Juilliard’s Creator of Champions : Dorothy DeLay’s disciplined teaching has struck the right note with a long line of high-profile violinists

There’s a mob scene outside Room 530 at the Juilliard School. A line of students clutching violins snakes down the hall for what looks like a four-hour wait.

But at times the line has been longer. Sooner or later, serious student violinists will end up as a pupil of Dorothy DeLay, the instructor who has virtually cornered the violin-teaching market. Her students regularly win top prizes at competitions, get snatched up by major managements and are launched on the high-stakes concert circuit.

She looks like your grandmother. But behind the disarming front is one of the most revered pedagogues in violin history. The “grandchildren” she dotes on are her myriad high-profile students. Among them are Itzhak Perlman, Midori, Cho-Liang Lin, Gil Shaham and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and violinists of the Juilliard, Cleveland, Tokyo and Fine Arts Quartets.

Before DeLay sets out on the drive to Juilliard from her suburban home, she will have spent the morning on the phone with conductors looking for soloists, managers looking for hot new talent and university directors with positions to fill. There will also be conversations with aspirant students, current students and their parents.

Callers are apt to be addressed as “Sweetie,” “Honey” or “Sugarplum,” and if they’re facing a snag in their personal life or career, she might dispense advice for the lovelorn or how to dress for success. She will even prepare a special program tailored to a particular violinist’s talents.

To keep up with the demand for her time, until recently DeLay commuted regularly to the New England Conservatory, Sarah Lawrence, to Tokyo and the Royal College of Music in Great Britain. She still flies to the Cincinnati College-Conservatory the second Tuesday of every month. And each June for the past 18 years, the migration of violinists who follow her from the East Coast to the Aspen Festival has been as constant as the summer solstice.

The loyalty of her constituency is unflagging, and for excellent reasons. Once they are inside her studio, she makes students believe they are special. Says one of her four Juilliard teaching associates, who help monitor student progress: “There’s a certain personal relationship that makes students feel good, even though they know they’re part of a very large crowd. Even though they’ve waited hours for a lesson, which you would think would make them feel uncared for.”

The best talent continues to flock to her because her track record for turning out successful players is probably unprecedented, because she has a great understanding of how learning works, and because she can break down the requisite technical skills into manageable particles. And once chosen, her young players often move fast on the road to a successful career.

“Learning is like a jigsaw puzzle,” DeLay says. “Often you get the pieces, but can’t fit them in until you’ve built it big enough to see the proper spaces.” Not having had a Dorothy DeLay in her life to systematize violin study, that’s what she set out to do for her charges.

DeLay’s station is at the back of Room 530. When students play, she sits with her hands folded on her lap, listening. Occasionally, she will beat out a rhythm with a pencil or make a point in the interrogative. “Shouldn’t this be twice as fast?” “Wouldn’t this slide sound better in Paganini than Bach?”

There’s a collection of photos pinned to a folding door, a guided tour to a lifetime enriched by relationships with students. “There’s Shlomo Mintz as a soldier in the desert. There’s Toby Perlman with their first baby. And Mark Peskanov always did feel that picture was sexy.”

Around the room there are framed manuscripts and a black-and-white scratch crayon drawing made by a 14-year-old Itzhak Perlman, a peace offering after his prickly first audition with DeLay. “He was cross. He didn’t want to be in the United States. He was sitting in this horrible hotel room and it was raining. He didn’t speak any English, nor did his mother, but we did our best,” DeLay says.

“It’s funny, when I think how I am surrounded by people today. I grew up fairly isolated,” DeLay, 72, says of her Kansas childhood. “I graduated from high school when I was 14 and all the kids were four or five years older than I.”

Her mother taught piano, and DeLay was given a violin at age 4. She became the concertmaster of her high school symphony, attended the Oberlin (Ohio) Conservatory of Music and Michigan State University and played occasional concerts as a graduate student at the Juilliard School.

In 1948, she became assistant at Juilliard to the legendary violin pedagogue Ivan Galamian, a Russian emigre who helped shape the dominant school of violin playing in America for four decades. Though there were no serious disagreements over violin esthetics or style, DeLay and Galamian were light-years apart in their approach to teaching. Her non-doctrinaire open-mindedness is essentially democratic in tradition, while his was autocratic. A rift was inevitable, and in 1971, DeLay established her own class at Juilliard, with assistants of her own.

DeLay has helped spawn certain trends in music--an emphasis on the presence of youth on the concert stage, of players tackling the “holy of holies” of the repertory, Bach and Beethoven, long before they’re wizened or hoary or even seasoned, and even a certain sound production that tends to be extroverted and bright.

Observers of the DeLay phenomenon wonder about the long-range effects on an American public that seems to want younger faces, that does not rate maturity particularly high while applauding the acrobatics and bravura associated with youth. Some point out the all-Americanism of it, where reverence for tradition does not figure as importantly as self-expression. Contemporary composers have expressed concern over the fact that new music is not a priority of hers; consequently they believe they are getting short-changed in the concert halls.

DeLay’s teaching style combines firm discipline and a fairly conservative grading system in technique with incredible tolerance. She uses the same etude books teachers have used for the past 100 years. But her aim is to excite students into making their own discoveries:

“I think the potential in every person is phenomenal. If you watch people working you can see them actually stopping themselves from succeeding, and that comes from fear. I’ve been finding ways of breaking down this fear.”

How does it translate into practical terms? “One thing is never to ask students to do something before they’re prepared, but to proceed in an orderly fashion.”

Few violin teachers get involved with the practical aspects of making a career, preferring to concentrate on the artistic rather than the commercial issues. Not so DeLay. Students and associates find her politically astute and concerned with what happens between lessons, after graduation and beyond.

How do you get a job? How do you make connections? How do you construct a good program? How do you get the conductor to invite you back?

As one former student puts it, most teachers will bring you to the point where you are going out into the professional world, and then when you need them the most, they lose interest. With DeLay, it’s almost as if you get a service contract. (DeLay won’t divulge her fees, but then hers is a seller’s marketplace.)

Former students frequently keep in touch from the road. Extremely non-judgmental, DeLay sees her function as one of opening up possibilities rather than trying to fit individuals into preconceived molds.

Says Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who was on a summer sabbatical in Aspen to be close to her mentor: “The most wonderful thing about Miss DeLay is that she recognized my spirit and didn’t stifle it. At my first audition (at age 14), she realized I had a rebellious streak and that she would need to loosen the reins. She knew eventually I would do what she wanted, but that it would take time. Also, she saw I had more than enough imagination and she left me alone. If she had said, all right, let’s do a harmonic, melodic and structural analysis of this piece, that would not have been for me.”

Noting Salerno-Sonnenberg’s discomfort with dresses while performing, DeLay suggested at a certain point--when ladies’ tuxedoes were coming into fashion--that this might be the solution for her. That outfit has become a Salerno-Sonnenberg trademark.

According to DeLay’s husband, writer Edward Newman, there’s a built-in moment or reckoning in the development of every adolescent, and anyone dealing with students needs to be empathetic to it: “There comes a time when every kid is going to overthrow Mummy or Daddy--or there’s trouble. Now in order to make a career, there has to have been an unusual amount of family support, even in terms of the instrument. Some kids have not six-figure but seven-figure instruments. And yet, if the young person is to break away--as he must if he’s to be alive--there’s going to be carnage!”

After the debris has been cleared away, DeLay is there to mediate between the generations. Essentially, DeLay champions and believes in youth.

Kurt Sassmannshaus, a teaching associate at the Aspen Festival, says: “For a long time there were many teachers who said you can’t even look at the Beethoven Concerto until you’re 40 or 50 because you haven’t the understanding and maturity and you haven’t lived long enough. She doesn’t believe that. Miss DeLay is more concerned with developing a student’s imagination than with reproducing the status quo in stylistic terms. With that you get new ways nobody’s heard. . . .”