exacting requirements, and in any case, it was deemed
character-building in our time, place, and culture for
young girls to clean house, which my sister and I did
every Saturday morning—dusting, scrubbing, and wip-
ing down fl oors on our hands and knees with an acrid
pine-scented detergent. If practicing violin, however, I
was always excused from cleaning!
Two even more remarkable gifts followed. If you
played in the school orchestra and you brought a dollar to
school on certain Thursdays, you were set free from classes
after lunch the following day to attend the Philadelphia
Orchestra’s Friday afternoon concerts. We climbed to the
top of the second balcony at the Academy of Music, and
once the lights dimmed, I was enthralled, practically for-
getting to breathe as scintillating sound wafted through
the hall. Prokofi ev’s The Love for Three Oranges suite is
the fi rst music I remember hearing there.
Among all the tuxedoed violinists in those years sat
a lone woman, so austerely dressed you almost didn’t
notice her. In a long black gown with
a high neck, her hair in a tight knot,
she wore no makeup or jewelry, and
I understood subliminally that this
was necessary in a man’s world. I
studied my heroine’s every movement
and marveled with my girlfriends at
how she had won a seat up front, just
behind the concertmaster. I fell in
love, as well, with the great violin virtuosos of the day
(all male), starting with David Oistrakh, then Isaac
Stern , and fi nally a young Israeli violinist who played, I
decided, with the greatest strength, energy, and passion
of any: Itzhak Perlman.
The second surprising gift, as my violin studies
advanced and I placed by audition in the city’s youth
orchestra, was to study with a member of the Philadelphia
Orchestra, an exciting, if terrifying, experience. It also
meant taking the train downtown alone on Saturdays,
eating a sandwich at Schrafft’s (a rare treat all by itself, as
our family dined out only a couple of times a year), and
walking blocks through a beautiful, historic neighborhood
to the teacher’s studio. It also meant visiting the adjacent
violin shop of his father, who revived the violin from our
attic now that I was big enough to play it. He taught me
about the care of my violin and about the dimly visible
label inside it, which amused him: Guarnerius fecit 1735.
The legendary Guarneri family of luthiers did not make it,
he explained; rather, it came from a German factory circa
1920, and the label was meant to .... He trailed off, mak-
ing a very Italian gesture with his hand. No one, he said,
would be fooled by it. My father was with me that day, and
I sensed a well-concealed trace of disappointment in his
prompt: “Of course not.”
Out of frustration at not ever achieving all that I strived
for, I quit playing a few times. It never lasted long. There
always seemed to be a university or community orchestra
in need of violinists, and by then, music and the violin were
a part of me. Not long ago, I heard Andris Nelsons, con-
ductor of the Boston Symphony, explain it this way: “For
me, music is necessary ... to breathe.”
So it is an addiction. I still study, now with a
Romanian-born concert violinist and educator,
Dan Flonta, who by some miracle lives and teaches
in our small town two hours from Boston. I play in a
chamber orchestra, a piano trio, and a violin-cello duo,
and have performed at parties, weddings, memorial
services, benefi ts, and glory of glories, in a string quar-
tet with three friends. The joy that arises from those
informal gatherings, with no audience to please, no
fee to be earned, can hardly be described. Nearly as
indescribable came a moment when a curtain lifted,
and through great luck I found myself face-to-face
with my teenage heartthrob, Itzhak
Perlman. When he took my hand,
I barely got out the words, “Thank
you for your inspiration for the last
fi fty years.”
When there’s no music-making
going on or if my hands need a rest,
which they increasingly do, then
it is time for listening. Often after
dinner, Hugo and I will turn the kitchen lights low
and listen to a recording of a great chamber work.
No reading, talking, phone calls, texting, or checking
of email interferes. Listening is quite enough. There
is hardly space in one lifetime to experience it all:
the Beethoven and Haydn quartets, all the Mozart
symphonies, the Bach partitas and sonatas for unac-
companied violin, all of Schubert’s chamber music,
Dvořák’s , Franck’s, Mendelssohn’s, Tchaikovsky’s—so
we take in as much as possible, one masterpiece at a
time, on these evenings. I admit to favoring music for
stringed instruments—a most unlikely and delicate
construction, if you consider it, of woods, metal, and
horsehair for the bow, yet capable of expressing the
entire range of human emotion.
Listening like this is, I think, a way to approach a
state of harmony that musicians will often experience,
one that it takes a very great poet to describe:Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you
Are the music
While the music lasts.—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartetsvictoriamag.com 16WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE
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