ARTICLES AND COMMENTARY

Honoring David Berman
A tribute to my first major teacher

While growing up in Ithaca, New York I was vaguely aware that my hometown is unique.  Nestled at the base of glacially-formed Cayuga Lake in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of Central New York, it offers hills, spectacular waterfalls and gorges, rural charm, and the energy, sophistication, and cultural advantages of a college town.  As a child I began attending Cornell University’s artist series concerts, hearing such world renowned soloists as violinist Nathan Milstein, pianist Gina Bachauer, tenor Jussi Bjoerling, guitarist Andres Segovia, and Julius Baker with the Bach Aria Group.  In seventh grade, after having played the flute for two years, I began studying privately with the flute professor at Ithaca College—the man who is the focus of this tribute.

David Berman was my teacher from 1959 until the fall of 1964, when I matriculated at the Eastman School of Music, 90 miles to the northwest.  Through the past several decades, my perspectives on pedagogy and admiration for my first major teacher have continued to grow and evolve.  What Dave Berman gave me was a gift of inestimable value: a solid technical and musical foundation that well equipped me for advanced study and, ultimately, for entrance into the professional world.

            Who is David Berman?  His career profile is straightforward: a one-year replacement position at Michigan State University (1954-55), followed by employment as a faculty member at Ithaca College from September 1955 until his retirement to Sarasota, Florida in August 1989.  More convoluted, and quite fascinating, is the story of his journey to a career as a professional musician.  While teaching at the Sarasota Music Festival in June I was fortunate to spend a relaxed evening with my teacher, and seized that opportunity to ask many questions about his early life and training. 

Born on August 20, 1927 to Jewish immigrants, Berman was the son of a Ukrainian mother and a White Russian father who lived in a Chicago working-class neighborhood.  Music was highly valued in the Berman family, and at an early age young Dave took piano lessons for several years.  His sister was the more diligent piano student, and a limited budget for music study caused his parents to discontinue Dave’s piano lessons.  At age 12 he began to study the flute and play in a neighborhood band. (He had hoped to play the drums, but when interested students were given a chance to choose their instruments someone else took percussion and Dave found himself with the instrument no one wanted.)  When the band’s conductor, a man from the Wurlitzer Company, noticed that the young flute player had talent, he sent Dave downtown for lessons at Wurlitzer, where he was given his first Boehm system flute.

            Berman’s next teachers were Joseph Sverov, principal flutist of the Illinois Symphony (a WPA orchestra conducted by Izler Solomon, who later conducted the Columbus Symphony from 1941-1949 and the Indianapolis Symphony from 1956-1976), and Carol Solfronk (later Vacha), who had studied with Barrère and was principal flutist of the Women’s Orchestra of Chicago under conductor Nikolai Malko, who in 1926 had led the premiere performance of Shostakovich’s First Symphony with the Leningrad Philharmonic. WPA orchestras were among the many jobs created by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (later Work Projects Administration, 1935-1943) to help the United States recover economically from the Great Depression.  The existence of a Women’s Orchestra of Chicago reflects the fact that there were virtually no women playing in major American orchestras during the first half of the twentieth century.

Between the ages of 15 and 18 Berman studied with Ernest Liegl, principal flutist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who coincidentally was also the teacher of Doriot Anthony Dwyer.  Liegl had studied with Barrère and Leonardo de Lorenzo and was playing a closed-hole Haynes in the earlier years of Berman’s studies.  Liegl’s home was in Evanston, near Northwestern’s football stadium, and Berman remembers having to take a streetcar, bus, subway, and finally the elevated train to his Sunday morning lessons.  He also remembers having to walk a good distance in the extremely cold wind blowing off Lake Michigan—a memory that Doriot Dwyer has also recounted. 

As a high school student in an era when most flutists were men, Berman was fortunate to have the opportunity to play in many community orchestras because it was wartime and older male flutists were being drafted. After graduating from high school in January 1945 he enrolled in a junior college and, facing the compulsory draft, also volunteered for the Navy. While in training at the Great Lakes Naval Base he played in a recruit band, and shortly after World War II ended was sent to Pearl Harbor for a six-month tour of duty on a destroyer. Discharged after 11 months of service, he attended DePaul University on the G.I. Bill, studying with Chicago Symphony piccoloist Emil Eck.  Robert Muczynski was one of his classmates, and Berman still owns manuscript copies of the Sonata for flute and piano and the Three Preludes for solo flute.

While pursuing graduate studies at DePaul Berman was drafted for the Korean War, to which he was politically opposed. At the recruiting station no one in his group was willing to volunteer for the Marines, so the young men were ordered to count off in threes. When everyone had a number those with ones were sent to the Marines and Berman, a two, was assigned to the Army and sent to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where infantrymen and combat engineers were trained.  During his audition for the post’s Sixth Armored Division Band he was asked to "sight read" the complete solo arrangement of Debussy’s Faun, which luckily he knew well.  He was accepted immediately into the band, and remains convinced today that his years of intensive practice literally saved his life: every other member of his training company was sent to fight in Korea.

Recognizing his talent, the Army sent Berman to the Army detachment of the Navy School of Music in Washington, where he was able to take lessons with National Symphony principal flutist Wallace Mann. It was Mann who first introduced Berman to the concept of whistle tones as a very useful warm up routine. After his discharge from the Army he returned to Chicago to complete his master’s degree, substitute teach, play in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago (the Chicago Symphony’s training orchestra), and resume singing in and conducting the Jewish Peoples Choral Society of Chicago, a Yiddish chorus with which he had sung while in high school and college. There he met Alice Becker, the younger sister of his sister’s close friend, and they were married in December of 1953.  Alice typed his master’s thesis, “Teaching Yiddish Folk Music in a Secular Jewish Day School,” and moved with him to Lansing, Michigan for his first job—a one-year replacement flute position at Michigan State University, where he learned and performed much chamber music and also began switching to an open-hole instrument.  The Bermans moved one year later to Ithaca, which would be their home for the next 34 years.

When asked about important influences in his development Berman mentioned that Liegl taught him to listen, and that hearing concerts by the Chicago Symphony was a wonderful education in and of itself. Violinist and pianist Paul Stassevich, who had served as assistant to the Hungarian-born violin pedagogue Leopold Auer (for half a century the major teacher in St. Petersburg and subsequently at Curtis and in New York), was on the faculty at DePaul during Berman’s years there and as Berman’s conducting teacher taught him a tremendous amount about musical expression and the importance of shaping and directing a musical phrase. Another important mentor at DePaul whose intellect greatly inspired Berman was Leon Stein, a composer, violinist, and conductor under whom Berman performed and studied theory, counterpoint, and history.

Berman enjoyed having the opportunity to study with Albert Tipton and play in the Aspen Festival Orchestra during the second summer of the festival’s existence. Early in his career at Ithaca College he attended summer school at Eastman, taking a course in contemporary analysis with composer Wayne Barlow and lessons with Joseph Mariano.  Those lessons were memorable for the chance to hear Mariano demonstrate and especially for Mariano’s emphasis on concentration and imagination. Often he would ask Berman to play a passage again a different way and then once again, yet another way. At the end of the summer session, when Berman asked about taking lessons the following summer, Mariano responded, “You’re old enough now that you can and should be your own teacher.”  Those were empowering words that Berman took to heart.

Berman stresses that he is a member of the first generation that had the chance to hear great musicians play on recordings; he learned a great deal from listening to recordings of Barrère, Moyse, Kincaid, Laurent, Baker, and Rampal. Equally important, he learned much from the recordings of such great artists as singer Alexander Kipnis and violinist Jascha Heifetz.  No previous generation had been able to hear an abundance of outstanding performances in the comfort of their living rooms—a circumstance we take for granted today.

David Berman had taught at Ithaca College for only three years when I met him as a 12-year-old flute student.  In the three decades that followed he made immense contributions to the Ithaca College School of Music and also to the greater Ithaca community through his annual solo recitals and numerous faculty chamber music concerts each year.  He played in the Ithaca Chamber Orchestra and the Ithaca Woodwind Quintet, and was both a conductor and member of the Ithaca Opera Orchestra. At Ithaca College he built a vital flute studio and while teaching flute, music theory, and music history mentored untold numbers of students who now serve our profession as performers and teachers.  As a faculty leader he developed and headed the chamber music program and chaired the committee that instigated such major changes in the music curriculum as making chamber music a requirement, requiring diction classes for all singers, and offering a 4.5-year program that combines music education and performance.  In addition, during the three years that Berman served as Assistant Dean he instituted many improvements to the physical plant of the music school. He justifiably takes pride in those accomplishments, but above all, he is most proud of all his students, saying, “Students are your teachers.”  How true!

How exactly did Dave Berman’s teaching make such a difference to me and the many students whom he mentored during the course of his professional life?  In re-reading notebooks that contain his comments from lessons more than four decades ago, I’m continually struck by the life wisdom that was shared in those hours—lessons that always included a balanced diet of scales, etudes, solos, and assigned duets.  As an example, here’s my entry for July 24, 1962:

Start competing with unseen competitors. 
Aim for Carnegie Hall. 
The USA is only one country in a huge world…
Plan to practice 3-4 hours daily. 
Budget your time.

Immediately following those motivational words comes the practical, technical advice that I clearly must have needed:

While playing Taffanel Gaubert exercises, stop on a note and listen to your tone. 
Try to maintain brilliance in the upper middle register when going down. 
Don’t make the embouchure hole too wide for your lowest notes because too much air will escape.
Try to get a good low tone before vibrating; vibrato is a camouflage.

Here are just a few other sample comments from other lesson entries:
Practice without stopping before hard passages in an etude.
Don’t think about your teacher’s possible reaction—Just play!
View criticisms in proportion.
Point the tongue for a clear staccato.
Practicing whistle tones requires a relaxed embouchure and good support.  This will help develop tonal placement and embouchure strength.
In exploring tone and articulation there are never-ending complexities, deeper and deeper shades and details.

            These quotes offer only a small glimpse of the spirit that made David Berman’s pedagogy so meaningful.  He was demanding and he was honest; he was able to get to the heart of a technical or musical problem and help a student improve.  How often he tried to help me achieve a sense of musical freedom, especially in music that had an ethnic quality, such as Bartok.  At those times he would often ask me to sing, which I dreaded. (Not any more—I now sing all the time while teaching!) Most important, he possessed a well-honed sense of how and when to push or encourage, and he understood how each student’s background might affect his or her ability to approach and solve an issue.  He was intuitive, kind, and effective—a winning combination of attributes for anyone in the teaching profession.

Perhaps the mark of a great teacher is that person’s ability to keep influencing students throughout their own professional lives.  During my visits to Sarasota over the past eight summers I’ve been able to re-connect with Dave and Alice Berman several times, and during each reunion I am buoyed by their energy and sense of humor.  Family has always been their top priority, and they relish visits from their three grown sons and eight grandchildren.  They also enjoy traveling, and in July spent almost two weeks in Hawaii. 

Despite a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, Dave continues to remain very active, playing tennis three times each week.  Although now unable to play the flute, he conducts the Humanaires, a non-professional chorus that he founded nine years ago at the Congregation For Humanistic Judaism in Sarasota.  The group has expanded from a small ensemble of seven singers to a chorus of 38 members—slightly over ten percent of the congregation’s total membership--and performs a broad range of Jewish music in the various languages of the Jewish people:  Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Ladino, and Aramaic.  Recently Dave sent me a DVD of the Humanaires’ March concert that took place at Sarasota’s Flanzer Jewish Community Center.  Entitled “Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust,” the concert was truly remarkable, and an excellent example of how a fine musician can stir non-professionals to produce a wonderful musical product.  Alice Berman’s touching and beautiful alto solo in Tsvey Taybelech (Two Little Doves) is a case in point.

Through his dedicated teaching and his love of music David Berman has brought inspiration and meaning to the lives of countless students, colleagues, and friends.  The example he has set throughout his life—being a devoted husband and father, working with complete commitment to his profession and community, and retaining an infectious joie de vivre despite recent health challenges--is a huge inspiration to all who are fortunate enough to know him. As he enters his ninth decade Dave Berman has my heartfelt gratitude and many wishes for continued happiness and fulfillment. I could ask for no finer a role model in music, or in life.