Midori: October Musician of the Month

Midori is our October Musician of the Month. She was born in Osaka, Japan, on October 25, 1971, and the reason she is here is a concert she gave when she was fourteen.

Three Violins in One Performance

On July 26, 1986, Midori played at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Leonard Bernstein was conducting his own piece, the Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium.” She was fourteen years old and playing a three-quarter size violin, because she was not yet big enough for a full one.

In the fifth movement, her E string snapped.

She walked over to the orchestra’s concertmaster, Malcolm Lowe, and he handed her his violin, a Stradivari. She carried on with the piece.

Then that string broke too.

The associate concertmaster, Max Hobart, passed his violin forward to Lowe, who passed it to Midori, and she finished the performance on a third instrument. Bernstein kept conducting. The audience did not find out until afterwards quite what they had watched.

Two days later, the New York Times ran the story on its front page under the headline “Girl, 14, Conquers Tanglewood With 3 Violins.”

What Is Actually Worth Noticing

The part children remember is the broken strings. The part worth talking about at home is everything else.

She did not stop. She did not apologize to the audience or wait for someone to tell her what to do. She solved the problem in front of her, twice, and kept the music going.

And she was not alone in it. Two grown professionals handed over their own instruments mid-performance, without discussion, because a fourteen-year-old needed them more than they did at that moment. That is what an orchestra is. It is worth pointing out to a child who thinks of music as a solo activity where you are on your own.

What She Did Next

Midori had made her debut with the New York Philharmonic at eleven, as a surprise guest at their New Year’s Eve concert, invited by the conductor Zubin Mehta.

What is less well known is what she did with the career that followed. In 1992, at twenty-one, she founded Midori & Friends, which brings tuition-free music education into New York City public schools. It has now reached more than 330,000 children. She went on to found Music Sharing in Japan, which takes live music into hospitals and to communities that rarely get concerts, and Partners in Performance, which she paid for with her Avery Fisher Prize money.

In 2007 the United Nations made her a Messenger of Peace, a role she still holds.

She is fifty-four, she still performs internationally, and she teaches. She holds the Dorothy Richard Starling Chair in Violin Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music and joined the violin faculty of The Juilliard School last year.

Listening With Your Child

Start with Paganini’s Caprice No. 24, which Midori recorded. It runs about five minutes and it is a theme with variations, which makes it unusually easy to follow.

Learn the tune first. It is short and it arrives immediately. Play the opening fifteen seconds twice and ask your child to hum it back.

Then listen for the disguises. Every variation is that same tune wearing different clothes. Ask your child to raise a hand each time they recognize it underneath.

Ask which variation is the hardest. Children are good at this, and their reasons are usually musical ones. Fast is the obvious answer, but it is not always the right one.

Try This at Home

This one comes straight out of the Tanglewood story, and teachers use a version of it.

1. Ask your child to play a piece they know well, all the way through.
2. Somewhere in the middle, clap once. Or say their name.
3. The only rule is that they keep going.
4. Try it again with a bigger interruption. Drop a book, open a door, let the dog in.
5. Afterwards, ask what it felt like to carry on.

Most young musicians stop the moment anything goes wrong, because in practice at home there is never a reason not to. Recitals are not like that. The skill of continuing is a separate skill from the notes, and it can be practiced at the kitchen table in about ten minutes.

Midori had that skill at fourteen, and it is the reason anyone remembers that evening.

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