Amid Scrapes and Squeaks

For all too many violinists, success means polishing the personal image and sticking to proven works from the standard repertory. Even his best friends admit that Violinist Paul Zukofsky does not have much of a personal image. He is a sad-eyed, dour, defensive loner who will run from a circle of party chatterers rather than make small talk. When he emerges from the wings to perform, it is not with the elegant stride of a Milstein or the open-armed warmth of a Stern. It is with a rapid, open-toed, Chaplinesque shuffle. When Zukofsky plays, his music often consists of a series of brash scrapes, sharp squeaks and galloping glissandos that Mozart, Brahms and Tchaikovsky never dreamed of. Sometimes, it seems that he is a man who cares little for the usual trappings of success.

In fact, Paul Zukofsky is the foremost interpreter of contemporary violin music in the U.S. today. At 25, he indeed cares a great deal about success, except that he has chosen to pursue it in the challenging and unpredictable world of new music rather than in the classics. He need not have done so. His flawless technique and singing interpretative style would have been enough to rank him with any of his contemporaries in the safe world of traditional concert life. But while Zukofsky can, and does, play the classics, he sees himself as a latter-day Liszt, introducing the music of his own time, chronicling it and, since he is a composer himself, writing it as well.

By his standards, even Stravinsky and Bartok are somewhat old hat. "The tradition that I am upholding is the tradition of the continuance of music," he says. He has introduced new works by Milton Babbitt and Krzysztof Penderecki to the U.S., revived neglected ones by Charles Ives and Ferruccio Busoni. Zukofsky's 1968 recording of Roger Sessions' Violin Concerto proved that the music was not only playable, which many a violinist had denied, but that it was perhaps the finest concerto for the instrument ever produced by an American composer.

From the day he was born in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., there was little doubt that Paul would be involved in new and unfamiliar art. His father, Poet Louis Zukofsky, saw to that. Paul started on the violin at age four. After a year of study with Ivan Galamian (TIME, Dec. 6), Paul made his professional debut at eight with the New Haven Symphony. Meanwhile, his parents had stopped sending their prodigy to school after the first grade, partly because they felt they could do a better job tutoring him themselves. They did. At 13, Paul won a New York City high school equivalency diploma. At 14, he entered Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music. By the time he was 17, he had played three major recitals in Carnegie Hall. At 20, he received his Master's degree from Juilliard. He is now working on his Ph.D. and writing a treatise on contemporary violin technique.

The Collaborator. Zukofsky has specialized in playing contemporary music for the past six years. This season at Manhattan's Town Hall he is giving a three-program series called Music for the 20th Century Violin. While no new masterpieces have been unveiled so far, he has at least given young Americans like George Rochberg, Phillip Rhodes and David Saperstein the chance to hear their works performed. Last week he gave five days of classes for advanced students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Vanguard Records released his latest recording--James Randall's Lyric Variations for Violin and Computer. As it happens, Zukofsky makes the violin part sound a lot more vibrant and lyrical than Randall's plodding, predictable electronic scoring. Because of the kind of advice he can offer on bowing and fingering, Zukofsky is now recognized as a peer by avant-garde writers. Says Milton Babbitt: "Paul collaborates with a composer. You discuss things with him and work them out together. We can all learn from him."

Zukofsky is refreshingly matter-of-fact about how the average listener should approach new works: "Just sit in your chair, open your mind, and try to concentrate on what you are hearing. If you have heard it once and you absolutely can't stand it, try and hear it a second time. If your attitude changes to boredom the second time, then forget about it."

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