On April 29, The Juilliard School held a memorial for my teacher Robert Mann – founding 1st violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet, American artist, composer, teacher, writer, husband, father. I studied with him for my Masters and Doctorate degrees at Juilliard. After that, I still occasionally went to play for him at his apartment. I also had the great joy to play Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert with him at his family’s annual Christmas parties.
In my life I consider it one of my hugest blessings, and my best luck, to have had a big array and sequence of extraordinary teachers, with each of whom I got to spend a lot of time. In my 20 years at Juilliard (and beyond), these included my violin teachers Shirley Givens and Dorothy DeLay, violinist Felix Galimir, cellist Fred Sherry, and the members of the Juilliard String Quartet. From my childhood, I particularly remember my teacher Rosemary Glyde. My musician parents, Robert and May, have given me continual support, dialogue, and sophisticated feedback. In recent years, composer Mario Davidovsky was essentially a teacher to me, engaging me in rich conversations about music, culture, and the world. And I’ve learned from so many other remarkable musicians and people I’ve worked with. However, of all these numerous influences Robert Mann is the teacher who was my most life-altering inspiration.
His mantra when he founded the Juilliard Quartet was, “Our goal is to play new music as if it had been composed long ago, and to play a classical piece written hundreds of years ago as if it had just been written.” [from his autobiography, A Passionate Journey]
I was tremendously honored and moved to be asked by Juilliard and his family to perform at the memorial, and to play “Rhapsodic Musings”, which Elliott Carter wrote for him in 2001. I remember his happy excitement when he told me, one day at my lesson, that Carter had given him this piece as a birthday present. R.M. stands for Rhapsodic Musings, for Robert Mann, and for the notes Re Mi, which figure strongly in the work. The piece is an amazing, delightful character study of Bobby, his characteristic gestures and personal qualities, both fiery and tender, and a wonderfully concise example of Carter’s brilliant and lyrical music-making.