Itzhak Perlman has received
more honors and titles than you can shake a bow at, but one title
is especially important to him these days: professor. Teaching has
occupied a significant amount of the beloved violinist's time since
he joined the Juilliard School of Music faculty in 1999. And last
October, he was appointed to Juilliard's Dorothy Richard Starling
Chair of Violin Studies, which had been held by his mentor, Dorothy
DeLay, until her death in 2002.
Now entering his second
year in that lofty position, Perlman insists that his increased teaching
duties are in no way a mere diversion, nor a form of compensation
for being forced to put down his violin for a while last year, when
he was recovering from surgery for a torn rotator cuff. Nor is it
a hedge against the mixed critical reaction to his recent work as
a conductor.
"I'm not playing
less, just teaching more," he says, during a phone interview
from New York. "Let's put it this way: If I'm not on the road
[performing], I'm teaching. I come back from a tour of Japan, I arrive
at the airport at 10 in the morning, and I go right in to Juilliard."
Teaching is certainly
nothing new for Perlman. Not only has he headed many master classes
over the years, but he also served on the faculty of Brooklyn College's
Conservatory of Music from 1975 to 1990. And since 1995, he has been
artist-in-residence at the Perlman Music Program, an instruction and
mentoring program for gifted musicians ages 11 to 18, cofounded by
his wife, Toby.
"I enjoy teaching
very, very much, and it makes the schedule complicated but it's not
a burden at all," he says. "I find that my musical machine
is so much more efficient with the teaching component in it.
"One of the most
important elements in teaching, conducting, and performing, all three,
is listening. One of the great challenges of a soloist is to actually
be aware of what's really coming out during a performance, and to
give yourself an accurate critique as to how you're doing. But because
of your physical involvement in the performance, you may be too distracted
to be 100-percent accurate. Then, as a conductor, I'm supposed to
listen to what the orchestra is doing, and say to them, ‘OK,
what you're doing sounds this way; it would be interesting if we do
it this other way I like.'
"If you don't listen
in an intensive way it would sound fine, but you would not search
into the music as deeply. Now comes the listening when you teach—what
do you listen for when a student plays for you, how do you judge what
you're hearing, and how can you fix it? If you listen to someone who's
not very advanced, it's simple. But if the person plays well and is
very musical, you have to listen closely to find things to help the
student out."
As
someone who fosters the careers of young violinists, Perlman has been
most closely associated recently with Ilya Gringolts, who is in his
early 20s and embarking on an international career. So it may be surprising
to learn that many of Perlman's Juilliard students are not brilliant
virtuosi at the edge of fame, but ordinary children.
"I love to work with
young kids," he says. "They are easier to teach, and it's
much more fun, and also everybody has a different schedule of development,
so when you see somebody at the age of 12 or 13 and they sound a specific
way, their playing is raw and age-appropriate, it's a great challenge
to figure out how they're going to sound in two or three years. It's
like tasting new wines. This young wine may have a lot of tannins
now, but in five or 10 years it is going to be spectacular, despite
the fact that right now it tastes like crude oil. You know this is
how it is supposed to taste at this stage of development."
But Perlman isn't likely
to compare a child's playing to crude oil to her face.
"I've got to be nice
when I teach," he says. "Young kids are very sensitive,
and you have to be sure that whatever you say, you have to say it
in a way that makes the students feel good about themselves and not
like they're getting hit across the head with stuff that's ‘good
for them.' You don't say to them, ‘You are upset by what I say
now, but you'll thank me later.' I don't believe in that. Thank me
now!
"To be a skillful
teacher, it's not only what you say to a student, it's what you don't
say. For people who are really talented, what you don't say becomes
extremely important. You have to judge what to say and what to leave
alone so you can let the talent develop. Sometimes giving your best
is a little too much; if you fool around with something, after a while
it starts to deteriorate.
"Also, speaking from
a selfish point of view, I always felt teaching was helping me as
a performer. You listen to kids and you have a day where everybody
is having problems, and you're trying to bring a point across but
it's not coming across as easily as you'd want, which can be discouraging,
but then you have a concert that night and you realize, ‘What
I was trying to tell those kids—that's something I should be
doing!' You have a different outlook on what you're doing as a fiddle
player."
Perlman
has derived some of his teaching techniques from his own experience
as a teenager under the tutelage of Dorothy DeLay, who at the time
of her death was widely regarded as the world's foremost teacher of
the violin, and Ivan Galamian, who mentored DeLay in the 1960s while
heading the faculty at the Meadowmount School.
"They were the most
potent one-two punch in teaching for me," he recalls. "His
way of teaching was to tell the student more or less what would work,
and if the student would follow what he said, you would get a very,
very good result. He did a job on my bow arm, and she concentrated
on my left hand, basically, but that wasn't the only difference between
them. Miss DeLay's approach to the students was, ‘What do you
think will work here? What is your opinion of the way you
played? If you're not happy with it, what do you think is the reason?'
"I wasn't used to
that, and in the beginning I didn't like it. ‘Just tell me what
you want from me and I'll do it!' But she insisted on my being more
involved in my own playing, and teaching myself, and that had a big
effect on me when it comes to my own way of teaching. If a student
comes up with a solution as to what's happening, that works better
because they can apply their solution to other stuff, and not come
asking me what to do every time.
"Another thing that
I don't like to do is show too much how it goes. I do it once in a
blue moon. Sometimes there are lessons when I don't pick up a violin
at all. And I don't bring my own violin to the lesson; if I have to
show something, I pick up the violin of the student. Sometimes they
have terrible fiddles and it's amazing they can produce any sound
from them at all. So bringing a Strad to show them how things should
go doesn't accomplish anything in most instances."
Perlman isn't the only
person keeping his hands off his fiddle in class; often, he has the
students put down their instruments and listen to recordings of great
violinists of the past.
"In our summer program
we listen to Heifetz and Elman and Milstein and Oistrakh and so on,
because kids should know where they're coming from historically,"
he insists. "That's how your ear gets trained.
"When Heifetz was
really young he sounded more like Kreisler and other people he was
hearing in that era. Eventually he developed his own style, but he
needed to know where he was coming from to develop his own way of
playing."
Perlman
is impressed with the technical abilities of his students, which he
says are generally higher than was the norm when he was a kid. He's
less satisfied with their tendency to care little about the likes
of Heifetz and Milstein ("learning the proper way of playing
musically"), instead throwing themselves into issues of period
performance practice in the works of Bach and Mozart. "They do
a lot of stuff in what they call the historical way," he says,
"but they should call it the ‘hysterical' way, because
it makes me hysterical when I hear it."
He says he's quite pleased
to be affiliated with Juilliard, but he's especially enthusiastic
about his wife's Perlman Music Program, or PMP, which is celebrating
its 10th anniversary.
"The amazing thing
about her school is it's not just in the summer; there are tentacles
during the year," he says. "We have something called ‘Works
in Progress,' where somebody in studio class plays a piece they're
working on, and a couple of weeks later they play the same piece to
show how it's coming along.
"Another thing we
do is invite 40 or 50 people to the house, and the kids play for them.
We emphasize to the kids that it doesn't have to be perfect; we're
seeing how they're doing under pressure. And sometimes we travel abroad.
Last summer we took 30 of our kids to China, and had a program with
30 kids at the Shanghai Conservatory, and an orchestra made out of
Chinese and American kids. This year we're having a concert at Carnegie
Hall.
"Many of the things
I've been doing recently have been a result of my wife's program.
She asked me to coach a string orchestra in the PMP, and that led
to my starting to conduct major orchestras. And the PMP is what really
started my new intensity of teaching. PMP is one of the main reasons
for the crossroads in my career right now, moving from one thing—playing
the fiddle—to doing three things.
"And so for what
teaching has done for me, I am very thankful."
