounded to Howie, the two embraced.

People have commented on the anti-aging effect of music, how musicians go on and on. Certainly Rabin is just the same—his voice as much a viola as he is a violist, the hands always in movement. When he talks about playing an instrument, he lifts an unseen viola under his chin—he’s playing even as he speaks.

He was one of two great musicians who had a message for me—you’re good, this can be your life if you want it, don’t give up, believe in yourself.

“That was a miracle,” he told me, after learning that I had put together the recital with Gunnar in three months, after years of not playing.

It may have been, but if so, who had performed it? Myself, of course—you don’t do that without a lot of practicing. Gunnar, who was always not flowing but flooding with encouragement.

And WYSO and Marvin Rabin. It was the one beacon in my life during those black years, those years in which I thought I fooled everybody around me, all those people who were so discerning about everybody else and so mistaken about me.

Rabin never stopped believing. Years later, I used to play music with a fine pianist who lived up the street. And for the first time, I worked out the frustration and neuroticism that had plagued me for decades about music and the cello. I dropped it all and played.

The best playing of my life.

Was it Marvin Rabin, up there, still passionate, still encouraging, still finding the unique and wonderful in all the others and me?

Maybe.

Or had just I listened at last?

Interview – Marvin Rabin from Loyola University on Vimeo.