The Cellist Destroying America!

Well, it was one of those things I came across in that surreal time between wake and sleep, when a medicine I take that knocks me off reliably forty minutes after taking it then wakens me sternly and craves sweets. It’s called mirtazapine, and if you don’t have to take it, don’t. If, however, like me, the choice is the black dog of depression or mirtazapine, then run for it. Anyway, here’s the text:

Hi, please read this letter. I am a musician who has nothing to do with this incident, but I am very interested in making sure that no harm comes to the extraordinary antique you have in your possession.

1. You need to know that without a violin case, you risk serious harm to a living piece of history. I know you threw away the case, so go buy another violin case at a music store. Today. Store the violin safely in the case.

2. Dry winter air could be very damaging to the violin. Go out today and buy a room humidifier. Run it a few hours a day in the room where you keep the violin. If the wood dries out too much, it will crack, doing terrible damage.

3. You will never sell this violin. The violin is individually known and marked. It is not like a diamond where you can have it recut before it's fenced—think of the violin more like a human being, as someone's child. It is a living piece of history, 300 years old. Benjamin Franklin was a boy of 9 when this violin was lovingly crafted in northern Italy.

There is a powerful network out there looking for stolen instruments. If you attempt to sell it, you will certainly be caught and will spend years in jail. What you have done is tantamount to kidnapping. Violinists the world over hate your guts. Not a one will give you a dime.

4. After you buy the case, your best bet is to take the violin into a local mall and set it down safely, then walk away. Leave it somewhere warm where it won't be crushed or in danger of water damage.

Do the honorable thing. Give the violin up so that it may continue making music. It is worth nothing to you, while the music that still lives inside it is priceless.

Well, as a cellist, that was all pretty interesting. Also interesting is that this appeared on Craigslist > Milwaukee > all personals > rants and raves. What was the deal, or would I go back to bed? Bed I could do, I decided; a stolen violin in Milwaukee was beyond my reach.

The next day, I checked in on what I had been reading during the night, and was interested to find that it was the Lipinski Stradivarius that was stolen in an armed robbery in a Milwaukee parking lot after a concert.

That at least is reassuring, since the possessor of the violin—Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony—had been attacked with a stun gun and had the violin taken from him. And that implies—at least to me—that the thieves (a man and a woman) knew very well what they wanted and what it was worth.

In the case of Strads, many of them are named after the famous people who have played them. But this Strad is particularly illustrious—it was owned by Giuseppe Tartini, an Italian baroque composer most known for his “Devil’s Trill” sonata. Why the instrument is known as the Lipinski Strad—after Karol Lipinski, a Polish violinist of the first half of the 19^th century—and not the Tartini Strad is a mystery no one can explain.

So the concertmaster had left the concert with his violin…but wait. It wasn’t—Almond, like so many others, couldn’t afford an instrument of that quality and especially that rarity. So the violin was on loan. But from whom? It isn’t stated—or rather, the violin was lent anonymously by someone who had “strong ties to Milwaukee,” but it’s almost certainly the estate of Richard Anschuetz, a pianist who bought the instrument for his wife, the Estonian violinist Evi Liivak. Here’s what one source had to say:

Mr. Anschuetz missed her dearly, and continued to do so until his death in 2008. He could not bear to be parted from her beloved violin, and treasured it to the end.

So Almond was—in a sense—lucky. The worst fear of a string player is that their instrument will be stolen by some junkie, who will abuse it and possibly destroy it. That said, I can’t imagine the agony of having my cello stolen. It would not be losing my instrument, not even losing my voice: it would be losing my soul.

Don’t think that it goes just one way—that the player makes the music. I recently rented for a week a cello in New York City. It was a cello mass produced in China, and it wasn’t bad, though it was miles behind my instrument at home. But that’s when I learned: even a bad cello can sound good. But it can sound good in only one way. A great instrument can sound good in every way.

And so an instrument teaches the player—suggests a sonority, allows a phrasing, responds and reacts. And it becomes not an instrument but a part of the body.

Which is why a surprising number of players have had their instruments stolen: their instrument is so much a part of them that they forget to watch it, or even take it out of the cab they had been riding in. Think I’m wrong? Quick—what is your left hand doing right now?

It happened to Min-Jim Kym in 2010—she was eating at a London Pret a Manger and checking her iPhone (why am I not surprised?) and then…the Strad that she had been lent was gone. And then, after three years, it turned up in the Midlands. But in a curious and horrible twist of fate, the owner of the violin decided to put the instrument up for auction. It was sold for 1.38 million pounds. Kym, one classy lady, released this statement:

 "This violin was a faithful friend for many years, and I was devastated by its loss," Min-Jin Kym said. "Its recovery is an absolute relief, and I am eager to hear the violin onstage once more. I wish its next owner all the best of luck and success."

What do cellists Lynn Harrell, Yo-Yo Ma, and the violinist Philippe Quint have in common? They all have left their instruments in taxis—and all have gotten them back. And yes, all of them were Strads.

It seems that Harrell, at least, should stick to ground transport, if possible. Why? Check out the video below…. 

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

Grrr….

Voice 1—Give it up, Marc. You’ve written about it before. Everybody’s tired of it. Find something new!

Voice 2—Why does it make me so crazy? He’s 32, he’s an adult, and if he wants to cross over from classical to pop—why is that such a sin? Why not let him?

Voice 1—Hmmm, jealousy maybe? Do you secretly wanna do rock?

Voice 2—Come on, I don’t even listen to it. But look, the guy, David Garrett, spent years at Juilliard and the Royal College of Music. He’s got an amazing technique on the violin. He was given a Stradivarius when he was eleven. The jerk is 33 and has gotten more awards and done more first than anybody around. Look what he can do!

 

Voice 1—That is pretty amazing.

Voice 2—Yeah, and look what he does with it!

Voice 1—Ummm, yeah… Pretty bad….

Voice 2—Pretty bad? Pretty bad? That’s an atrocity, that’s a slaughter. Look, I don’t mind playing Bach with exaggerated vibrato or a hokey style. But why add stupid drums? Why make it sound like Muzak? But there he is, with that huge screen behind. At least he appeared in a concert hall—other videos have him in football stadia…

Voice 1—See? We don’t believe in stadiums….

Voice 2—Nor auditoriums…

Voice 1—Look, what’s the problem?

Voice 2—Joyce DiDonato said it best: why are we so insecure about what we do,—and what we’ve spent years learning to do—that we have to dumb it down? Why not own it?— This is what we are, this is what we do. No, I’m not going to jazz up Bach to play down to your level. That’s an insult. To both of us. And you know what? It doesn’t fool anybody—nobody is going to hear this rhinestone gaudy arrangement of Bach and then decide, ‘hey, let me just sit down and listen to the Well-Tempered Clavier!’

Voice 1—OK, so what’s the big deal? If he wants to use his talent and his Stradivarius to making money—oh, and also making people happy—is that a crime? Elitism, Marc?

Voice 2—Guilty as charged. Look, maybe we should just come out and say it. There is nothing wrong with going into new areas of music, of forging new types of music. If Garrett had wanted to do something like Laurie Anderson—hey, no problem!

Voice 1—So?

Voice 2—Look, will we ever do rock better than rock stars? Who are we kidding? And you know what? Beyond the flash, how much of a musician is there here? Because I heard him doing Bach and I heard him doing Schubert, and guess what? It was the same rich, throaty tone. And it might have worked in the Schubert, but the Bach?

Voice 1—OK, so what is it?

Voice 2—you know, there are a lot of good violinists out there. Hey, I came to Garrett through Philippe Quint, who was playing the hell out of John Corigliano. There’s Hilary Hahn, and Sarah Chang and a LOT of good musicians out there. And guess what? They’re not out there doing crossovers. They’re out there presenting and furthering a long and distinguished tradition. Isn’t this selling out? Isn’t this a child prodigy who’s hit a wall? There’s a limit to fast technique, you know. I mean, an hour and a half of fast, flashy music is unsustainable. There’s also such a thing as musicianship….

Voice 1—Wow, harsh words, Marc. And by the way, isn’t Yo-Yo Ma also a crossover?

Voice 2—Dunno, maybe…. But there’s something different. Ma’s Silk Road Project takes music from many cultures and fuses, producing something new and traditional at the same time. Quite different from putting snare drums to Bach, or playing a rock song on a violin.

Voice 1—Not letting go, are we, Marc! Bite ‘em, boy! Bite ‘em!

Voice 2—OK, maybe it’s purely irrational. Maybe it just rankles to see a 32-year old kid, pretty enough to have modeled his way through Juilliard, getting all this fame and attention when other musicians are laboring away, one concert after another.

Voice 1—Ya,  Marc—give it up…

Voice 2—Grrr….

On Music and Teaching

Well, it’s clearly a day not to read the newspaper, since is it really sensible to be taking antidepressants one minute and reading The New York Times ten minutes later? Nah…

So I bring the story of Thomas Sudhof, who shared the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology this year. And who was his greatest teacher? His bassoon teacher who, in Sudhof’s words, “taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.”

You know, it may be true. Anyone playing a double reed instrument like the bassoon or the oboe is openly flirting with madness; at one moment you’re playing music, the next moment you’re squawking. Oh, and you neither have any control nor any warning….

And I’m thinking about teaching, lately, because I did it for a large part of my life. In fact, I still do it, and like it. My problem, however, is that I had and have absolutely no idea of what I’m doing—I am perpetually improvising.

Other teachers know what they’re doing, as I saw yesterday when I was reading a New York Times article on schools which are “flipping.” And that is? Well, here’s the Times:

Students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.

Oh, and guess what? Everybody, for once, is completely on board with this idea! From the same article:

The flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on. “It’s the only thing I write about as having broad positive agreement,” said Justin Reich, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard who studies technology and education.

Well, it’s familiar territory: there’s Marc and there’s the rest of the world. Because when I saw the video that a flipped teacher had prepared, I was less than impressed. In fact, I was half appalled. Check it out:

Full disclosure—I am perhaps one of the few people who really enjoys a vigorous discussion of subject / verb agreement. And in fact, the topic drops by for dinner occasionally, usually in the form of Mr. Fernández sputtering about the capricious way that English handles collective nouns. Spanish, of course, is completely logical—all collective nouns in Spanish are singular. But what fun is that?

All right—about the video. First, the teacher states that singular verbs have an added “s.”

Little Marc (seated in second desk, third row—and very cute): I works? You works?

Teacher (exasperated): No, Marc….

Marc: But aren’t “I” and “you” singular?

Teacher: Yes, Marc, but we’re talking about “he /she / it.”

Marc: Oh, the third person singular in the present simple indicative?

Teacher: Ummm? 

Next, the teacher discloses a trick—something he calls the “it / they” rule. Big question: “Tony works” or “Tony work?” Well, we can replace—so sez Teach—“Tony” with “it.”

Yeah?

Marc: But isn’t Tony a “he?”

Teacher: Well, yes, but to make it simpler we’re using just “it.”

Marc: How does that make it simpler?

Next, the teacher suggests that we simply count the nouns, using the example “Marc and Mary”—that’s two, see? Plural.

Marc: What about the sentence “Neither Marc nor Mary?

Teacher (nervous—he sees what’s coming): What about it?

Marc: Well, there are two subjects, but should the verb be singular? You wouldn’t say “Neither Marc nor Mary work in the mill,” would you?

Then there’s the problem—the teacher gives it away when he says “that doesn’t sound right,” in discussing the “it / they” rule.

Marc: But what if someone doesn’t know what “sounds right?” Maybe he’s never heard it right, and so he can’t tell what sounds right? Or what if he’s learning English as a new language?

Teacher: Well, I think we can assume….

I hate to say this—no wait, let’s be honest, this causes me no pain whatsoever to declare—but the teacher in this video doesn’t seem to be too bright. How would he handle the question that I, even as a child, would have asked?

Marc: What is a subject, anyway?

Teacher: Well, the subject performs the action of the verb.

Marc: What about the passive voice? What about, “the patient is examined by the medical team?” Is “medical team” the subject?

Teacher: No, the subject is “the patient.”

Marc: But is the patient examining?

That would have lead to the old and mostly true “the subject is the noun before the verb.” A possibly useful rule of thumb, yes—but it does beg the question.

Maybe it’s time to do two things. First, I seriously think that we need to reinstitute Greek and Latin into our schools, and yes, in grade school, when those young minds can soak up the rigor and the discipline of the languages. Because then kids will be able to decline nouns and conjugate verbs, which means that he or she will be able to give an example of the third person positive singular present perfect active indicative using the verb “to see.”

(“he has seen” is the answer, by the way….)

Second, why can’t all kids learn a musical instrument? You know, I’m back to playing the cello now, and looking at YouTube clips of musicians speaking and coaching. And guess what? We’re a bright, talented, funny and quick group. And it occurs to me—have I ever met a stupid musician? If I have, I’ve forgotten him or her.

The video of the subject / verb agreement has gotten 57,000 hits, and the comments are almost all positive. Some people say that he’s really helped them. But check out the video below, of the legendary Dorothy DeLay. Then tell me…

…who’s the better teacher?