Meanwhile, it's violins on video - violinist Pinchas Zuckerman uses videoconferencing technique to instruct his Manhattan School of Music students while he is on world tour

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 21, 1994 | by Emily Cary

Through videoconferences, a master violinist can instruct his students while on tour -- and bring great music to people who can't come to the concert hall.

Pinchas Zukerman, master of the violin and viola and conductor of the sublime English Chamber Orchestra, is celebrating 25 years with the ensemble with a world tour that will keep him away from New York for three months. While his admiring public welcomes the opportunity to hear him perform live, his talented students at the Manhattan School of Music suffer from the absence of their mentor.

Or so one would think. The fact is, Zukerman communes with them daily, thanks to the Radiance Videoconferencing System he uses whenever he travels.

"This is an ideal system to bring people together and break barriers," he says, explaining that what began as a project to create a CD-ROM accidentally led him to discover the potential for long-distance teaching. Although similar systems have been used many years for videoconferencing, Zukerman is the first to focus on its use in music. A huge screen allows the teacher and student to see each other life size in real time.

"For instance, I can see a student's fingering up close, analyze the problems and then send him fingerings and bowings with live graphics," says Zukerman. "This provides the student with ability for follow-up. It's not just a onetime thing because the lesson can be reviewed when it's over, and in several weeks I can come back and see if and how his playing has improved."

Besides observing his students' techniques, Zukerman can keep on top of their physical well-being and help them eliminate performance anxiety. "Learning to play properly is a gradual, painstaking process that can be helped through video monitoring," says Zukerman. "We start kids today at 16, 17 or 18 years who have played Paganini and everything else, but at that age the body works three or four times faster than it should, and what we're doing is teaching them to hold it back. No matter how talented they are and what experience they've had, they must learn to redirect the hands, but it's really the brain we're talking about. We have to take them right back from the start, and this takes about six to eight months.

"It's a very physical thing that we do," he continues. "We get a lot of pain and we have to release pain by working the muscles. People in tennis and other sports do that automatically, but musicians have to learn the techniques, to use a treadmill to build up muscle and to take vitamin supplements. That's very important."

Zukerman's violin and viola students are not the only ones benefiting from his teaching by videoconferencing. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and its branches in Florida and Arizona regularly call on him to train their physicians. "I might play Beethoven sonatas for an hour, and then we can talk about the use of music to enhance the lives of the doctors and their patients," he says. "I can be anywhere in the world and play a recital for the doctors as scheduled."

But Zukerman would like to use the system to benefit others besides the privileged and the talented. He advocates "electronic subscription" programs that would bring live performances to people who live in rural communities or reside in senior citizen homes, for example. "We're not ever going to take people away from live performances," he says. "We will, however, enhance the ability of many to attend a concert even though they cannot financially or physically be present."

Ironically, images on the screen may prove more intimate than actual presence in a music hall. "People will finally understand that when I stand on stage and work my tail off, I'm the same kind of human being as that person listening, and I have pains in my back and in my arms, just as they do," he says. "I can talk to them about the music right after I finish playing. It's not just blood and sweat on the stage. There's a real barrier between performers and audience that can be broken by this system."

Many of Zukerman's foreign students use his studio equipment to communicate with their families in Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. "It's invaluable in so many ways," he says. "Already, the state of Georgia has 150 units in rural areas that are used for teaching isolated children, and the Foreign Office in Israel has been using this system for several months for negotiations."

Will people accept the idea of attending live concerts in small groups seated before a video screen? "As Sol Hurok used to say, `If people don't want to come, you can't stop them.' If people don't want to learn, you can't stop them, but I believe there are enough out there who will like what they see well enough to make this concept the greatest advance in live programming."