TJ: At what point did you decide that you would dedicate your life to music?
SD: When I was in my second year in high school, I told my parents that
I wanted to train to be a professional cellist. They asked my cello teacher
if he thought I would be able to make it. He said, "I don't know if
he'll be another Piatigorsky, but he should be able to make a living."
Of course I was disappointed that he didn't say I was going to be another
Piatigorsky, but my parents were reassured.
I ended up studying with Richard Kapuscinski at Oberlin. Then I went to
Stony Brook for a couple of years to study with Bernard Greenhouse. Then
I had a fellowship from the Watson Foundation to go overseas. The terms
of my fellowship were that I was to meet cello teachers all over Europe
and to find out what they emphasized. I met Tortelier. I worked with Starker
for a few weeks in Switzerland, and then I worked with Jane Cowan.
TJ: What did your teacher at Oberlin, Richard Kapuscinski, emphasize?
SD: He was a pupil of Salmond and Leonard Rose. He had played in the Boston
Symphony for years. He was an absolute genius when talking about musical
articulation. He never played an uninflected phrase in his life and he would
never accept anything that didn't have musical direction. His technical
emphases were very much influenced by Dounis, a doctor and an amateur fiddle
player who was fascinated by the role of the fingers as shock absorbers
during bow changes.
Kapuscinski also was an incredible human being, while I was a little bit
of a cello nerd. I practiced for hours every day, ignoring what was going
on in the world around me. He would drag me out of the practice room because
there were peace demonstrations going on outside. He felt I needed to get
involved with real life outside. Soon I felt that music was too divorced
from the real world, and I thought about leaving music. So he encouraged
me to take a biology course. But I soon discovered that biology was not
a strong area for me and I returned to music.
TJ: Then you went to study with Bernard Greenhouse.
SD: He was mostly a great model for me. I would listen to him play and I
would try to absorb it by osmosis. He was an excellent teacher, but I was
mostly influenced by his sound and by watching him play. At the time he
was often on tour with the Beaux Arts Trio so I had to grab him between
tours. I couldn't make the sound he made, but I sure tried to figure out
how he did it. He emphasized the notion of walking from finger to finger
in the left hand.
TJ: And then Starker.
SD: He certainly showed me what was wrong. He made it very clear what the
issues were in string playing and how I had to solve them. It was very interesting
having him for that three week period where we had master classes everyday.
He made me play a lot, everyday for 15 or 20 minutes. It was terrifying
and I became more and more nervous as the classes wore on. I carried away
from that encounter an agenda for my own study, and I knew that the rest
of the year had to be spent dealing with it.
Then I met Steven Isserlis. He was 17 years old at the time and was an incredible
player even then. I was fascinated by his style because it was so different
from anything I had heard before. He invited me to stay with his family
and took me to his teacher, Jane Cowan. She ran the International Cello
Center in Scotland. I think that it was started by Maurice Eisenberg and
that Casals was the honorary president. She had studied with Feuermann and
was a friend of Casals. I had the great fortune of experiencing the amazing
musical heritage she embodied..
She taught from her home in the Scottish Borders. There were about eight
of us studying with her on an intensive basis for two months at a time.
We didn't just have cello lessons, though. She had to teach enough subjects
so that the younger students would be prepared to take the university entrance
exams. Her husband, who is a wonderful organist, taught math, theory, and
piano while she taught European history, languages, and cello. It was a
totally absorbing environment and a little eccentric. At that time, I was
a slightly disillusioned American graduate student looking for a different
approach. I certainly found it there.
TJ: Who were your cello idols when you were growing up?
SD: I was a huge fan of Casals. I bought as many recordings as I could get.
I was also very much influenced by Rostropovich. He was the amazing emerging
talent at the time. And of course there was Starker, Rose, and Fournier.
I listened to a lot of records when I was young. I tried to steal fingerings
off the records, which you can do if you listen hard enough, except with
Feuermann. Feuermann was so technically clean and quick that it was difficult
to discern his fingerings. But Casals did us a favor in a way by recording
when he was older. He slowed down a bit so you could hear the finger connections
and therefore his fingerings.
TJ: Early in your career, you entered competitions such as the Tchaikovsky
competition in 1974. What did you have to play?
SD: In the first round we had to play Popper Etude #33, a Bach Suite (4,5,
or 6), and a contemporary piece by a composer of our country of origin.
The second round was more Sonata oriented. We also had to play Tchaikovsky
Pezzo Capricioso and a set piece that we could choose from two options;
I chose one by Kabalevsky. The final round required two concertos with orchestra.
I chose the Dvorak and Rococo Variations. Between the two concertos
we were given only two minutes to get a drink of water. The whole thing
happened in front of a live audience and was televised from beginning to
end. It was a bit terrifying, like suddenly finding oneself in the middle
of the Olympics.
I originally went on a dare from my friends. My friends wanted me to have
a goal and they encouraged me to do it. So I prepared the first two rounds
as well as I could, figuring I would never make it to the finals. When I
got to the final round, I had only three days to get my concertos in shape.
I really blew it. I should have been playing them all along.
TJ: Who was on the jury?
SD: Leonard Rose and Daniel Shafran were the two big names. Leonard Rose
was very gracious. Unfortunately, it was the only time I was to have any
contact with him.
The Russian cellists knew that we Americans had all been influenced by Rostropovich,
who had defected to the West just a few years before. One of them took me
to a mural which had a picture of the last competition. There was a picture
of the table of jurists and you could just see their heads. There was a
little bald head and he told me that this was the biggest picture you could
find of Rostropovich in a Russian conservatory. It was his way of saying
that he was banished from Russia.
TJ: Have you been a juror for competitions?
SD: No. And I don't have an ambition to either.
TJ: Why not?
SD: Competitions, if entered in the wrong spirit, can have a terribly destructive
affect. If I enter a student in a competition I make a very big point that
he or she is only doing this for the experience. Even if you play beautifully,
it doesn't mean you will get a prize. The jury can be biased. Or a player
might win a competition largely because he doesn't offend anybody.
Sometimes the greatest talents don't come through in the top prizes. I'll
never forget Andras Schiff getting fifth prize in that competition. The
audience was crazy about him. And in the final concert they wouldn't let
him off stage. He had to play five encores, playing one Scarlatti sonata
after another, each one more beautiful than the previous. And he only received
fifth prize!
TJ: Do you have themes in your own teaching?
SD: I want my students to be healthy cellists first and foremost. Then I
want them to be thinking musicians. I am more interested in a student that
comes with something to say musically but is terribly awkward technically.
I far prefer to teach somebody with a musical instinct than somebody who
is a glib instrumentalist and has nothing to say. There are too many of
those out there anyway. Sometimes it is a bit of a struggle, but I'm intrigued
by trying to help people make the physical process easier.
TJ: Can musicality be taught?
SD: Musicality can't be taught but it can be developed. You can teach a
student to play intelligently, but if somebody doesn't have music in their
soul, you can't insert it surgically.
TJ: What are some common problems of students?
SD: There is a tendency in modern string playing and in students to not
recognize the difference between legato and portato. An awful lot of students
don't play legato and don't understand what it sounds like or feels like
to really create a legato line. One has to teach facility, but one also
has to teach how to make a musical line.
TJ: So you use technique to serve the music.
SD: I would hope so. When most students get to school, they're manic about
getting technical command of the cello. In a lot of instances, I have to
spend the first two years getting technical issues sorted out. But in the
third year, I start expanding from that foundation. Then the biggest job
is to teach them musical responsibility, that they have to make choices
that are actually going to make sense, and that they have to be accountable
for these choices. It's very dangerous to say "Here are the fingerings
and bowings. Now go practice them and come back next week." You have
to cut them loose from that and let them make their own mistakes.
I have a couple of students who I must insist that they not play a note
until they figure out exactly where they want the phrase to go. I do this
because very often the musical shape determines the technical solution.
If you use only a technical formula to solve a problem, the audience can
always hear it. Jane Cowan used to talk about the transcendental technique,
the technique that isn't noticed because you're just listening to music.
I can't know how to teach that perfectly, but I'm certainly trying.
A good technique is one that is infinitely flexible as well. The basics
have to be in place and then you have to take them, just like primary colors,
and be able to make any effect you like. For instance, if you have really
fluid bow technique, you should be able to make any sound the ear demands.
TJ: When you're studying a piece should you listen to recordings?
SD: Dangerous. A lot of people listen to one recording and try to imitate
it. And when they come into the studio I say, "Now you're distorting
a distortion." Because everybody's performance is filtered through
their own personality, it could be regarded as a distortion of the text.
If you take another person's interpretation as a model, it's bad. You should
start from the source again, from the score, and come up with your own reading.
I hate this business of "what record did you listen to." A piece
like the Dvorak is so pulled out of shape these days that people don't think
about Dvorak, but how so and so played it, which is rubbish. How do you
come up with your own interpretation if you do that? It's like the game
called "telephone" where one person says something and passes
it on the next person, who in turn passes it on to the next person, and
so on. At the end of the circle, the message is completely distorted. That's
what can happen to music if you use only recordings as your model.
TJ: What is your own practice routine?
SD: I have certain basic exercises I have to do everyday to stay in shape.
Scales, flexibility exercises, a bowing routine, etc. I have a big handout
that I give all my students that has different warm-ups. I also try to talk
to them about intelligent use of practice time. You've got to have a good
warm-up routine to maintain your flexibility and to keep you in touch with
your intonation and your sound. Then I follow that with work on passages
that I find tricky for technical work. After a break, I work on phrasing
problems that I am trying to solve. I also work away from the instrument,
using musical imagination by taking the music into the library where it's
nice and quiet and looking at the whole score, or going to the piano and
studying the piece at the keyboard, or just sitting somewhere and just thinking
through the piece. I believe a lot of practicing takes place unconsciously
between practice sessions, especially musical assimilation or "internalization."
TJ: The music business has become so saturated today that it is becoming
more and more difficult to get a job in music. And yet the music schools
continue to pump out musicians like a factory. Does this make sense?
SD: The good side of this is that it's going to raise the level of the orchestras
in this country. It's going to hopefully raise the level of music teaching
and music playing as well. But unless the students are trained to be very
flexible and to have a number of different career paths possible to them,
and maybe be willing to pursue two or three of them at once, they're going
to be very hungry. It's really important for us to stress diversification.
The big job right now is to build an audience because there's a whole generation
that has lost the message of classical music. We must get into the schools
and involve kids at an early age with music. I think everybody that's involved
with an instrument is going to have to be involved in teaching. We must
be responsible musical citizens. This doesn't mean you have to spend all
your time doing it, but there has to be some teaching or some outreach activity.
TJ: Is there such thing as a wrong interpretation?
SD: I would say the only interpretation you could say was wrong is one where
there is a blatant disregard of the text. If somebody ignores tempo markings,
articulation indications, and dynamic markings, showing a real carelessness
for these elements, and if it's obvious that the performer comes first and
the composer comes second, then his or her interpretation shouldn't even
be dignified by the term "interpretation."
Of course, there can still be many beautiful and valid interpretations that
are very different from each other. If there is a sincere attempt on the
musician's part to recreate a piece as closely as what he or she feels is
the spirit of the text, then that's great, and any differences are honest
and sincere. I just hate carelessness. If a student plays for me and is
obviously thinking about playing the cello and hasn't thought about the
composer, then he or she gets a lecture.
TJ: Do you have any general principles when you play the Bach Suites?
SD: Use an edition as close to the manuscript as you can. The Magdalena
manuscript has its flaws because of the haste in which is was made, but
it's still the best we've got. The violinists are lucky because they have
the autograph for their Bach solo works.
It has become a really complicated issue to work on the Bach Suites. Some
of the students come in with a very romanticized idea of how to play them.
I don't want to take away the feeling that they're bringing to them, but
I do want them to hear it with different ears, with sort of 18th century
ears. This is hard sometimes, and there's a tremendous amount of resistance
to do that. But some of the early music performing that's going on today
is so vital and so vibrant that we can't ignore it. It would be silly to
not pay attention to it; we can't be ostriches.
I always want Bach to be red-blooded, not just scholarly. Scholarly information,
if used with imagination and insight, can contribute to an incredibly exciting
performance. There's a wealth of information about articulation; how to
handle cadences, and how to make phrasing using articulation for emphasis
instead of just trying to do a melodic or "romantic" phrase. I
think that because of what's going on in the early music movement, my own
ideas are constantly evolving, which is really exciting. We can't take anything
for granted anymore.
8/1/94