Op.2 - Don Ehrlich, viola

Don Ehrlich, Northern California Viola Society's 2014 Tom Heimberg Viola Advocate Award recipient

Until his recent retirement, Don Ehrlich was assistant principal viola in the San Francisco Symphony. He received a B.M. from the Oberlin Conservatory, an M.M. from the Manhattan School of Music and a D.M.A from the University of Michigan. He has been a member of the Aurora and Stanford string quartets and is principal viola of the Mendocino Music Festival. Ehrlich plays an ergonomically corrected Pellegrina model viola designed and made by David Rivinus of Portland, Oregon. His recent recording of the Six Suites by Bach, originally for cello, is available through the San Francisco Symphony Store.

I met with Don a couple of weeks ago for a quiet chat in his kitchen near Golden Gate Park over coffee and home-cooked chocolate croissants. We began by talking about his recent faculty recital program at the San Francisco Conservatory.

...Well, one piece I played I wrote - a memorial piece [“In Memorium, Hana”] for a girl I knew who died, she was 10 years old. Her father had put a paragraph he wrote up on the internet for family and friends – it was beautiful, and I set it to music.

Another was by Ingolf Dahl. Do you know his Divertimento? I don’t know a single violist who knows it! It’s really good!

I made it a point to do something outside of the symphony every year: Play an audition, a recital, something with quartet… It’s easy to die in a Symphony.

Even auditions?

People who have jobs play auditions a lot. It's not so much that they want the job - although I took an audition for the NY Phil principal, figured if I’d won that then I would have taken it. It was the year my mother passed away, about three days before the audition. I took the audition anyway... And of course I didn’t win, but…

I think one of the reasons for taking an audition is for making a kind of progress you can't make any other time, if someone is listening to every wobble, every scratch of your bow…

How I started--

So my mother got sick when I was a kid and had to spend a lot of time at home. Television had just been out for a while, so we got a television for her. I was maybe 4 or 5. My brother had started piano, he was 2 years older. There was a TV program, “The Voice of Firestone.” People of a certain age will remember that. A live televised symphony orchestra. I remember seeing the violins do their thing on the TV, and thinking, ‘I can do that!’ We were in Buffalo, my parents got me a violin and I had a really good beginning violin teacher - he was really good with kids - I remember a lot of what he said.

So you started privately – was there music in school?

There probably was, but I was probably before the curve, when they would have kids start. I was always in the orchestra.

Was it immediately clear, you were into it all the time, or… what else did you do as a kid?

I don’t remember, but I do remember that Far Side cartoon with the dog and the violin, looking out the window, his friends worrying the postman and he’s looking so forlorn…

But it was a prison of your own making?

Yes, it was. I would take a few apricots up to my room, practice for 10 minutes and give myself an apricot for a break.

I wouldn’t say I was excited to play. I practiced, I got better, I guess. I got good enough to get into Oberlin… for the record, my first violin teacher was Bernard Mandelkern, and his wife Rivka Mandelkern took over when he stopped and went into the stock market. Rivka had had her left first finger amputated, so she played backwards.

And then my violin teacher at Oberlin was John Dalley. The [Guarneri] quartet was the quartet, but it wasn’t full time yet - they were all doing different things. And that was his job, and he was there for a couple of years, and then the quartet was able to do their thing and he left. He was my teacher for only one year, because then I went to viola.

Why the switch?

Well, I picked up a viola. (long pause) I knew there were violas - I'd been to the Buffalo Philharmonic, I could see them, the Budapest Quartet came to Buffalo every year... But I didn’t know what that meant, until I picked one up and played it. Then it was disconcerting, disturbing, because it felt like I had gone home. It just felt so comfortable, it just fit. It fit my size, it fit my voice. The violin had always felt a little cramped - I would hit my nose, and... - (demonstrates, laughs)

It was as much the sound as the feel?

Yeah, the sound - my voice. I’ve never regretted that change, ever. I’ve always enjoyed being a viola player.

Would you still ever play the violin?

No, I gave it up. I picked it up a couple of times, for different reasons, I remember. Once I went with a friend and their daughter, who was going to try violins for purchase, and I picked one up and played the opening of – (sings the Bruch violin concerto opening) - something anybody could play. I did that just for a friend, to help try to keep them away from an instrument that was, you know, not right.

You became famous for owning and performing professionally on your Pellagrina viola, which has been described as like a Salvador Dali painting, or like it is melting, or has been melted. An article appeared in the New York Times in the late '90s about modern experimentations with ergonomic instruments, featuring you and your new viola. You wrote later you had no idea it would be such a big deal.

What really surprised me, the woman who wrote it, Margalit Fox, was actually researching an article she intended to write on ergonomic instruments that are just out there. She found, for instance, the flute with the bent head joint. But the flutists never took the time to find someone like me who would take the time to work with the makers, etc. etc.

And the only other one that she found was a piano keyboard with smaller keys, and maybe they came around a little bit at the ends. The genius of that is you should be able to pull out the old keyboard and put in this one and just play on a Bosendorfer or a Steinway, whatever you have. But it never caught on and I don't know why!... Since then there’s been a bass clarinet with a head join that is a little different.

And then of course my viola, which was the only one with an interesting story, I guess. And so she wrote this story that was basically all about the viola. That was a really interesting experience -- to be written up in the New York Times. What - a - rush! Hearing from people I hadn't heard from in years and many people I'd never heard from before. And not only was it a big article, but there was another small article and then a squib in the Week IN Review. There were three times where my name was mentioned - in the New York Times! Kim Kashkashian doesn’t get that kind of attention. (laughs) For a while I was the most famous violist in the country, and it was for the instrument, not for my playing. But what a rush, to have that experience.

What kind of experiences stick out to you as particularly significant – mind blowing lesson you learned from a performance or from a teacher, or just from your own life experience as a musician?

OK - Oh man, I have a lot of those. One thing I learned – it took me a while to work through this, but – basically, we teachers don't know what the heck we're talking about. I have a lot of examples of bad advice being given by great teachers, and I can even think of some for myself, for sure, but... For instance, I understand that Dorothy Delay apparently told Nigel Kennedy that he shouldn't do jazz because people wouldn't take him seriously. So he didn't do jazz and it was like he cut off his nose. And then when he put his nose back, and started to play jazz, that's when his career took off. So, just the wrong advice.

I think anything the teacher says has to go through the filter of the student. I tell my students that all the time – all the time. “That fingering works for me, I don't know why it doesn't work for you” - no, that's the wrong attitude! – it should be “This works for me, but will it work for you? If not, let's find one that does.”

I do have this very strong feeling, in fact this whole [Tom Heimberg Viola Advocate] award, is so meaningful to me. It's like we're pebbles and we're dropped into the pond, and the rings expand outward. Well, one of the pebbles that influenced me, was Lehner, Eugene Lehner, in the Kolisch Quartet.

When they broke up, he was in the Boston Symphony and was there the two summers I was at Tanglewood. I think I sort of base myself, and my teaching, my teaching specifically, and a lot of my performance, on things that he influenced in me – And just in the two, eight week sessions – and it wasn't even all 8 weeks each time, just when we worked with him in quartet coachings. One was the Bartok 1, and the other was the Death & the Maiden. And the things I learned from him...

For instance, Bartok - when we were doing the first Bartok. He told us we were, I don't know how many generations removed, 3 or 4.. it was in the 60s.. “You're the 3^rd generation that's playing this. It will be different. It can't be the same.”

And the other one about differences, when we were doing Death & the Maiden – Peter Salaff was the first violinist in this quartet. So Schubert, a lot of times, in a lot of his pieces – symphonies, the Arpeggione – the recap is identical to the exposition: the length, the theme... just the key relationship is different.

So we're rehearsing it to get to the next lesson, and we get the exposition, and there's the development, and we come to the recap, and we decide to do everything the same so we can get to the coda, which is totally awesome! (laughs) and Lehner was really upset with us! He was like, “How can you possibly be the same, there, after this amazing – incredibly intense middle section...!” and that was something I learned from him. I loved Eugene Lehner, I idolized him a lot.

Did you get to know him at all outside the coachings?

I sure wish I had, but I think – a lot of people felt that way about him – he was distancing himself from the students.

You recently recorded and released the complete Bach Solo Suites.

It's a life changing experience to do that. I did it as a recital at the Conservatory, which I did from memory. All 6 in a row, from memory.

I know there is some European cellist who connects the Six Suites with different aspects of the life of Christ – so, No.1, which is so happy, is the birth, and, you know, No.5 which is so dark is the Crucifixion, No.6 is the resurrection... Well, I'm Jewish so I can't really get behind that. (laughs)

But I did feel very strongly as I was doing the recital that it was one 36 movement piece. And one of my goals was: to do the same musical idea rarely - if ever - a second time (laughing), if I could figure out how to deal with it. Anyway, the life changing aspect to it is, to know yourself so strongly that you can make it be right. If you try any other point of view it just doesn't work. I think. No teacher can teach how to play that.

It's very personal

Yeah, it's completely personal. And of course everybody has an idea of how it should go (laughs). And I don't! – that's the thing that I know: it's like, today I wake up and I go, “hmm, well that's a different tempo!” (laughs)

What else has influenced you as a musician, as a performer?

So I have a couple that are kind of contradictory - 

Not long after I did the Bach recording, we were on an airplane and I was reading a book – and the book is the “Schopenhauer Cure” - Irvin Yalom, I think was the author. So he quotes Schopenhauer a lot, and there's this one quote that I read on the airplane - I don't know what the source is, I couldn't really find it, the book that this would have been in. He wrote a novel-like book about a flower. The flower must have been dissed by someone for showing off. The Schopenhauer quote is:

The flower replied, “You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake, because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.”

And when I read that, I burst into tears, in the middle of the airplane. My wife looks at me and goes “What's wrong??” This was me and the Bach – it's exactly what I did with the Bach: It was me, blossoming, and that was part of the life-changing experience.

I want my students to feel, they're the seed in the flower pot. I supply the rich soil and the water and the light, and then they heliotrope however they are going to.

The other side of that, though, is also within the quote, if you think about it, because there is a flower, and people admire the flower.

The [San Francisco] Symphony was on tour and my wife came with me – we were in New York. We stayed in the Hilton, which was like 2 blocks away from the Museum of Modern Art. We always go there when we stay at that hotel. We were standing there staring and enjoying van Gogh's “Starry Night.” This particular time, there were three other people also standing there, watching – two young girls, teens maybe, and another middle aged woman.

One girl looks at the other girl and says “It's different to see it in person.” And the woman rounds on her and goes “Different?? It's THIRLLING to see it in person!” And that changed my life, because it's so easy to be routine-ized, especially in an orchestra situation – and that's when I realized that that's what the audience wants, that's what the audience is there for. That's my job: to be thrilling.

So, between Schopenhauer's flower, and thrilling, there's like, being pulled in two directions. But there you are – that's our life as musicians, I think.

I still can't believe that “It's thrilling!” – whoever that woman was, thank you, for arranging that.. (laughs)

How much do you put your own personal stamp on your performances, rather than trying to do what the composer tells you, what the composer 'meant'?

One influence I remember was when I was getting my doctorate – I actually got a doctorate, but don't call me doctor (laughs) – whatever the class was, we were studying a Beethoven piano sonata, and the guy brought out 6 different recordings. We were listening to the first movement.

The first one, beautiful, followed everything Beethoven wrote. Second guy, same thing. Third person, same thing, then the fourth and the fifth... eventually, finally, the last one he picked up was Glenn Gould, who was of course completely off the charts, and the performance was completely off the charts, and it was the one that was jaw dropping. And going back to Lehner, and “you're the X generation... it's going to be different.”

I do know that I've actually verbalized this, especially when looking at Bach - but really with everything I play - the notes tell me things, and the notes demand certain things, like bowings: If I see a little scale pattern, do I really want the scale to be in one bow, even though he might have written three in one and three in one, or something like that? I'm always looking at things like that. And harmonies – as the harmonies change, what happens? The worlds change with these harmonies. Some people feel like, the composer did it, you don't have to do anything. And I don't feel like that – the composer needs all the help he can get! (laughs)

Two of my favorite quotes are about consistency. Oscar Wilde: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative”. And my favorite really is Emerson - Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” A lot of people leave off the 'foolish' – but I really think that's important, because, where does it become foolish? (laughs) Again, that's my decision!

What is your proudest musical moment?

Oh man!

Or top three?

That's a tough one. (pause) Possibly the best single performance that I was ever in – possibly; hard to say that - was a Third Bartok that I did with the West Point Quartet, with Mark Sokol. This was before Concord (Quartet). We were all in the Army - we were all in the West Point Band, and we made this string quartet, with Tom LeVeck and Dave Gibson. It was a really centrifugal quartet, really pulling apart all the time. Made me feel that my role as the viola player in a quartet is to be the glue! (laughs)

But that particular performance of the Third Bartok, we were at the University of Michigan, and it was so intense, all four of us were dripping with sweat. The last chord, “dah dah dah dah—WAP!!!” --- Total silence. The audience was so wiped out they couldn't applaud. And Mark finally looked at the audience, and shrugged (slowly demonstrates a shy sideways glance). Then the applause started, slowly, and built. That was certainly one of the most amazing performances I've ever been in.

It's interesting your most amazing moment, so memorable, was in a Quartet – you've been in the Symphony for many years and done many solo recitals...

Yeah, I'll say, the intensity. And the togetherness, which was so difficult for that quartet. The audience response..

[Another memorable moment was] the first or maybe second time I was acquainted with the Shostakovich Viola Sonata – I felt like it taught me how to play the viola. It kind of grabbed me by the shoulders and shook and said “NO! Find a different color! Find a different mood!” And that was amazing.

Especially since I've been retired from the Symphony, and beginning with the Bach Project, and actually even a little bit before that... OK, well, my history is - my early teachers who were the Mandelkerns – and then I won't say this about John Dalley because I was only with him for a year - but then my viola teacher at Oberlin, Bill Berman. They were so much under the influence of Heifetz, they didn't want me to move. So I'm standing still and playing like this (sits stiffly upright), and it's only as I've been an adult that I've begun to realize that a little movement is really important. Motion helps the e-motion. And I've been trying to break into that.

So I played the Allemande of the 4^th Suite for my daughter's wedding, and also my son's wedding later, but it was my daughter's wedding that was really amazing, because one of the things I did for months before was I would pick up my viola when I was cold, tune, and play that movement. Because I knew I'd be cold and there would be a lot of time before I'd be able to play, and I knew I would be totally involved in the emotion of the situation.

I still remember, there was this one place toward the end of the movement – I feel about Bach a lot that this is art music based on a dance, so many people play this as dance. But this one movement is so touching and warm, and I get to this one place, it's in a major key but it's also so tender. This one extremely tender place right in there, and just at that moment my daughter reached for a Kleenex to dab her eyes for the tears that the music had squeezed out; and there were people who knew nothing about classical music who were saying “Oh that was one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard!” - and I heard that comment, and so that started the chain. Then the Bach project happened, I left the symphony, and I've really been trying to break out of this box that my teachers put me in.

So I'm going to say, each of my last couple of recitals were on that road, and I feel very happy about the way things are going. I've been becoming the violist that I wanted to be.

That's a long time coming.

It is. I would even say that -- But it's certainly gradual. I'm 71, and I feel I'm playing better than ever.

What non-musical things do you enjoy doing?

(laughs, thinking) Watching Baseball (laughs). Watching the Olympics.

Do you go to games?

I have gone to games, I used to try to go once or twice a year. I haven't been to AT&T Park but maybe twice. It's partly because it's sold out and partly because... it's cold! I get cold easily and it's not warm over there. I like AT&T park, I like the garlic fries (laughs) I probably shouldn't eat them, but anyway..

What else do I like doing? Walking. We walk a lot. Both of us walk a lot. We live three blocks from the park and we're always in the park walking. For years, even after concerts, I'd wake up early so we could go for our exercise walk in the park. And that was hard, and now that I'm retired I don't do that anymore.

And travel - I like going places. I like going to, well, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We've been on two Road Scholar tours. One to Padua and Venice, one to France, starting in Paris and sort of following the impressionist painters. So from Paris up to the Normandy coat, down to the Riviera, following all those painters. My favorite period of art, I have to say. So that was cool, and we're planning another one now to Norway, the fjords.

Did you enjoy traveling with the orchestra on tours?

Generally not. (laughs) It's too much work! Every day a different city: (breathlessly) so you get up in the morning and you have your breakfast and you get in a bus and you go on an airplane and you get off the airplane and get on a bus and go to the hotel and try to grab a little snack, get to the hall, do a sound check if there is one, try to get dinner in there somewhere, play the concert, get back to your hotel, get up in the morning, do the same damn thing all over again...

So you enjoy traveling as a tourist more..

There were some places I enjoyed more [on tour]. We do have days off here and there. One of the days off was on a Sunday in Zurich, when the city shuts down so there was nothing to do, and I could see out the window from my hotel room, drug deals going on in the park out there. So that was not a particularly good day off but there were others that were better (laughs)...

But generally, I started off touring on the wrong foot. My first year in the orchestra was the 6 week tour to Europe and the Soviet Union. We left on a Saturday morning. Our twin children were 2 and a half. So that was Saturday; on the Tuesday before one had a 104 temperature and in the hospital we found out it was pneumonia in one lung, and the Friday morning before I left, the other one had pneumonia in both lungs, and on Saturday I ran out on my family, and I was not happy.

I'm sure you weren't the only one.

No, definitely not. You know, these days I would have been able to tell management, “Look, I have to stay home, I'll catch up,” and they would have even helped. But I had just joined, and it was different then.

The whole tenure thing was working its way out and I didn't feel like I could do that, even though I desperately wanted to. So when they finally got healthy, Marcia took the kids east, to spend half of the tour with one set of grandparents and the other half with the other. So before I came back she had to fly back and forth with two kids by herself - with two 2.5 year old kids, the terrible twos... Not a good time, and that really put me in the mood to not enjoy tours. I did not enjoy that part of it.

How'd you end up in San Francisco?

So I was getting my Doctorate. After my Masters [at Manhattan School of Music] I got a job at Kent State University, which would become famous a year after I left – but for the wrong reasons...

So I had to join the Army, and actually I was very lucky, because in the military, each branch has two special bands. One in Washington D.C. and one at each academy - the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, the Army Academy. They're all four year enlistments - except for West Point, which was three. (laughs) I was fortunate to get into the West Point band.

I had trouble in basic training – just look at me and you can tell I would have trouble in basic training (chuckles). I had done an audition tape and sent it in. This was of course during Vietnam so there was all this money in the military, and at West Point they liked to have string players around. Because string players would do officer club teas, cadets did a musical every year... there were reasons to have them. But there was not enough work, so there was always something else to do: most string players would be given piccolos, and...

There were basically two performing organizations: the concert marching band, and then this group called the Hell Cats which was a Fife, Drum, and Bugle Corps, which was a horrible service - but OK, you're not out firing at people and getting fired at. So mostly they gave piccolos to the string players and made them learn the fife part in the Fife, Drum, and Bugle Corps. But the week I got there, there weren't any more piccolos! A week later, the Quartet became official. They formed without me actually – they were looking for me, they wanted me in the quartet, but I had taken too long in Basic. Andy Berdahl was there, they wanted to get the quartet going. When he got out of the army, they put me in. So anyway, I spent two of my three years playing string quartets.

I got married in the Army. My wife was pregnant with what we didn't know yet was twins. I got out of the Army and that's when I went to Ann Arbor. I figured if I was going to stay in academia - which was my choice, I thought - I figured I should get a doctorate, and it'd be easier to get it without having a job at the same time.

And actually I did end up having a job for half a year while I was getting the doctorate: Berman took a sabbatical from Oberlin and had me fill in for him, which was very nice. I liked that half year a lot, too. One reason I moved to Ann Arbor was it was close to Oberlin, and they were the most flexible school, with its ability to let me out for that [teaching at Oberlin].

So... I'm getting a doctorate and I've got two children and I'm thinking “I need a job!” Somebody showed me the [Musicians'] Union paper and the job, so I wrote away to San Francisco and I came out here with actually a great attitude – “I don't want this stinking job, I'm going to be an academic!” - you know, all the academics thought the orchestra jobs were the pits! And it wasn't long after that that it turned around completely, and I think it was because of unionizing, because of the ability to have 52 weeks employment at living wages and with benefits...

It had already begun: New York was of course the first orchestra to go to 52 weeks, and ours when I joined was 49 weeks, but it wasn't even full orchestra for the full year because we and the opera shared the opera house – this is before Davies [Symphony Hall]– so they had to make work for the rest of us: kiddy concerts and new music concerts... So I came out here with this attitude, “I don't want this job, I want to be an academic.” So of course I played great and won the job! So then I called my wife...

There had been one academic job available for a violist in the country that year, and it was in Columbia, Missouri. So I win this audition and I have to call my wife – and it's like, “Do we really have a choice, to wait for the possibility of a job in Columbia, Missouri at god-knows-what salary?, or accept a living wage in one of the great cities of the world?” And when I thought about it like that, there wasn't a choice – I took it, and I've never been unhappy. It's a good job. If you have to have a job, it's a good job.

How has the orchestra changed over the years?

There were always days of peak performances, when things were really great, and I remember – my first concert was Mahler 8, the opening of the season, my first concert as a regular – before that I was a sub, or an extra. It was with [Seiji] Ozawa, and it was wonderful. I'd never played in an orchestra that was that great. There were peak performances, but also a lot of not peak performances going on.

Because...?

(simply) We weren't that good. Also, largely, the conductor, who was conducting... I remember Rachmaninoff 2^nd symphony, jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and also with Ozawa.

And then Ozawa left, sort of under a cloud – he was a great music conductor, but a terrible music director, in my opinion. He could never make a decision about anything – repertoire, auditions, anything.. Which is not unusual for music directors, but I think it was particularly hard for him.

Then we got De Waart who was much more in control and he started really to develop the control that the orchestra has shown. And not a lot of spark.

Then we had Mr. Blomstedt, who continued in that way, but with more spark. And of course under De Waart we built Davies, and a lot of people decided they wanted to stay in the opera, or were helped to stay in the opera and not do the symphony. There were like 30 or 40 new people.

We would go head to head during the fall [with the opera], and then in the winter, the ballet would take over and we'd mix it up with the ballet. With Davies open, we didn't have to do that anymore and the Ballet and opera became sort of the same set of people. You couldn't do Symphony and Opera anymore and people had to make decisions.. That was really the beginning of when [the Symphony] started to get good. So De Waart, then Blomstedt, and then Michael was next – 20 years about. And he brought a spark.

I will say this of Michael, when he wants to be, he's about the best conductor I've ever worked with. There are times that he turns it on.

Certainly in an orchestra, one has an energy field, an aura, and when you're in a group you can merge that to a large degree - and I know I've felt this a lot, and a lot of my colleagues have sort of ignored it, but it was there, even so. But, to a degree greater than any other conductor I've worked with, I felt he could change our performance by his thought into our energy field. When he really wants to – I mean, we could change tempos and it'd be like we always did it that way. I remember talking to the personnel manager on tour once, and he said that Michael had said “Gee, I can do anything I want!” (laughs) and he can really focus his energy or thought or something, and it affects our energy, and we just change.

If you play unaccompanied, it's like you're going for a walk in the park. You can go look at this flower over here, you can go to that grove – or not. You can go look at the kids on the merry-go-round, or even ride on the merry-go-round. If you want.

If you play with a quartet, it's like the four of you are going for a walk in the park. You have to make decisions: you want to go to those flowers, but they don't, so you don't. You have to make decisions.

But if you're playing a concerto, it's like you're on a train. (laughs) You have absolute control of what's going on in your car, but you go where they take you. (laughs) And I think it takes an unusually sensitive orchestra and an unusually sensitive conductor to be able to do a chamber-music kind of flexibility, to have that kind of influence on each other.

I'm pretty sure it was Sarah Chang doing Sibelius, with a conductor I really did not care for. And he would not listen to her, and he would not take her tempos! And I would watch her in the rehearsals and, to a degree, in performances – just, daggers, looking daggers at him when he wouldn't give what she wanted.

You had a good seat for observing that sort of thing!

Very good seat for that! I will also say the lesson I got from that is, as soon as the last chord was over, everything was great. Everything was great. She'd kiss the conductor, she was happy! And I knew she was not happy (laughs). So that was really interesting.

I also have to tell you a Yo-Yo Ma story, also from that chair. He did a pension fund benefit, and he did three concertos. Who else in the world would do three concertos in one concert? The second was one of the Haydns, but the orchestra being reduced, I moved from my third chair up to second and I'm sitting almost 6 or 8 feet away...

Haydn viola parts, you know, not very interesting. “dun-dun-dun-dun-dun” So I'm laying back. And all of a sudden Yo-Yo looks at me, (craning his neck as though looking back from the soloist position) he looks at me, and he gives me the ear, and so I goose up my sound, and he gives me this HUGE SMILE! And I know what he needs - He needs to hear my 8^th notes so he can bounce his rhythm off of it. (laughs) Not a word was said. (laughs)

What a wonderful connection!

(laughs) Yeah!

Any parting advice to young players? For anyone in high school, considering what to do or maybe looking forward to college..

OK, in the first case – if you can't live without it, you should try. If you can live without it, you shouldn't; the competition is so fierce.

The other thing to say is, and this is something I can't really do or deal with, there are so many avenues of music making available - there's world music, things that I'm just too old to adjust to at this point – but they should be looking at all these things, there are so many...

When I was coming up, there was the symphony, and if you could make a quartet - which seemed like a very precarious existence, and usually you needed a university to sponsor you in a quartet - and there was teaching. And that was about it. And now it's exploded, in ways that I can't even begin to imagine. Jazz, world music, I don't know, but they should be looking in those directions as well.

One more Yo-yo ma story – there was a masterclass he ran, and this girl was doing the Schumann Concerto, and she was completely bent over (hunches over) and the first thing, he talked about certain technical and musical things, the line, one very long line, he pointed out something about the groupings.

But then he started other things, “What about the orchestra?” and she turns and there's Timothy Bach at the piano behind her, and he smiles at her, and so he asks her “Play it again” and now she's doing chamber music with Tim. And it's completely different.

And then he says “Now what about that nice lady over there?” (pointing to a woman in the audience) and so she plays it again, and it's like – she got lost, she became the music – [but] she's sitting up, she's playing chamber music, she's expressing herself out into the audience. I'd heard the expression, “The audience gasped,” and I'd never experienced until just then when the audience gasped, it was like (gasps). He'd never even said “Sit up straight”, and there she was, just, yeah.. (laughs)... Great teaching! Perfect.

Op.1: Cookie Segelstein

Cookie Segelstein, violin and viola, Veretski Pass / owner-operator, The Macmama

May 31, 2013

Cookie Segelstein, violin and viola, received her Masters degree in Viola from The Yale School of Music in 1984. [READ COOKIE'S COMPLETE PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY HERE] She is principal violist in Orchestra New England and assistant principal in The New Haven Symphony Orchestra. She is the founder and director of Veretski Pass. Cookie has presented lecture demonstrations and workshops on klezmer fiddling all over the world. She was on the music faculty at Southern Connecticut State University and has been on staff at Centrum's Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Wash. She was featured on the ABC documentary, “A Sacred Noise”, heard on HBO’s“Sex and the City”, appears in the Miramax film, “Everybody’s Fine” starring Robert De Niro, and heard on several recordings including three Veretski Pass recordings. She is also the publisher of "The Music of..." series of klezmer transcriptions. Active as a Holocaust educator and curriculum advisor, she has been a frequent lecturer at the Women’s Correctional Facility in Niantic, CT. Cookie is also an Apple Certified Support Professional, and owns and operates The Macmama. Cookie lives in Berkeley, California. 

I spoke with her by phone in May 2013. This is her story:

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. I lived there till I was 24, because I got my undergraduate degree at University of Missouri at Kansas City. I went to Yale in 1982, and then I lived in Connecticut until 2010. So I lived in Connecticut, what’s that math, 28 years, something like that?

My parents are both Holocaust survivors, and their English was very - it was not used at home when I was little, until whatever became the Jewish Federation, or whatever it was called, sent English teachers to all the survivors. I remember this woman coming to the house and scolding us for not speaking English. I was about 4, I remember her saying [pretends to shout] “Only English in this house!”

We were always around survivors’ kids, so we spoke Yiddish, or in my case Hungarian. And then as we started to enter the American world, we started to speak English, and then we became translators for our parents...

Basically that’s also how I got into music: my father handed me a violin and said “Ok, you’re going to play now. Here. You’re gonna play this” and then he would sing me songs, or tunes, and I’d play them, people would cry, and I would go, “Well this really sucks! I hate this, it’s no fun for anyone! I hate this!” It was evocative of pain...

So I was really forced into music, I didn’t want to do it. And then my violin teacher was another survivor’s kid, who was, you know - I don’t know if you can print this, but - batshit crazy, and scary! And I was like, “Wow, this whole music thing is for, you know, bad dream people.”

I was going to be a veterinarian. I was crazy about animals - I still am. If it was up to me I would be that cat lady, I just wouldn’t weigh 5000 pounds. First I wanted to be a cowgirl, and then when I realized that that was a TV job and not real... Probably at the age of about 8 or 9 - I actually remember getting my first cat for my 8th birthday, I was crazy about that cat. And then going to the veterinarian - and going “Hmm (lightbulb!) maybe this would be a good job.”  

So I was really going to do something with animals. Even into high school -- until I took chemistry in 10th grade, and I went “Ohhhh... yeah I can’t quite do this, this is really hard.” I just couldn’t handle chemistry or math.

So I was playing violin (I started when I was 5) and then in school I joined the little school orchestra in 4th grade. I was also taking classical music lessons at home. I was playing Jewish music at home, and then in my lessons I was playing Onward Christian Soldiers, Bach Minuet and all this stuff. I had a series of violin teachers. Some very nice, some really scary.

And I never considered it as a living, it was just something - I started to enjoy it a little bit in Junior High School, because there was a community of kids in the orchestra that was kind of fun.

In high school we had a really good orchestra conductor who was very, he was kind of the one people went to… He was very cool, a place to - he was a refuge in tough high school years. He said we were gonna have a clinic with the Kansas City Symphony. He needed viola players for the orchestra - I was in 10th grade - and my sister was in the orchestra and she said she would switch to viola because they needed more. And I wasn’t gonna do it, but then she said she wouldn’t do it anymore, she was going to drop out of orchestra, “But would you do it?”

So I said “I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to switch to viola.”

And she just said “Oh I’ll give you Five dollars” [laughs]

So she gave me five dollars, and I said to Mr. Alter, the teacher, “I guess I’ll switch to viola and see what it’s all about,” and I did. And then - I basically played by ear anyway, but - I couldn’t read the viola music and wanted to quit. He said just wait till after the clinic with the symphony, because I was already the strongest player… which wasn’t saying that much.

So the symphony came and they did their clinic, and the viola players were so nice, and they weren’t insane, and they - I remember one guy had a viola that had, like, a lion’s head on the scroll, and of course being the Jewish woman and attracted to bling, I went “OH, cool!” and you know, when he let me play it and it was so - the tone was so much better than what I was led to think...

I started to take lessons from Hugh Brown, who was teaching at the conservatory there, and I started to actually practice. And then the next year I took my bat mitzvah money, which was about $1200, and bought a little Italian viola - or a pretend Italian viola, I don’t remember. My dad helped me with that, and I started to be serious.

My father was a very difficult person, but  I was kind of his favorite, and I said “Well, I think I‘m going into music.”

And he said “You don’t really have the discipline for that,” and I got really upset.

And then when I calmed down and he realized how much he had upset me, he said “Ok, I’ll do whatever you need, I’ll get you whatever you need, I’ll support you in that.”

So I started towards the end of my Junior year kind of realizing that I was going into music. And I didn’t think of applying to other colleges [besides UMKC]. I just, for some reason, because I had to do all that - my parents couldn’t fill out any applications - I was just like, “Well, I’ll just go to UMKC, and study with Hugh Brown,” because I’d already been studying with him. I did that as an undergraduate, and then became, you know, bored. And he was very easy [on me as a teacher].

I was also very involved, by the way, in teaching horseback riding. [laughs] I was the head wrangler at the Jewish Camp, Barney Goodman, which I had been since I was 14.  Plus, I bought a horse when I was, let me think, 16. So I was really into horses.

As a matter of fact my mother went away to Cleveland to visit a friend and while she was gone, I bought that horse. [laughs]

One of the other refugees, he didn’t have any kids and he kinda was our Secret Santa all the time - you know, that’s a funny thing to say as a Jew, but - he kind of like, if there were things our parents wouldn’t help us with, he would say (whispering) “All right, be quiet, here, here’s fifty dollars”. He knew I wanted to get a horse, and he made this deal with me that I would take his mother shopping every Saturday morning. I think she was ethnic Hungarian but had been living in Yugoslavia. I used to pick her up in the morning at about 8:30, take her to the grocery store, waddle through the grocery store with her for about an hour and a half, and then take her home, unpack her groceries... That’s what I did for her, and he then helped me pay for my horse - the winter months for my horse, and he gave me gifts, money for my car, you know... He kind of subsidized my horse thing.

So my mom came home [from Cleveland] and I said “I bought a horse,”

And she said “What do you mean you bought a horse?”

I said “Yeah, I just bought a horse.”

She looked at my father and she said “You let her buy a horse?!”

And he said “Whaddaya mean, ‘LET?’ I can’t -- LET?? She’s a grown woman!”

Of course, I was 16.

So I had this horse and I was supporting it, and then, I mean, I paid for all my own education. My first year of school was $900. I was working, I had a job at Baskin Robbins, and I was house-sitting. I was bringing in money here and there. And then when I went to college I sold the horse to buy a bow for my viola.

It was terribly hard to do, it was really hard. I was teaching horseback riding at this camp but I had my own horse, and this stable charged $25 a month for the summer and $50 in the winter. I bought her barely - they call it greenbroke - she was barely trained. She was 2 years old, a quarter-Arab mare, and I trained her and I was crazy about that horse. I was out there every day.

And then when I needed a viola bow, you know, at that time it was like $350 or something like that and I couldn’t afford it, and there was no way I could go to my parents for it, they didn’t have the money. So I sold her. But she - Arabians tend to be one-man horses.

I sold her to this man, and they called me about two weeks, three weeks later, and said “You’ve gotta come and get your horse because she broke his leg. We think she’s gone crazy...” Because the guy that bought her - see, I never rode her with a saddle. I had a little bareback pad. He put this big saddle on her and she hated it. So he would get on her and she would sit down, with her back leg, and she would sit down and try to roll over to get him off her. So she rolled on his leg.

And so, I went out there, and I whistled and she came, and I rode her all day and I said “I’m gonna buy her back, I can’t stand this.” But my mother had called them and said “Under no circumstances can she buy that horse back!” So I got really upset. That was a very tough decision, and I’m still not sure it was the right decision! [laughs] But that was really hard for me and really painful, and I really missed -- anyway, he said “I’ll keep her, I’ll keep the horse.”

Working in that summer camp, we had to buy and sell horses. Going into the outskirts of Kansas City as a girl, with a black caretaker for the camp, to an auction to buy horses - he would say “You’d better drive, Cookie, ‘cause we’re going into Raytown (Missouri) and I’m gonna get pulled over if I’m driving with a white lady.” So I would drive, but the fact that we were sitting in an auction and I was a woman without a man, you know, bidding on these horses... I had people tell me “This is dangerous, don’t accept a drink from anybody, they’ll spike your drink, they don’t like to see a girl with this much... power...” I mean, I was in my early 20s, I had an expense account of $125, how much trouble could I get into? So I started thinking, you know, this horse business will be frustrating, I don’t think I want to do it.

Raphael Hillyer was coming to do a master class at Lawrence, Kansas University, so my teacher said “You should go and play for him. You’re pretty much, you know, the big fish in a little pond here, you should go play for him.”

I had dropped out of college for half a semester - I had a boyfriend and we were going to go pick fruit on the western slopes of Colorado and live like hippies and take hallucinogenic drugs. But that was just a little way to make my parents insane a little bit. I didn’t actually go, but I did drop out. I kept my private lessons and orchestra but dropped out of class-work for one semester.

So I went to this master class and he beat the shit out of me, and… I decided I should go study with him. He was at Yale, so then I realized I actually should go somewhere else [away from home] to go to graduate school.

I applied to a few places. I applied to Indiana to study with Abe Skernick, and I applied to Cleveland to study with Robert Vernon, and then Yale for Hillyer. And I got into everything but Yale gave me the most money, and Robert Vernon said “You can come here but you have to get a new viola,”

And I remember saying to him, “Well, how the hell do I do that?”

He goes “You’re cute, just get a sponsor!” like it was so easy.

I thought he was a total asshole and I went “I’m not going to study with this guy...”

Anyway, I ended up going to Yale, and Hillyer kicked my ass into gear. I really started practicing in graduate school. And by the way, I had - once I switched over, when I got older, I had stopped playing Jewish Music. When I thought about playing music from my family what ran through my mind was “I hate this, I hate it, hate it, hate it.” And I only came back to that when I had children.

It’s interesting. I always was interested in, like international folk dance stuff, so even when I was in undergraduate college, I played in a small group for international folk dancers, and we did, you know, Balkan, some Hungarian, all these different things. I was always attracted to that. We played for dancers, we played for parties and stuff like that, but I didn’t want to come back to the Jewish stuff. Occasionally there’d be - what was it like, they didn’t call it a Klezmer tune, they would have called it Israeli, it was just part of the pile of music.

The Klezmer revival started happening in the early 80s. I was just starting Yale and I wasn’t really interested, it just went by me. I didn’t even think of it as something I would be interested in, and at home we never called it Klezmer music. “Klezmer” at home meant the musician. So I didn’t hear Klezmer, I heard Yiddish music, or Jewish music, or music from home, things like that. Then when I had kids I thought “Shit, they’re gonna have to find out about my parents. They’re gonna ask questions. I’m gonna have to tell ‘em all of this stuff, I have to present them with their - ‘What did grampa do when he was 21?’ ‘Well,’ [laughs] ‘he was escaping from labor camp!’” [laughs]

I knew I had to present that to them, so I was trying to find a way, that there was something good also in their history. And I just started to get more attracted to it. The Klezmer revival - Emily was born in ‘88 - it was really kind of getting some people interested, gaining some steam, and then I decided to join the synagogue because I wanted my kids to go to Hebrew school, and just because we were in such a Methodist area I wanted them to have somebody who was similar to them.

Somebody at the synagogue said “We’re trying to start a Klezmer band” and I was bartering with them about the membership. Because my husband at the time was Ukranian and not Jewish, and not  too interested in, you know, paying any kind of membership anywhere, I said “I could kind of lead that, I could help with that as part of my - in exchange for my membership.” So I started that!

They said “We want you to go to Klezkamp in the Catskills,” and I said “Oh-Kaaay” and, well, I went there, and I loved it -- and realized that all of this music I’d been growing up with was now very popular with this certain group of people.

I remember I came home to visit my folks, I brought a tune home and said “Dad, listen to this, this is something you taught me but I learned it the right way.” [laughs]

I played him for it and he goes “Oh my God, what’s all this noise??” Cause you know there were all these ornaments and trills and slides and all this shit.

He goes “I can’t even hear the melody - What is this, Greek?” he couldn’t recognize it.

So I go “What-- what I’d been playing at home was what this revival was all about?”

Anyway, so that’s when I kind of started, you know - I actually started interviewing my father, as an informant for the music, and really got a lot of  information from the street, as it were- you know, I kind of put things together. I was interested in it now, and realized that the place he was from had the kind of music that I liked the best.

I became pretty busy in the New York Jewish club date scene, because I could read and I could play by ear, and I could stroll, and I knew all the tunes... You know, and I took showers. I wasn’t like a typical folk musician: I had a tuxedo, I dressed up, I showed up on time, and I... didn’t curse and spit. I shaved my legs, I colored my hair. You know what I mean, I looked normal.

So I was busy during the economic… happy time. In the mid-90s I had three to four a weekend. It was crazy busy. There was a woman in the New Haven Symphony who was also getting interested in this music, and she was the principal flute player. She became a pretty busy contractor for weddings - you know, people were starting to do this kind of live music at their events. They really wanted a Klezmer band. So I would have two on Saturday, one on Sunday, maybe one on Friday night even though the religious people wouldn’t do it on Friday night. There were times I would leave the house Friday at 3 o’clock, come home at midnight, leave Saturday at 7 in the morning, and get home at 1 in the morning only to leave again Sunday morning...

I was making about $1500 a weekend! And this was in the mid-90’s. It was because of the skills of being classically trained but also having the background in, you know, being able to plug into a sound system and play any of the Hassidic  music, all of the dance tunes, and then be able to play Pachelbel Canon for the cocktail hour, and then jump into My Yiddishe Mama  and then the crazy hora set, when they throw the kid, or bride and groom up on a chair. The only thing I didn’t do and still don’t do is Jazz. You know, “me no rock!” [laughs]

It’s interesting because if you gave me a Klezmer tune I’d be varying it right away, but it’s more like Baroque music - you take a melody and you kind of fill in spaces and you change cadences, and it’s not like Jazz where you do a solo over harmonic changes. It’s the opposite: you do the melody and the harmonic changes have to follow the melody. It’s a melodically driven music.

The harmony is secondary, almost like rhythm. If there’s no harmony and the people are just playing open fifths, that’s fine. It’s really about the melody and then the melody is there, usually to serve the dance rhythm. Like Jazz, there are some rhythmic treatments of pushing ahead or pulling back and, you know, kind of making the rhythms a little bit crooked, but I mean, I can do a solo on any of the Yiddish Theater tunes but it’s very tame... My husband is a real jazz head, a real jazz player, and he’s trying to explain it to me and I think... I think I’m just resistant to it. [laughs]

In ‘92, ’93 - pretty much from my early 30s, which is when I started - well, I had my first kid at 30, my second at 33, and I stopped teaching then. I decided I wanted to be home to raise them, and I was only doing playing gigs.

When I got out of college, out of graduate school, I auditioned for the New Haven Symphony, and I got in, and then I was in Orchestra New England, which was a chamber orchestra. Eventually, when positions opened up, I became - I think when my son was like, God, a couple months old - the assistant principal position opened up for New Haven Symphony. I practiced, I auditioned, I got the job. And then I also got the job to be principal of the chamber orchestra, so I was at that since ‘92...  I was doing all the core work for both of those orchestras, plus the club date stuff, plus the casinos opened up, so I had strolling violin gigs. I was really busy playing.

The Symphony got a grant to bring music to the inner city, and the conductor Murray Sidlin said “You know, I think you’d be good to do this,” so I went into three schools in the inner city in the afternoons, and I brought in a music program. But when I had my kids I kind of stopped teaching, I wanted to be home with them, and I was pretty busy working. So I was home during the day and out at night. Which was pretty horrible for my marriage, among other things. So that was probably from the age of 30, kind of, on, when I was busy, really busy.

And then the economy started to tank. There were dips, a crash sometime in ‘87, when I was pregnant, I was just about to be married and pregnant, and the economy took a downturn then. Some of the playing work dipped down, and then started coming back by the early 90s, and that’s when I was super, super busy.

Well, our trio had an agent, MCM out of New York, and they were getting us work and between the Symphony and the chamber orchestra and the strolling gigs and the work from our agent, I was doing pretty well.

Then the Madoff scandal happened, and a lot of the Jewish organizations that were, you know, pooling together to bring us in for residencies all over, even Indiana University, Ohio State, all these colleges... A lot of the Hillel organizations that were usually the bulk of our fee, ‘cause they usually would pool together the anthropology department, the history department, and the Hillel was usually one of the bigger donors, as were some of the local synagogues.

When we came to do residencies we would usually be there for 3 or 4 days, and we would teach, we would do workshops, and then at our concert we would have a spot for the students. This guy, this agent got us maybe between 5 and 8 of those a year. And you know, by the time we came home it was enough, padded with everything else I was doing, to make a - you know, I was not rich by any means, as you can imagine, but it was enough.

But then, when this happened, because a lot of the donors even for the New Haven Symphony and Orchestra New England came out of Fairfield County - well, Fairfield County in Connecticut got killed by Madoff. The city actually lost its pensions fund. So a lot of the donors, of any of the work I was doing, you know, withdrew their money from the endowments of any groups I was in. So the Symphony's services were cut almost in half, the Orchestra New England that I’d, you know, been principal of for almost 30 years, almost went into bankruptcy, and all of a sudden this huge chunk of income got kind of dropped out.

I wasn't teaching - I had stopped teaching because, you know, I didn't have to [laughs], to be frank... And in the end, my daughter, starting to enter college, luckily she was going to the RI School of Design, got a full scholarships, so I was ok - you know, my ex-husband and I were gonna have to pay maybe, with her living expenses, about 12,000 a year which was much better than we thought. Actually he was great about it - he had put money away when they were kids, so that was covered.

But when all of this happened, within about 6 months I noticed we were losing work: my agent would call and say “You know, these three residencies just dropped out” and then one of our European tours, which was going to be pretty much a half of my yearly income - our anchor gig there got canceled. So we had to cancel out on all these tiny, three- or four-hundred euro-a-piece gigs, and I was sitting there going “Oh My God,” and our son is growing... I was really panicking and I knew I could go back to teaching, but -- I enjoy teaching a day or two a week, I don't enjoy teaching 5 or 6 days a week.

So I was helping a friend set up a wireless network, and I was telling her, “I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do. My child support's gonna stop soon.” My ex-husband and I still, and did, have a very good relationship - I did not try to ream him during the divorce, and nobody pulled any funny business... Our settlement was just what everybody needed, and not enough to make him, you know, have to live out of his car. So I just was freaking out: To build up a teaching studio is gonna take me a year or two, and meanwhile my son who is starting to grow three inches a year and, you know, I'm telling him “Get away from the refrigerator, I can no longer feed you!" [laughs]

My friend said “Why don't you do this?”

And I said “Do what?" I didn't know what she was talking about.

And she said "This - you're not a 22 year old anti social geek - you're talking to me in a way I can understand, you're not giving me too much information but you're giving me enough that I feel like I can trust you...”

I had never even thought about computers [as a career], it was just not interesting to me. You know, when I was in 7th grade I remember we had computer class and the computer was in this room, it was the whole room. And you put in these little punch cards and it, you know, it added 6 plus 6, so who cares, you know - that didn’t interest me.

So I started thinking about it, and you know, I have a Masters in Music - I have no mathematics. I have no IT training. But I've always loved gadgets. Everybody always called me “Gidget Gadget,” 'cause if it was silver with lights I had it, and if there was a well written manual, it was like a religious experience for me: I was like, 'Wow, that was written well!'

[A little later] I was at Klez Camp, where we go - where the Jews go between Christmas and New Year’s. It's in the Catskills, it's been there since right when the revival started, I think it's in its 26th year. I've been teaching there for almost 20 years. So I was there, and one of the guys that is kind of one of the musicians but he also - he runs the office, he's also a Mac geek and he's written some books on Filemaker Pro, and I was talking to him about it, and he goes “Well why don't you just take the training, just get certified! And then put your shingle out, and most of the time you're gonna be connecting printers and, you know...”

I started to look into it - I looked up “How do you get certified by Apple?” I found that you just have to take a test, and they offer classes. And I was gonna take a class but the classes were 3 days, and $1500. First of all, I did not have $1500 to spend on a class, and at that time, I was in my late 40s - I don't learn in 3 days, it takes me longer.

So I decided I would buy the materials: the textbook, the certification for the operating system. I studied that, and I also bought the study materials to repair hardware, and soon realized I didn't like that - that's not fun for me, to repair hardware. I can change out a hard drive and memory, and change out almost anything in there, but when you start talking about soldering, I lose interest, I'm not interested in that.

So I decided I was just going to get certified in what's called ACSP - Apple Certified Support Professional - meaning, the only hardware I'm certified to do is to change memory. But I can, you know, wipe your system, I can do anything that has to do with the operating system and software and it'd be certified and I don't void your warranty. So I bought these books, and I bought a spiral notebook and a bunch of pens, and I friggin' studied for 6 weeks, about 4 hours a day.

I'd get up in the morning, I'd go play tennis, or ride my bike, or you know, prepare my kids' dinner, and I would sit down with my coffee or whatever from about 9-11, take little break and then study another 2 hours or so. And I basically wrote out the book - I took notes on the book... I filled up two spiral notebooks. And then I went back, took notes on the summaries. It was really like an intensive course I gave myself for 6 weeks, and my whole family was crackin' up because they were like, [laughing] "Yeah, we're not eatin' really well right now" [laughs] "We’re doing a lot of ‘diner dinners’..."

I signed up for the test, it was $150 or something, I had to drive an hour and a half to Waterbury CT and I walked into this scuzzy building to take this test. It's just me and this guy... and a PC!

And I'm all "What the hell, why am I taking an Apple test on a PC?" and I'm laughing and I said "You're giving me this thing from like, 1989 that I'm supposed to take this test on to be certified?" I think I was at that time taking the 10.4 certification... and so I took the test, and I got a hundred. And I went "oh" and, of course I over studied, I mean, I was like, insane, and he said to me "Are you a musician?, or an artist?"

And I said "I'm a musician."

And he goes "'Cause musicians see patterns - they might not know why something doesn't fit, but a musician will say “Naah, that doesn't fit in with the other ones."

It turned out he had a Masters degree from Juilliard in clarinet. So he said "I have IT training" - his job was he operates this testing center, but he also was an IT consultant and he just started this business.

He said to me "That's great, with your certification, you can now get a logo from Apple that you can put on your business card and on your website that shows that you know [what you’re doing]. And then he gave me this lecture about “Don't expect to make any money, because...the economy's bad - people aren't spending money...”

So I waited about a month. I was like "I can't be good enough, that was too easy, I'm not ready yet..." So I read a whole bunch more stuff, and I read some of the books on repairing hardware, and I was on the internet a lot and I was reading books about hacks... I just couldn't believe that I was really ready.

Then I finally started to advertise. The place I was living was right outside New Haven, Connecticut, about 15 minutes. It was a suburb, kind of like a mixture of North Berkeley and Piedmont. So there were some, you know, some of us apartment dwellers, and some wicked rich people. So I decided, “You know what, I don't need to go into New Haven, I don't want to go into a place where I'm going to worry walking into a house... I want to serve the nice rich ladies.”

So I advertised in the Shoreline Times, because it was right on the Long Island Sound and there were a lot of people. I got my first client: she was the niece of Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who had an affair with Virginia Wolfe... She was in her late 80s and she called me to come over because she was writing a book -- and she had an antique Macbook and probably needed something new.

And then her daughter called me and tried to make sure I was not going to, you know, be a con woman. So she and her daughter became my first two clients, and I was really busy with them, because I refitted -- they had all this old equipment, and they had, you know, two versions of Microsoft Word between two computers and one couldn't talk to the other, and so they, these were folks that were comfortable with money and I - and very sweet people, I still actually keep in touch with them, I still do remote support for them. And we went shopping with their credit card, and I went - “That was really fun.”

So I decided "That's my clientele" - people who really are kind of digiphobic, that need to be able to use their Macs. And then I advertised in a little Seniors’ newspaper, and then I started getting clients who wanted help installing Skype so they could speak to their grandkids, and that was most of my work: helping people over the age of 65 with their digital life.

I made some recommendations about network stuff, like if they were on AT&T and needed to be on something faster, I would help them call Comcast. I had a couple of times when AT&T was giving them the runaround and I'd get on the phone and get all kind of Sheriff Dillan from Gunsmoke on 'em, and all, "Now, Lookie here, you're taking advantage of seniors! And I'm gonna report you, and come down there, and blah blah blah…" It became kind of this business serving people either too old or too intimidated to go into the Apple store which was an hour away.

Or - “I think somebody's hacking into my computer.” “Why do you think somebody's hacking into your computer?” “Because I get emails that I didn't ask for.” “Okay, well, [laughs], you're still on yahoo? Well, I'll tell you what...”

You know, so it's stuff like that, or setting a backup system. I'm very big on that, looking at somebody's situation, saying “Here's what I recommend” and that kind of stuff. Printers, wireless network problems, extending networks, email issues… That's pretty much what I deal with, with my clients.

There was nobody on the shoreline that did what I did, so I was pretty busy! But it wasn't so busy that - I still had whatever music work I was doing - it didn't interfere. It doesn't now either.

So that's what it was, and I kept my certification up - I still have to do 10.8. I need to take the certification test for Mountain Lion, I haven't done that yet. Around here [Bay Area] a lot of the computer geeks, they're not certified, they just know stuff. One guy that kind of - I call him my mentor - he said “You don't need to be certified - what, do you need to be certified to hook up a printer?" But I prefer to just have that [certification], it does calm some people down...

If somebody says they need something really complicated, ‘cause I'm almost 55 I say “No I don't do that” - I won't take on something I know I can't do, or that's gonna be too challenging. I'm very upfront about what I can do and what I can't do. For instance, Patty Heller wanted this whole sound system and I said “I really don't do sound systems” -- 'cause I don't listen to music! [laughs] If I'm not playing music, I don't wanna hear it! Unless I'm studying it, or go to a concert, I wanna hear one tune, and then I'm like “That was so amazing, I'm gonna leave now and go have ice cream...”

So that's it. I teach 2 and a half days a week, I do MacMama about three days a week, and then whatever gigs come by, and that's pretty much how it was on the East Coast, except I wasn't teaching and I was playing a whole lot more.

When I graduated in ‘84, I worked my way up, and I was, you know, I was top tier, I was doing everything. When I moved here in 2010, I actually did a leave of absence, because I wasn't sure, but... my whole classical life has completely changed. I was really very, very busy, but, you know, I'm not willing to sit on the highway at this age, I'm just too old. [laughs]

The difficult part [of my relocation] was that there was no competition for me out there. Here, there is so much competition - but the niche that I attract are the, you know, some of the folks from Marin County, how would I put it, how some women have in-home businesses, a lot of times they don't want a geek in the house. They want someone that is like them. So it took me a little while to build up my clientele, but I get a lot of word of mouth, and the biggest exposure for me, the best ads have been the Piedmont Post.

It's a small paper run by this wonderful guy, Gray Cathrall - I trade IT with him: I fix his stuff, he runs my ads for free, and then I write a monthly “Dear MacMama” column on his Senior page. So that's really what gets me the most business. I don't get the college students, I'm not for them and they're not for me. I get their grandparents. So, you know, I get somebody when their kids buy them a Mac, and they start asking their kids questions, and their kids are like “Oh my God, Mom, call somebody!” -- well, I'm that person!

I have one patient -- oh, patient - I have one customer who had a stroke, and he's very hard to understand - he goes “[unintelligible high-pitched whimpering]” but I know when I sit down in front of his computer, I can see whatever the issue is... He's a person who's done a lot in his life - he's very intelligent, very smart, and just because he can't use his voice, his wife says he gets treated like an idiot, but his IQ's probably off the charts.

Part of it is maybe because I had immigrant parents, so I always had to negotiate the world for them, it's kind of second nature for me to have someone who doesn't understand something and I can present it to them in a way that will not overwhelm them but will allow them to do what they have to do. That's what I market - one woman said “You should name your business The Daughter I Wish I Had” [laughs] - but that's kind of, you know...

I would say that right now, music plus teaching is half my income and MacMama is the other half. I'm actually making more out here [than back East] on MacMama because even though there's so much competition, the niche that I fill is kind of new territory.

Older people - people in my generation who, you know, really were in their late 20s, early thirties when we started really kind of counting on computers and really using them and being curious about them… I think what happens as you get older is you get more easily frustrated. What I worry about is as technology gets more complicated, am I going to be able to keep up with it? And I have a feeling that my life as MacMama is gonna probably have to morph into something else.

I mean, I’ve had the experience when my daughter was having trouble with getting onto a network, so I was working on my daughter’s computer, and her boyfriend was having some trouble with his own computer and she - just in watching me use the mouse and the trackpad and do what I was doing, it was frustrating to her because I’m slower. You know, I don’t go boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. I go methodically.

Her boyfriend was looking all over and he couldn’t fix it and so he closed his computer and walked away. Well, I just did the things that I knew, and I knew there was nothing really wrong with the network, there was just some setting that was goofy, so I deleted all her network settings and started over, and it worked. But it took me - I didn’t think it was taking me a long time, but it drove her crazy to watch me do it - it probably took me 15 minutes. But for her, because her attention span was - it’s either fixed or I’m not gonna do it... They’re just so used to doing and fixing things so quickly.

My clientele is most likely very rarely going to be much younger than me, and so as I get older I may start going too slow for, you know, to fix stuff. So I fully intend to have to, at some point in my life, either take in more students or just figure something out - remake myself. I mean, in Berkeley, shit, I could call myself a life coach and probably get enough people to [laughs] you know... I mean, I call myself the “iLife Coach for the Digiphobic!” I don’t know what I’ll do but I’ll do something. I think that one of the lessons I’ve tried to teach my kids is that you have to remake yourself a few times in your life, and that’s ok! You know, you’re one thing now and something else comes up, and you just have to do something else. That’s the deal!

My current husband, we actually met when we were brought in to teach a workshop in Albuquerque in 2002, and because we were both kind of well-known in the Jewish music scene, they said “Oh can you guys put on a concert?” and, you know, things happened that led to right now, but... He was a Mac person, I wasn’t - I was on a PC.

I still was the one who could always fix stuff at home on the computer, but he was telling me all about the Mac and he said “You should really think about getting a Mac” and he had a little Powerbook... so I switched over and I got an iMac. Then, you know, fixing problems was 6 steps less on the Mac. So I started just reading about it, and then I really became, like, a geek. Not like a person who doesn’t wash their hair, but, I was so interested in the whole architecture of the operating system. I was like, “Oh, I can’t believe I’m really reading this magazine right now... Huh!”

So that’s when I just - I really enjoyed using the Mac and then my kids were kinda coming up and we would - I would get little software for them, and it was just fun, and it was so clean, and I switched over from Finale to Sibelius, which seemed very sexy, and user-friendly.

So that’s kinda when my interest got piqued, but I never considered doing it for a living, because you know like I said, I don’t have an IT background, I don’t have a math degree, I don’t have a science degree. Basically, I had studied something where I’d never have to write a paper, ‘cause, you know, yuck!

Yeah, no, I never would have thought that I would do it at all. So the fact that I actually did this - if you would have told me 10 years ago, I’d say You’re crazy! I know how to do stuff, but I could never do this... So it was kind of a surprise to me that I did it, and I enjoy it, and you know, very few times do I say “Oh my god, that was a horrible day” - I usually feel pretty good at the end. There’ve been a couple of times when I haven’t solved a problem and it bothers me and bothers me and bothers me and I keep worrying about it, but I mostly really do enjoy the work that I do.

I like to talk to people, I like to be a problem solver. I like to interact with people personally, just like when you’re teaching, but... you know, and I love it when someone says, “I need a laser printer, and I want something that’s black.” I go, “Okay! Let’s go shopping!” and we go online and I go “Well, if we get at B&H, you know, you don’t have to pay tax. “Um, well, I don’t like to buy things from -- let’s just buy it from Apple and pay more money” and I go “Ok, well now we’re really shopping.” So, you know, that’s really fun for me. That would be my next job, a professional shopper - I’d go “You can NOT wear those shoes with those pants.” I’d be so good because I’m so opinionated. [laughs]

And setting up an office the way I like to do it, very cleanly and telling people “Put your documents in documents, and put your pictures in pictures, keep your desktop clean...” You know when somebody goes “Ok, I want you to organize my computer,” then I’m just happy as a pig in shit. You don’t have to print that, but...

I do work in the command line a little bit, but the thing is, anything I can’t do, I can find on Google in a split second, and if I, for instance, if I want to know where a hidden file is because I have a feeling there is some extension causing a problem, I type into Google “Where is the preference file for...” and - if people used Google I would never get a job. There is so much available online. I started to study some more command line stuff and programming, and at five seconds I went “Nah, not for me, definitely not for me.” I just like the people part of it, and solving problems. That’s why, you know, if I get too old for this, I’ll do some other kind of in-house something, I don’t know, I’ll make something up.

If technology went by me so quickly, went over my head, like in the next ten years or so, I would have no qualms about going back to school, getting a social workers degree and putting out a shingle as a, you know, musical ensemble therapist. [laughs]

Our group, when we do workshops, we do a class called “Bandstand 911.” It’s solving problems on the bandstand, ‘cause you get these Klezmer bands that are made up of deeply developed - or much too quiet - personalities, and there’s usually some battle that goes on musically and some people wanna play by ear, but others... So we get hired, I don’t want to say a lot - when the economy was better, we were brought in a lot to do that workshop. People really liked that ‘cause we would teach people how to lead a dance, how to work with the dance leader, how to call tunes, how to indicate to your group that you’re switching tunes by having little code, licks that you do... You know, “Who’s the leader, the piano player or the violinist? Well, guess what, the violinist can use the instrument to give cues...” You know, that kind of thing.

I was really- and still am, I love animals… My kids used to call me a “serial pet collector,” ‘cause something would come to the door hungry and I’d say “Oh look! We just got a new cat! We have a bird! I bought a horse!...” I’d be so happy on a ranch, working with animals all day and then playing tunes at night! And cooking! That would be like, you know - my string quartet folk music dude ranch would be the perfect thing for me. And our kids could support us, Goddamm! [laughs]

I don’t think this will be my job forever, I don’t think it can. It’s like with music, you know, as we get older, we get replaced by younger, faster, cheaper people, and then we hope our kids are making enough money that they can build us a room with a southern exposure. I told my daughter, “You better give me a big window, ‘cause if you give me a dark room you’re not gonna be happy.” [laughs]