Interview with Paul Kantor, Professor of Violin

WILLIAM: Hi and welcome to the MusiShare Young Artist Program Series Viewpoint. Today I have the honor and pleasure to talk with Paul Kantor. Paul has done so much stuff, but here's a little of what he's done. He's currently the Sally Shepherd Perkins Professor of Violin at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, having previously served as the Eleanor H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He received his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the Juilliard, studying violin with Dorothy DeLay, and chamber music with Robert Mann. For 13 years, he served as the chair of the string department at the University of Michigan, and has taught at the Juilliard School, the New England Conservatory, and Yale University. He continues as Artist-in-Residence at the Glenn Gould School of Music, Royal Conservatory of Music, since his appointment in 2008. I think it's enough.

PAUL: You missed a very pivotal part of my background. Please, please. Yes, and that was playing second violin in the New York String Quartet with Bill Fitzpatrick. And I say that jokingly because you're doing the interview, but those were really important times, at least for me.

WILLIAM: Well, they were certainly, certainly, certainly for me as well. I mean, you were the taskmaster of taskmasters, I believe. I mean, I don't know how we could have gotten as far as we got, if you were.

PAUL: Well, it was a great and important formative experience for me.

WILLIAM: Well, it was likewise for me as well, my friend. So one of the things we used to deal with in the quartet was intonation. I'm curious to know, do you have a particular approach. When you deal with students with intonation, is it based on situations? Is it based, you know, how do you deal with it? How fluid or how strict do you deal with that?

PAUL: That's such an important question, you know, because I would be hard pressed to say that the most important thing in music is intonation. I don't think that's true. But, you know, when we get sort of lazy and we're thinking about where a violinist is, are they here in the world or are they here or are they here? You know, a really easy way of doing that is just saying, well, how in tune is it? You know, and our friend Joel Smirnoff used to say that, you know, Paul, it's very simple that in the final round of international violin competition, the person who plays the most in tune is the person who wins. You know, it's a little simplistic, but I don't think he's all that far off. Of course, the most important thing, as you well know, that when you're thinking about intonation is. It's all about how intense your listening process is, how important you have made it. Our dear departed Mr. Ley used to say that someone will play as in tune as someone else demands of them. Which is kind of interesting, and it speaks to two things. First of all, there has to be someone making that demand. Like, that ought to be better in tune build.

WILLIAM: Well, that I've heard a lot.

PAUL: And the other thing is the idea that if somebody demands it, you can do it. Right? And I think that's a very important part of the message also, that it's not a particularly unique or magical gift, it is a cultivated gift. Okay, go ahead.

WILLIAM: No, I was just going to ask, in terms of cultivating, what do you have tools that you use? How do you deal with that?

PAUL: I would say my first line of defense or a line of offense, I guess, is the very simple idea of matching with another note. Whether that can be another note theoretically on a tuner, which I don't like quite as much, but matching with open strings. And using that, that's painfully basic, but if you think about it, when we tune the violin, most people, unless they're tuning specifically with the tuner, they tune two strings together. For the simple reason that as soon as you have a comparison, it's easier to hear. If you don't have a comparison, you're really dealing with a type of perfect pitch. Like, where should that A be? Well... In real life, it's really where should that A be in relationship to another note or another chord or the piano or the orchestra. Okay, so starting with the most basic comparison, which is your open strings. Then if you're in a key where that's not particularly convenient to have open strings, you're in A flat minor and open strings don't help you all so much, you create that comparison by making double stops. Either two consecutive notes that are already there in the music and you play them together, right? It's the next best thing to having the open strings there. I will also say that I have created this ridiculously simple intonation exercise, which I love tremendously. And it feels to me like it's my one and only original contribution to the pedagogical repertoire. But it is a system, it's really simple, it's really basic, and most of the time I have to try, I spend most of the time convincing people not to blow off this idea because it's simple, but to embrace it because it's simple, because after all, the most important things in life are usually pretty simple.

WILLIAM: That's very, very true. I can't wait to hear this. Let's hear this.

PAUL: It takes a little bit of time the very first time you do it. It starts with impeccable tuning of the open strings. The idea of impeccable tuning of the open strings is more important than it might seem. We've all seen people tuning in orchestra. The oboe player gives the A. Nobody's really listening. And then you see violin players or viola players going... They haven't listened to a bloody thing, right? But they've missed an opportunity to set the stage, if you will, for really intense listening. So the first thing is really intense tuning of the open strings. The idea behind this exercise is we're going to create pyramids of perfect intervals. And in this exercise, I only deal with perfect intervals because I think of perfect intervals as being basically non-negotiable. That pretty much everyone will agree, every musician will agree. When is a unison really in tune? It's not all that controversial. When is an octave in tune? When is a fourth in tune? You know, when those beats kind of disappear or align, we all kind of agree that's in tune. When we get to thirds, sixths, sevenths, seconds, there's some wiggle room. We can talk about that. Like, I might like the major third here. You might like it in a slightly different place. So I solved that problem by avoiding it. It's just gone. So basically we're dealing mostly with octaves, unisons, fourths, and occasionally a fifth. I try to avoid fifths in this exercise because fifths have a particular physical problem due to the fact that our fingertips are not square at the end. They're rounded, right? So again, I try to avoid that extra complication. People miss the point when they think that this is finger training. It's not finger training. It's ear training. Okay, so we will start, and I'm only going to give you a taste of it because it does take a little bit of time, and I don't know, I find it fascinating. Most human beings will find it incredibly dull and boring, but start by playing, let's say third finger A on the E string first position with open A. And then third finger D with open D, and then third finger G with open G. That is your first base interval. Base interval is defined as when the finger is with an open string creating a perfect interval. So here we have the perfect octave, first base interval. Second bass interval is perfect for it. So you'd play a B on the A string, first finger with open E. E on the D string with open A. A on the G string with open D. Then you go to your third base interval, which is the unison. Of course, the hardest of the three, fourth finger E with open E, fourth finger A with open E. You get the picture. As I said from the very beginning, you're going to create pyramids of open intervals. So you start with base, those three base intervals. You then move on to base plus one. You're gonna take the same three bass intervals, but you are then going to add a perfect interval to it. So you have A with open A, that's your original bass, which you add a fourth finger E below it. You with me? Then you take your second bass interval, which is D, and you add a fourth finger A below that. And your third bass and fold, the G, G with open G, and you add a D beneath that. Okay. Okay. It then moves on to bass plus two, always starting from the same place, right? The same pyramid bass, if you will. Okay? So you have A with open A, you add an E to that, and then you add an octave E below that on the D string. Okay. You get the idea. And it goes all the way from bass, bass plus one, bass plus two, and finally bass plus three. When you get to bass plus three, of course you're dealing with four fingers being down. The beginning, the genesis of a hand position, if you will, or a finger position, right? Right. Now, there are certain complexities in this. There is something called the golden rule, but not the golden rule you learned in Sunday school. It's a different golden rule. It says, when the finger playing the bass interval is on a middle string,. You always have two options. So you will have one perfect interval that goes up and one perfect interval that goes down. This is all much easier with two people having violins in hand.

WILLIAM: No, but in other words, if you put a B natural on the A string, first finger with an E, then with that same B natural to a D, you would have to lower the B. Is that what we're saying?

PAUL: No, because you would go that same B natural to an F sharp. Gotcha. This is more basic than the very important idea that you just touched on, that B is not absolute. The B with open E obviously is different from the B with open D because it's in a different harmonic context.

WILLIAM: Right. Right.

PAUL: You're way ahead of me.

WILLIAM: No, no, no, no. I like what this is because you're taking an idea and you're reducing and reducing it to something that people can build from. I think that's great. Exactly right.

PAUL: And I would say, in many ways, that idea of reducing to the point that you can build from something is one of the essences of good teaching, I think. Making it reducible first. Now, like any exercise, it's much less about the exercise itself, the notes in the exercise, and it's much more about how you do it. When I'm doing this exercise and when I'm focused and concentrated and doing it well, you almost enter, and please don't laugh too hard, you kind of enter almost the trance state, where you're just so fixated on the proportion, and after all, intonation is proportion, mathematical proportion, you're so fixated on listening to these proportions, it's like time disappears, the room disappears, distractions don't exist. And you just intensely focused on the smallest minutiae. It is not important that when you first touch a bass interval, for example, that it's perfectly in tune. It is much more an adjustment exercise than it is a perfection exercise. The hope is over time, doing this over a period of months, you get closer and closer and closer, and the increment of adjustment becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, and quicker and quicker and quicker.

WILLIAM: So we're really talking about. Seriously talking about getting aware, becoming extremely aware or sensitive to something as being more important than the actual destination of getting a perfect fourth. No, it's more about how you hear that and how you observe it, how you use that.

PAUL: Right, right. And I would say when I'm doing the exercise really optimally, there's three parts to it. There's imagining the interval in advance aurally, A-U-R-A-L-L-Y, aurally, imagining where you think the finger should be. That's the first part. The second part is actually playing said note with the open string and adjusting as necessary. And the third and most important part, you then have to remember it. And once you've gotten it and it's really beautiful, and I apologize for getting excited about this, but when a perfect interval is really in tune, it is so gorgeous, you know? And then the idea is, oh, that is so beautiful. I want to remember that. You know, so there's those three parts also and I'm sure it can be taken further than that. But those are the parts that of it that I understand and as I always tell kids when we when we get through first position and usually it takes almost an hour to teach first position to someone because it's not quick. I then tell them that the good news , or the bad news, depending on your point of view, is that this exact exercise can be done in first, second, third, fourth, and fifth position. And what I usually recommend if someone is like hardcore serious person about intonation, two positions a day. A really easy one like first or third. And then a harder one like second, fourth or fifth. And once someone understands the pattern, and it is a very simple, reliable, predictable pattern, they can go through this exercise first position easily in six and a half or seven minutes with the kind of focus that I'm describing. I very often say, even before you do your warm-up, do the intonation exercise because it's warming up the ears, which is, of course, the most important thing. It's a weird thing. I was just thinking about this this morning that. You know, the silver lining to this horrible COVID thing that we're living through for me is I've had the kind of time to practice that I haven't had in decades, decades. And it occurred to me, practicing regularly every day, eight o'clock in the morning, that I think the ear is most susceptible to thinking about intonation at the very start. First thing in the morning, so I recommend it first thing, and maybe the other, if you do two a day, the other position, last thing. You know, so you start and you end your day with those two devotionals, if you like.

WILLIAM: There was something I tell students, there was this French teacher, whose name will not be mentioned, who was asked by a student, well, the student commented to the teacher, you know, I'm having such a hard time playing in tune. And the teacher looked at him and said, listen, it's very simple. You figure out where you're going to put your finger, and then you just keep putting it there.

PAUL: If only that were true.

WILLIAM: What I like about what you're saying is it's not about figuring out this mythical place to put your finger, but how you figure out that place to put your finger. I think that's brilliant. That's a wonderful way to go about it.

PAUL: And the thing that you touched on, which is so important, is. It is where you put your finger is not an absolute place, as you were saying. It depends what's going on in the key, so context is super important.

WILLIAM: When you think about that intonation, I'm assuming you would say that this is an integral part of interpretation of a piece that you're learning, that you're working on. What other things do you think are important in the understanding or that journey towards finding your interpretation?

PAUL: Well, let's start, if you will, since we were talking about intonation. One thing I forgot to mention, I never write this exercise down. And the reason I don't write it down is I don't want people to read it off a page and think, oh, I've done it. I want them always to be thinking: Where am I in this process? And the more alive, alert, aware you are, the greater the benefit.

WILLIAM: Yeah.

PAUL: Okay, it's very simple. If I just wrote it down, someone could just read it, but I don't think the benefit is as great. Okay, but to your question, almost everything, it seems to me, has the potential, even if it seems absolute, it has the potential to be interpreted. Let's take the most mathematical aspect of what we do, rhythm, okay? You could study the rhythm from a mathematical context and say, okay, each note goes here, here, here, here, here, here, right? But then there's the fun part. Once you have an incredible understanding of the math, right, then you start having fun with it. And yes, mathematically, this note should be here, but because of how I feel the music, I might want it a slightly different place. And this is the essence, I think you would agree, of rubato, right? And I mean, I don't speak Italian, but my memory is that the word itself has to do with stealing. Okay. But less like Bonnie and Clyde and a little bit more like Robin Hood. So he stole from one place to give to another place. Right. So in the end, at the end of the piece, the math kind of works out. But in each specific instance, it's the solid base is the math, but it's only the base. I don't know if that's where you're going, but you know I would then say that another mathematical proportion is this intonation thing. We can measure how many vibrations per second are going on. But the whole idea of expressive intonation is that the intonation can suggest something. The type of intonation you choose can suggest a direction, or I'm aiming for that, or the idea of making something more blue.

WILLIAM: Or as Ricci is purported to have done, which is to tune higher. He played with orchestra because he wanted it to be more brilliant so you know I guess.

PAYL: And he's not the only person who does I think Pinchas does that also and the only problem comes when if you do it too much it just sounds what's the word sharp. And I think the goal is to make the soloist kind of highlighted or kind of standing out. And I think Heifetz did that quite a bit to give it that kind of hot edge is to play things on the upper side. You know, but you have to, one has to do it with understanding and know when you've gone too far.

WILLIAM: This is very true. Listen, can we shift just a little bit? When sort of a couple questions sort of put into one. For example, when one is when you have students who are preparing for performance, I would imagine that's a certain kind of a mindset. That's a certain kind of an orientation. Is there or what kind of a shift is there from that kind of preparation to the preparation for a competition?

PAUL: What a great question that is. To my mind, I need to reject the question. I'm sorry. And I'll tell you why, Bill. I think, and this is maybe too idealistic, forgive me if that's the case, but a competition should have exactly the same requirements as a performance. In other words, the person who should, and I'll use the word should, not who does, but who should win, is the person who communicates the most. Who shows the most understanding of what's in the music and brings the most of themself to the party. I'm going to stand by it because I can't live with myself the other way, which is to prepare for a competition in as a, well, it's like in figure skating in the Olympics. The part you don't see on TV is kind of the required part before the artistic part, where they have to do perfect circles and figure eights, right? To get to the next round. Okay. But there is then an artistic component after that. And I would like to feel that that artistic component is really the important thing.

WILLIAM: I remember when Stephen Clapp, who came and did a class, he did a couple classes, but one of them in particular, and I asked parents to, if they had questions they wanted to ask him, and one of the parents said, what are your. What are the things that you look for in a student when they apply to the Juilliard School? And Stephen said to them, well, if I had a student who played really, really well, everything was perfectly in tune, everything was so, you know, clean and everything. Another student, well, not so in tune, not so in tune, not so clean, whatever, but really expressive, really. You go, I choose that one. I always thought that was just a wonderful thing to express to parents, to students, and I think it sort of lines up with what you're saying in maybe an oblique kind of a way.

PAUL: It absolutely does, and I think, you know, it's so important because we spend so much of our time judging people, judging violinists, judging students. Who will I accept to my class? Who will get a fellowship or a scholarship? Who's going to go home empty-handed? You know, those are huge, huge things to the person involved. They're life-changing things, right? And it's the easiest thing in the world as an experienced musician to say, oh,. This person is the best, pardon the air quotes, the best, the cleanest, the most accomplished, the most advanced. But the art of listening to an audition is to figure out, and we know someone who did this unbelievably well, is to say, oh, this is what I'm hearing. What potential do I divine from this? That is much harder, and that's why we call it an art. Just figuring out who plays the best or the cleanest or the most accomplished, that's super easy. Right, right.

WILLIAM: When you, so we're talking about a performance and we've talked about a competition. What about. Preparing and taking a live audition to Rice or to Juilliard or to Cleveland, what about that? For an undergraduate or grad school audition, is there a difference in the preparation? Is there a difference in the expectation? I don't know if that's the right way to say that, but.

PAUL: I would say essentially no, not for me. You know, obviously, if there are technical issues, whether it's intonation or rhythm or anything you want to name that are unsolved and become a distraction to the message, then obviously that has to be dealt with. And I don't think it's just about like,. Here's a bunch of ideas, isn't this wonderful? There is the craft of it, and there's a certain expectation for what the level must be. But I think you're speaking of something beyond that. I wouldn't say that the basic preparation is different, because you want that level of craft for performance, for an audition. For a competition, for all of those things, you want that level. But then beyond that, it becomes a question of, well, who has the capacity to move me? Who has something individual to say? And I think for me, and I'm quite sure for you, Bill, that's the stuff that's really interesting. Those are the people who are really fun to work with. Let me just leave you with one other thing on this subject. A great hero of mine, and I'm not alone in this, was Albert Einstein. Who was not only a genius thinker on the highest levels of physics and what's possible, and an incredible humanitarian, also a pretty good violinist. Pretty good, not great. In fact, one of our teachers, Robert Mann, is purported to have played chamber music with Albert Einstein. I didn't know that. And he said that he played pretty okay, but he always got lost. And the joke in the chamber music group was, Albert, what's the problem? Can't you count?

WILLIAM: That's very good. That's very good.

PAUL: But where I was going with this is Albert Einstein, what he prized amongst his colleagues was not knowledge as the highest value. It wasn't even intelligence. As the highest value or accomplishment in the field as the highest value, it was imagination. And at that level of physics, imagining that when something goes really super, super fast, that it changes size. I mean, the imagination to understand that explains why imagination at the highest levels is the most important thing.

WILLIAM: Yeah, yeah, very cool. Well, here's another slight shift, but not really. Can you tell me a story about your lessons with Miss DeLay? Something you would be willing to let people know about. So many of us have stories, but nobody talks about them.

PAUL: Well, you know, I thought this might come up because that is one of our common experiences, you and I. And I thought of three things that are not so much funny stories as they illustrate something that I found was true about the lady. The first for me is, you know, sometimes we have an epiphany or a thought that strikes us so strongly, we even remember where we were geographically, very specifically, when we had that thought. And this thought happened to me the first summer I studied with her at Meadowmount in 1969 or something like that. Walking down the dirt road near the laundry, as I remember, something like that, one of those old buildings. And I had been studying with Ms. Lace since September, so I'd had eight months, nine months with her. And I had the thought, what the hell is going on? I don't understand her. I don't know what's going on here because the kind of teaching she did and the kind of teaching she didn't do was so different from my experience before that. And I was a very fortunate and privileged person in that. The teacher who was my very first teacher before Mr. Lay was a marvelous teacher. And not so many people can say my first teacher was a wonderful teacher, but great musician, great human being, and just an ideal role model. But Ms. DeLay's teaching was so mysterious to me for quite a while. And I'm just, I'm really glad I hung in there because it wasn't quick and easy. There was a lot of work that you had to do, a lot of gaps that had to be filled in. Okay, so that was my very early experience with Ms. DeLay. Another. Illustrative story I can tell you was quite a bit late. A couple of years after that, I had been, I started going to the pre-college division at Juilliard and I had the opportunity to play a concerto with orchestra. To me, it was like the biggest event of my life to everyone else in the world. It was a little tiny, nothing like who cares. And Ms. DeLay, the teacher of Itzhak Perlman, insisted on getting in her car, driving from the Juilliard School in Midtown Manhattan. To the wilderness of Staten Island, which is now famous because of a silly movie, but at the time it was like kind of part of, legally part of New York, but not really. And insisting that she had to come and hear my dress rehearsal. This was amazing to me because... first of all, I could never understand, like, why on earth did she accept me into her class? I was always, certainly at the beginning, I was definitely a bottom feeder in the class. And my incredibly busy teacher, who worked with the likes of Itzhak Perlman, spent the time and the energy to come to my dress rehearsal. And I can't tell you how many times I think about that when I am not living up to the same level of devotion to my students. Okay, that was the second. And the third thing I can relate to you, Bill, was. Again, an epiphany that happened. I was sort of, what do we call it, associate faculty at Aspen. I was kind of assisting Miss DeLay for some of her students. It was maybe the year after Bernard Rand's string quartet in Aspen, if you remember that.

WILLIAM: I certainly remember that.

PAUL: Anyway, so Miss Delay was kind of at the height of her fame and people, this person came to interview people in Aspen who had worked with her. And I did a rather protracted interview and I spoke about her extraordinary unique style of teaching and her devotion to the art of teaching and her commitment to students in the teaching. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, on and on about the teaching. And this interviewer subsequently went to interview Ms. DeLay. And she said, well, I interviewed your former student, Cantor, and he said a lot about your teaching and how wonderful it was. And Ms. DeLay smiled very gently and subtly. And she said, you know, that's almost right, but I'm really not that interested in teaching. I'm interested in learning. And when I heard that, it just, it was like a slap across the face, in a good way, like a wake-up call, right? The teaching is, that's the method. But the goal is the learning. And that's why people say that her teaching was so different for different people. Because she was reacting to where they were and the way their brain and mind worked and their emotional state. And so that was kind of another epiphany that struck me, rather. Rather late in life, but that is, it struck me, that is so right.

WILLIAM: You know, once we were talking and I said, Ms. DeLay, when are you going to write a book like Mr. Galamian? And she looked and she goes, oh no, Billy, no, I'll never do that. I go, why not? She goes, well, you know, when you write things down in a book, then people go, aha. Oh. I don't want people to go, ha ha. I thought that was really good. I thought this thing that you mentioned that she said about learning, I think is like what it's really, really all about. And if we can all follow that light, that would be such a wonderful thing.

PAUL: That's a great story, particularly taking into account that the famous Galamian book was not really written by Galamian. I mean, it is absolutely based on his principles, and I think quite faithfully, but I'm quite sure that most of it was written by Elizabeth Green.

WILLIAM: In this journey of learning that we're all going through, I wanna thank you for expressing and sharing the things that you just shared with everyone. I think it's a wonderful thing. I think it's things that, these are things that people will remember and hopefully will embrace and explore. So, thank you.

PAUL: Bill, thank you for having me. It is a rare pleasure for me to have, I don't know how long we've been going, but it is a rare pleasure for me to have 45 minutes with Bill Fitzpatrick. And I thank you. It was really, really fun. And I kind of forgot we were doing an interview, but it was a nice conversation.

WILLIAM: Well, it's a beautiful conversation. And thank you so, so very, very much, Mr. Kantor. All the best.

PAUL: Thanks.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---