The Soloist Read Free Page A

offered me an immediate appointment and the promise of a manageable teaching load.
    For ten years very little happened to me. I hardly remember anything about this period, except how impatient I felt with many of the students, who seemed more interested in their social lives than in music. Even Bach, who was remembered by contemporaries as a man of nearly infinite patience and mild disposition, could lose his temper when confronted with musicians who didn’t practice enough. Once, while rehearsing a cantata, Bach listened in horror as the church organist lost his place during a simple passage. Enraged at this needless crime against music, Bach tore off his wig, threw it at the organist and shouted, “You ought to have been a cobbler!” Ours being a litigious society, I managed to refrain from throwing things at students, but if dreams came trueand university teachers had more control over students’ professional decisions, Southern California would have found itself overrun with cobblers by now.
    I plodded forward with my job and my grueling daily practice routine until early last year, when my life changed direction once again. It started the weekend that Yo-Yo Ma visited our campus to give a master class, and after watching him do more in one afternoon to inspire my students than I had been able to do in the entire year, I came home to find a summons for jury duty in my mailbox.

2
    Mr. Ma taught for over two hours that day, then surprised everyone by giving an impromptu performance for the students and faculty. His energy appeared to come from an inexhaustible source; his playing showed no signs of wear from all the teaching, and he didn’t seem worried about exhausting himself before the concert he was giving downtown the next evening. He answered questions afterward and proved to be an endearing and irrepressibly humorous speaker, which explained why I had heard laughter all afternoon coming from the practice room he used for his master class. I had been in my office down the hall in case they needed someone to quickly locate or photocopy any music during the lesson.
    After this, the chairman suggested that we all move over to the Faculty Lounge for drinks, where we had to split up into several tables. I felt sorry for Yo-Yo, having to entertain the faculty after spending three long hours with our students—I don’t know if anyone even asked if he would have preferred to go back to his hotel—so I sat with a group of students at the farthest table. I remember that the only part of being a concert musician that I disliked was the socializingafterward. I loved making music onstage, but I hated having to sit through postconcert dinners with groups of people who wanted to know all about me, or who wanted to tell me all about themselves, and who inevitably seemed disappointed to find that I was not as fluent in conversation as I was in the language of music. I pleaded with my mother to decline those invitations, but she insisted that it was important for me to “mingle.” The truth, I realize now, is that the dinners and luncheons and teas were important for her, not for me. Since she couldn’t actually sit onstage with me during concerts, those social occasions were her only chance to get the attention she felt she deserved as my mother, since anyone wishing to speak to me had to meet with her approval first.
    Yo-Yo must have been telling funny stories the whole time because his table never stopped laughing. I looked over a few times and caught glimpses of him gesturing with his hands as he talked. At one point I think he was imitating Arthur Rubinstein. Whatever he was doing was obviously funny, and he was laughing just as loudly as everyone else at his antics. His sense of humor was so contagious that, I heard later, it even inspired Larry Axelrod, a notoriously serious bassoonist, to tell a joke.
    After the drinks we said our good-byes and I joined the others to thank Yo-Yo and see him off. When it came my turn