Cry Now, Play Later

Time for a violin lesson with Ivan Galamian. The place is a memento-cluttered study in his Manhattan apartment, where he does all his teaching. Students call it the torture chamber.

Nobody is allowed here who has not already shown talent and promise. Still, it is hard not to be nervous. Autographed portraits of Kreisler, Szigeti, Milstein--all good friends of Galamian's --glare down from the walls. The air seems to tingle with his awesome reputation in the violin world. Isaac Stern calls him "the most effective violin teacher in the country," and he certainly has the alumni to prove it. Most of the brightest young soloists in the U.S. are Galamian products; Itzhak Perlman, Young Uck Kim, Jaime Laredo, Paul Zukofsky and James Oliver Buswell IV. In addition, Galamian has trained top chamber players like Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri Quartet and orchestra concertmasters like David Nadien of the New York Philharmonic.

Ultimate Sin. Tall and deliberate, Galamian, 65, sits there in his white wooden chair, taking everything in with stern, searching eyes. His Russian-accented speech is soft, and the softer it gets the more ominous it can be. When a student commits the ultimate sin--wasting Galamian's time by showing up unprepared--they say he whispers a single word: "Leave." Ivan the Terrible,

The piece for today is Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole. Galamian nods and sings along, sometimes snapping his fingers to indicate rhythm. His few comments are deceptively simple. "Intonation," he murmurs, or, "That's it, that's it." When something goes wrong, he raises an eyebrow; the music stops cold. Then he picks up his 1680 Nicola Amati violin and, filling the room with a full, rich tone, shows how the passage should sound. "Mark that," he says.

Oops--awkward bowing there. Galamian is a stickler on that. He teaches all of his students the same technique: the bow parallel to the bridge and the arm extended in a natural sweep. His method is based on mastery of the fundamentals. Paul Zukofsky's first six months of lessons, for instance, were devoted entirely to the A-minor scale.

Galamian's theory is that suffering through exercises liberates a student to go on later and develop his own musical personality. Cry now, play later, is the plan. "Some people say he is all technique and no music," says Itzhak Perlman, "but I say he shows you the way to produce the sound you need. Then he inspires you to have your own ideas." He approaches each student like one of the chess problems he is so good at, and he tailors each solution to individual talents and temperaments. And the students all agree that he is gentle and considerate beneath his seventy. "The most dangerous thing in a teacher," he says, "is dogma."

Watch that intonation--and stand up straight. When Galamian thinks a student is a potential concert performer (rather than, say, an orchestral player or teacher), he works on much more than just his playing. He advises him when to appear publicly, what to wear, how to carry himself. He corrected Young Uck Kim's habit of hitching up his trousers while onstage. He was tough on prankish Arnold Steinhardt, to give him discipline; with shy Kyung-Wha Chung, a co-winner of the 1967 Leventritt Award, he was kindly and patient, to give her confidence. Galamian constantly worries that sex will distract his best students from their careers. At Meadowmount, the summer school for string players he founded in upstate New York, his most famous exhortation is: "Don't go in the bushes."

Unheeded Advice. When a student tackles a technically difficult piece, like the Wieniawski concerto, Galamian makes it a little more difficult by asking quietly: "Sure you are ready to play this?" He means from memory, the way he plays everything. Surprisingly, he never did much concertizing of his own. How could he, when he was 14 at the time of his first lesson? His first lesson as a teacher, that is. When he talks about his childhood in Moscow, he says only that he was the son of an Armenian cotton merchant, a shy boy who wanted to be a concert violinist. But after his teacher sent him a ten-year-old pupil of his own, Galamian discovered that he had an even deeper instinct for teaching. By the time he settled in Paris at the age of 21, his lessons were so much in demand that he had no time to think about performing. He might still be teaching in Paris today if World War II had not forced him to emigrate to the U.S.

Galamian frequently ends a lesson with a warning about too much practice. "Four efficient hours a day is best," he says. He never heeds the advice against too much work himself. He has about 100 students who see him anytime from once a week to once a month, not counting old grads who come back for checkups. Most of the students are enrolled at either Manhattan's Juilliard School or Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, though there are a few private ones (at $50 an hour). To keep up this schedule, he works ten hours a day, seven days a week. At night he reads detective stories until late, sometimes rises at 4:30 a.m. to practice. But perhaps this too is part of his secret: he infuses the students with some of his own dedication and perfectionism. He has no outside interests to speak of. He never takes a vacation. His wife says that in the 27 years they have been married, they have gone out to the theater just once--and then Galamian was so bored that he wanted to leave at intermission. The show: Oklahoma!

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