“If we're really going through the lineage, for viola, a lot of things go back to the Franco-Belgian school,” SFCM String and Piano Chamber Music Chair Dimitri Murrath begins. He’s providing context for how he’s part of a teaching lineage on his instrument that has even touched one of the Conservatory’s presidents. A more contemporary section of this lineage will appear as part of Chamber Music Tuesdays on March 11, when Murrath’s old teacher, the GRAMMY-winning Kim Kashkashian, will perform works by Gabriel Fauré and Antonín Dvořák.

So to understand how Kashkashian and Murrath fit in, he explains, you have to go all the way back to Eugène Ysaÿe, the Belgian “King of the Violin.”  "Ysaÿe was a very important teacher at the turn of the century," Murrath says, "and he also taught Ernest Bloch, who was one of the Conservatory's presidents." One of Ysaÿe's pupils for several years in the 1920s was Scottish violinist-turned-violist William Primrose, who would go on to so impress a young violinist named Karen Tuttle in 1941 that she immediately asked for lessons. Primrose accepted on the condition that Tuttle switch to viola and enroll at his studio.

Tuttle was obsessed with the relaxation and ease of movement Primrose played with, and spent hours observing him and jotting down details. She internalized this to such a degree that Primrose would often send his own students to Tuttle, because she was able to articulate his concepts better than he could. Tuttle collated her observations into a system she called coordination has become a major pedagogical aspect of American viola playing.

Murrath explains:  “Coordination technique is about a lot of things, but a major aspect is how, at any point of the bow that you're playing, you are readjusting your body to be as free and relaxed as possible. There is a sort of constant adjustment and readjustment to create as much flexibility in playing, and that turns into resonance, because if our body is loose, it allows use to better control the instrument, as well as having the vibrations of the sound to come out of the instrument, even through our body.”

Tuttle’s legacy is immense: “You look everywhere,” Murrath says, “and there's a very sizable portion of professional violists who studied with Karen Tuttle. Of course, nowadays, it has become more about violists studying with Tuttle's former students. That is where Kim Kashkashian comes in.”

Murrath had one lesson with Tuttle, but began studying with Kashkashian in 2006. “She’s said that when I came to her, a couple of things were going on,” Murrath remembers. “The first one was that I was very tense, and the second one was that sound was not my priority. I was very tense at the time, and I truly didn’t know how to loosen up, and so she kind of made me do a reset on how I play, which was hard.”

But Murrath was a dedicated student, even if the going was slow when he began. “At first, I could not play: it's like learning to walk in a different way, learning to write with another hand. It really felt quite difficult. But Kim did it in a way that was one with the music, it made it easier to connect what my body was doing with the sound coming out of the instrument, and the musical intentions. She always referred back to what was happening in the music: You use your body in a certain way, but it is to reflect actually what is happening harmonically or rhythmically on the score. And she connected this with vocalising, how to sing a certain phrase with my voice and then imitate it with the same sort of total coordination.”

Murrath became Kashkashian’s teaching assistant at one point, and, by applying what she’d taught him, was able to internalize her techniques further after working with other students on them. “It made a huge impact on my playing,” he said. “I don't know if, today, my playing is as totally focused on coordination as it was maybe 10 years ago, but certainly with teaching, I am very, very focused on it, I do really try to incorporate those elements.”

“Every student is a lock,” Murrath continues, “and every lock is different. As a teacher, you have to find the key to unlock every different lock. And that’s what Karen and Kim’s contributions were to all of these teachers descended from those traditions, including myself. We have a new set of keys to help unlock the best in our students.”

Learn more about studying String and Piano Chamber Music or Viola at SFCM.