Word: galamian
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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...
...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...
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...
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...
...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...