A Teacher Lineage-DeLay

So, what do Sarah Chang, Shlomo Mintz, Cholien Lin, Hyo Kong, Gil Shaham, Paul Cantor, Robert McDuffie, Midori, Nigel Kennedy, Bill Fitzpatrick, Mark Peskidoff, Nadja Salerno-Solenberg, David Kim, Naoko Tanaka, Christian Altenberger, Kurt Suspenshouse, Connie Hurd, Mark Kaplan, Itzhak Perlman, and so many others have in common.

Well, what they have in common is one teacher, one studio, one woman who helped shape the sound of violinists for decades to come.

It's remarkable when you stop and think about it.

I mean, we know so much about her students winning major international competitions, all coming out of her legendary studio with Juilliard.

But what do we know about the teachers that taught her and the teachers that taught them? Well, to start, Dorothy Delay was born in 1917 in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Her first teacher was her father, Irving Delay.

While we do not have a documented lineage attached to him, he introduced her to the violin and guided her through her earliest years of study before she left Kansas for more formal training.

She went on to study at Oberlin with Raymond Cerf, a student of Eugène Ysaÿe.

Isai was a teacher that was known for cultivating individuality, expressive freedom, tonal richness, and interpretive depth.

Isai encouraged students to develop a personal voice rather than conform to a rigid technical system.

After this, she attended Michigan State, where she studied with Michael Press, who had been a student of Jan Grimley, a teacher associated with a systematic and disciplined approach to violin technique.

She then went to Julliard where she studied with Lewis Persinger, who was appointed to the faculty as the successor to Leopold Auer.

Persinger had studied in Leipzig with Hans Becker and completed his studies with Isai in Brussels.

He spent summers with the French violinist Jacques Thibault, who emphasized elegance of phrasing, natural bow flow, refined tonal color, and expressive spontaneity.

She also worked with Letts was the student of Leopold Auer, whose tradition was rooted in structural understanding, clarity of interpretation, and fidelity to the score.

Then in 1948, she became the assistant to Ivan Galamian at Juilliard.

Golamian had studied with Konstantin Mastras, whose teaching emphasized He as well studied with Lucien Cape, who focused on refined bowing techniques, nuanced articulations, tonal control through contact point, and bow distribution.

Through Galamian, Delay encountered both Russian and French pedagogical traditions that were layered onto the influences she had already come in contact with.

But her nearly 20 years as his assistant ended when she accepted a position at the Aspen Music Festival in 1970.

Their relationship never recovered.

Dorothy Delay did not come from one school of playing.

She was shaped by multiple traditions, and that helps explain why her teaching was not about preserving a method, but about reaching the individual student.

As she was known to say, teach the student, not the subject.

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