Everything music from a perspective of a public
school music teacher with subject integration
(especially art, history, and literature) as a focus
to help teach the Common Core Curriculum.
Let tyrants shake their iron rod, And slavery clank her galling chains, We fear them not, we trust in God, New England’s God forever reigns. The foe comes on with haughty stride, Our troops advance with martial noise, Their vet’rans flee before our youth, And gen’rals yield to beardless boys.
Schuman then transports this hymn to the 20th century, by altering its rhythmic and harmonic
"The President's Own" United States Marine Band Timothy Foley, Director Transcribed by William E. Rhoads from William Schuman's orchestration of E. Power Biggs's edition of Ives's variations for organ, S140.
Dorothy DeLay, teacher and mentor to some of the world's most celebrated violinists, died Sunday at her home in Upper Nyack, N.Y., after a more than yearlong battle with cancer. She was 84. DeLay's long teaching career spanned two generations of players. Her students included violinists
Itzhak Perlman, Midori, Cho-Liang Lin, Gil Shaham, Schlomo Mintz and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.
Other pupils, such as Joseph Swenson and Peter Oundjian, went on to become conductors.
Her violinists have joined the Juilliard, Cleveland, Tokyo and Fine Arts quartets.
At the Juilliard School of Music, where she taught for half a century, students clutching violins would line up
for hours for the chance to study with DeLay, whose students regularly snagged top prizes at competitions,
often a first step to the high-stakes concert circuit. Parents called DeLay from all over the world,
hoping she'd listen for five minutes to their "brilliant" children and recognize them as prodigies.
They hoped lightning would strike as it did in 1986 for then-6-year-old Sarah Chang,
now one of classical music's hottest properties. After listening to Chang play on her one-eighth-sized violin,
DeLay agreed to take her on as a student. Young violinists trained by DeLay were noted
for a distinctive sound that has been described as lush, burnished and beautiful.
"Dorothy DeLay represented the highest level of violin teaching during the second half of the 20th century,"
said Joseph W. Polisi, Juilliard president, in a statement. "Her legacy is reflected in the thousands of violinists
who are currently performing and teaching around the world."
Born March 31, 1917, in the cattle town of Medicine Lodge, Kan., DeLay had been described as looking
more like a nice Midwestern grandmother than a groomer of concert professionals.
The stereotype of the stern, usually male European violin master was flouted by the warm, nurturing DeLay
--who, according to a 1989 story in the Los Angeles Times, often addressed her callers as "Sweetie,"
"Honey" or "Sugarplum." She was given to offering homespun advice on romance or fashion
in counterpoint to her musical instruction.
Her philosophy:
"Teach the student, not the subject."
Even when their fame outstripped hers, many of her students continued to call her "Miss DeLay."
The approach has to be tuned not just to students' accomplishments but also to their personalities.
In some cases Miss DeLay -- mystifying most other pupils --
has seen a trait worth developing in someone even though that person is not going
to become a professional musician. The person is paramount.
2. Expect a lot. What you teach -- information and principles but also, and more important, habits and disciplines of thought and practice -- will have to last a lifetime. Miss DeLay explains how, at
the start of her teaching career, she imagined a circle of exacting listeners sitting in on her classes:
Toscanini, Heifetz and others. What would they want to hear? How would they respond? From
this exercise came the rigorous program she gives her pupils to take them through their five
hours of daily practice.
3. Be positive. Fear is a strong incentive, but only for as long as the teacher is part of the pupil's life. Encouragement lasts forever. (Isaac Stern suggests that Miss DeLay's characteristic
endearments -- ''Sugarplum,'' ''Sweetie'' -- covered the problem of not being able to remember so
many names when she was seeing dozens of students each week. But the cuddliness -- partly a
front, of course -- also helps pupils feel that their teacher is on their side.)
4. Ask questions. This is where negativity comes in, but subtly. By questioning students, the
teacher invites them to think about what they are doing and why. In time, they may start to
discover their own faults and find other ways of doing things. They may come, in effect, to teach
themselves.
5. Learn. Making the lesson a dialogue has another advantage, that the student may start to teach
the teacher, at least in how to teach. Teaching is about giving but also gaining.
6. Be yourself; or if not that, at least be someone. Having a distinctive teacher makes the lesson
special. A lot of Miss DeLay's success may be owed to the scarf she always wears around her
shoulders.
7. Break down problems. Students learn little from being told -- in however positive a way -- that
they have done something wrong. And they learn nothing from being told or shown the ''right''
way. The teacher has to analyze, has to detect just what is going amiss and why.
8. Let progress show. Miss DeLay, like all other music teachers, marks her students' copies of their
pieces to indicate details that need attention. She then thoroughly erases those markings as the
problems get solved. Perfection is the clean copy.
9. Do not shun trickery. Ms. Sand reports the nice story of a boy who said he could not possibly
manage the speed Miss DeLay asked for at a certain point in a piece. So she put the metronome
away and just asked him to play the passage over and over, a little bit faster each time, until, lo and
behold, he was attaining the impossible.
10. Remember what cannot be taught -- but not so as to relax your efforts. However much they
are given good examples, encouraged and taught to question, some students will go farther than
others. Innate talent is an issue here, of course, but so is innate determination. There are parts of
students' minds that cannot be reached, though they may be released.
11. Be a team player. Miss DeLay works with colleagues who take care of part of the instruction
process, and she recognizes the importance of parents, especially where young children are
concerned. Nothing will be achieved unless at least one parent is backing the teacher and
promoting good attitudes toward work at home.
12. Attend to everything. Nothing is beneath the teacher. Nothing is beyond the teacher's
competence to care. Miss DeLay's pupils have the benefit of her advice in everything from
concert dress to relationships with managers.
13. It never ends. Not only does Miss DeLay make a point of hearing her ex-pupils perform
whenever she can, but they clearly know, to judge from the evidence assembled in Ms. Sand's
book, that they have been marked by her for life.
Paul Kantor on Dorothy Delay:
Dorothy Delay studied under the famous violin teacher Ivan Galamian:
George Szell, Conductor
