Month: January 2023

One fateful day in 1990, an undergraduate in his junior year who had never been around the Stanford music department strolled into the Stanford Concerto Competition and stole the show. He won that year with his famed Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 performance. In 1997, he went on to become the first American in 16 years to win the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. This (now, not-so-unknown) mystery pianist is none other than Jon Nakamatsu B.A. ’91 M.A. ’92, who has returned to campus to teach Stanford students this winter quarter.

Laura Dahl, Director of Collaborative Piano and Interim Director of Keyboard Studies, said she contacted the Van Cliburn gold medalist back in November 2022 to see if Nakamatsu would be interested in substitute teaching during her medical leave in the upcoming winter quarter. According to Dahl, the two had met almost a decade earlier through Stanford Director in Choral Studies and mutual friend, Stephen Sano. 

Nakamatsu is on the adjunct faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory and says he keeps “a very small studio,” due to his intensive travel and performance schedule. During this winter quarter at Stanford, he will be mentoring five students who have been studying under the instruction of Dahl.

In his days as a Stanford student, Nakamatsu too once balanced rigorous schoolwork with practice schedules. Dahl is excited for her students to connect with somebody who’s been in their shoes before: “He understands, on an extremely personal level, the kinds of students that we have at Stanford so I’m really excited for my students to work with him for these ten weeks.”

Reflecting upon what he hopes he brings to students during his time at Stanford, Nakamatsu emphasizes the importance of learning different ways to approach a piece of music. He said it’s easy for pianists to sit down at the piano, start playing, and let their fingers “take over.” On the other hand, he hopes to guide students toward conceptualizing and expressing the components of a piece musically before practicing. 

“I don’t care that you can memorize the whole piece the first day and play it really fast. That doesn’t interest me,” Nakamatsu said. “What interests me is that I can hear your thought process going into every single phrase in every single detail and that you understand the overarching structure of this piece, which is considered a masterpiece for a reason.”

So far, this approach to teaching has varied from what piano student and intended math major Abhy Devalapura ’24 has previously experienced.

“[Nakamatsu] looks at both the macro and micro perspective,” Devalapura said. “He’s very passionate about looking at unique perspectives that you haven’t really explored before. So that’s one thing we’ve been working on and it’s something that I thought was really new and vibrant and interesting.”

According to Devalapura, there are often several lines of voices in music that were composed before the 20th century. Balancing these details with the overall phrasing of the composition is a skill Devalapura has been working on with Nakamatsu. 

Nakamatsu never personally received piano instruction from the music department during his time at Stanford. He began piano lessons at the age of six with Marina Derryberry (1936-2009). She was the same teacher who accompanied him to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which jump-started his musical career twenty years later. 

Having one’s education “led by one primary source is unusual,” Nakamatsu said. “But at the same time, [my teacher] immediately started seeking out other people to help me musically in different disciplines like composition.”

As part of this additional schooling, Nakamatsu studied with Leonard Stein at the University of Southern California for 11 years and learned from Karl Ulrich Schnabel from the age of ten. At that point in his childhood, Nakamatsu began living what he described as a “two-pronged” life. 

“I was having lessons with my teacher four times a week for four to six hours at a time, so I had a very different lifestyle,” Nakamatsu said. “And then at home, I was kind of the normal public school kid who played in the neighborhood with his friends.”

In addition to Nakamatsu, the music department is also welcoming pianist Stephen Prutsman as a Visiting Artist. Prutsman has collaborated with the St. Lawrence String Quartet at Stanford and is additionally looking forward to seeing Nakamatsu on campus. As pianists, their paths haven’t crossed much before. 

“It’s not like string players or singers where ensembles are a part of one’s professional activity. Pianists do play chamber music, do play in orchestras, but a lot of our time is spent practicing alone,” Prutsman said. “But I’m thrilled Jon is there and I look forward to seeing him.”

The excitement to see Nakamatsu back at Stanford and in the music department is echoed by colleague Dahl. 

“It’s a real opportunity and I would have been worried to step away from my students but he’s an extraordinary teacher and a really kind, warm, and sincere human being,” Dahl said. “They are in extraordinary hands – even better than me. He’s an extraordinary pianist and pedagogue and so it’s a great opportunity for them.”

Three factors determine the price of a violin, Mel Sapp explained, just as I was leaving the bright, airy shop she and her husband Greg run in Batavia: one is workmanship. Two, materials. And three, the name of the luthier who built it.

“You notice I didn’t say, ‘sound,’” she added. “Sound is subjective. You can change it.”

Indeed, most masterpiece instruments of old —by Amati, Guernari, Stradivari — have been modernized over the years, their necks and fingerboards lengthened, to bring them into line with current musical tastes.

I am not in the market for a violin, alas. But I visited Sapp Violins earlier this month because of a quip. When the shaky future of journalism is being discussed, with what colleagues I yet retain in a rapidly contracting profession, I’ll sometimes attempt to both sound a positive note and move the conversation along by observing, “They still make violins.”

Meaning, even antique trades thrive, for some.

Though it got me wondering: How is the violin business doing? Chicago, being home to one of the world’s great orchestras, is unsurprisingly also a center of violin craftsmanship. After I visited Sapp, the January Chicago magazine took an in-depth look at John Becker, the Fine Arts Building luthier to the multi-million dollar instruments of musical stars such as Joshua Bell, the article by Elly Fishman itself a finely constructed marvel.

So how does one get into the violin making biz?

Greg Sapp was a music education major at Duquesne University in the mid-1970s when he had a realization that often comes to those whose ambitions lie in the arts.

“This isn’t going to work.”

Luckily, senior year, he had a class with the very 1970s name, “Creative Personality.” His final project was constructing an Eastern European folk instrument called a “prim.”

“It’s kind of like a mandolin,” Greg said, pointing to the ur-instrument, displayed on the wall. “I was the only one in my class that made something so functional.”

That wasn’t a complete accident — his father was a woodworker and singer.

Greg moved to Chicago in 1978 to attend the Kenneth Warren & Son School of Violin Making (now the Chicago School of Violin Making). He also bumped into Mel, whose car had broken down and needed a lift to the train station. When Greg told her he was going to violin school, Mel, who’d known her share of prevaricating creeps, assumed he was lying.

“How do I find these guys?” she asked herself.

Now Greg, 69, divides his time between building and repairing violins, and Mel does the books. Business is solid — they have three employees. Aubrey Alexander was busy at work when I visited.

“I’ve always been more in tune with the violin, no pun intended,” said Alexander, explaining her choice of profession. “I don’t do well with people so much.”

How did she get started?

“When I was 8 years old my mom took me with her to pick up my sister’s violin when it was repaired. I was instantly fascinated by the tools and the instruments,” said Alexander, 39. “When I later started taking lessons I was always more interested in my cello and how it worked, rather than actually playing it.”

And what does it feel like, to create a violin with your hands?

“I start to associate a personality with the instruments,” she said. “They take on a personality of their own. I name the instrument. I gender them. This one’s a boy. That one’s a girl.”

How can she tell? A fraught question nowadays. It isn’t as if you can flip a violin over and check.

“It’s more about the feeling and how I interact with the instruments,” she said. “If it’s giving me a lot of trouble, it’s a boy.”

The vast majority of her instruments identify as girls. Her last cello, for instance, was named “Ophelia,” after the Lumineers song.

The Sapps also tend to anthropomorphize their instruments.

Violins “sulk.” They wait for buyers like puppies in a pet store. “Some instruments like kids better than others,” Mel said. The violins choose their eventual owners like wands in a Harry Potter book.

“The way I look at it, these instruments are all waiting for their person,” she said.

Working with stringed instruments is a protracted process — constructing a violin can take years (new projects tend to get put aside in favor of more pressing repairs, which themselves can take months). A violinmaker is seldom rushed. I wondered if hobbies are necessary and, if so, what Alexander does to relax from violinmaking. She told me she loves to fish, particularly bass fishing — she is from East Texas after all.

“When I’m not up to my elbows in wood shavings, I’m up to my elbows in lily pads,” she said. “Pretty much all I do is make violins, and I fish and make coffee.”

Speaking of wood. The top of a violin is spruce, the back, sides, neck and scroll are maple. The two types of wood, soft spruce and hard maple, combine to create an ideal sound. Along with a healthy dose of time.

While aging wood is important — Sapp pays hundreds of dollars apiece for small pieces of lumber that have sat for decades — everyone agrees that once constructed, violins need to be played to keep their sound fresh.

Playing “keeps it doing what it needs to be doing,” Greg said.

That sounds almost spiritual, I observed.

“Oh, This is juju personified,” Mel said with a laugh.

And on that note — sorry, couldn’t resist — we reach our fine, pronounced fee-nay, the musical term for the end of a composition.