By Barbara L. Stand

Education has at last become the focus of our national attention, and Musical America is proud to present its first-ever Educator of the Year award to a teacher who, for over 50 years, has had a profound influence over literally hundreds of students.

Dorothy DeLay is both the first woman and the first American to have entered a previously all-male stronghold and be ranked among the world's great violin pedagogues. Sarah Chang, Kennedy, Cho-Liang Lin, Robert McDuffie, Midori, Shlomo Mintz, Itzhak Perlman, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Gil Shaham, and a host of others all spent their musical childhoods under the watchful eye of this plump, motherly woman. DeLay has trained concertmasters of major orchestras all over the world, as well as numerous chamber musicians, orchestra players, and prominent teacher/performers. Isaac Stern has called her "the most effective violin teacher in the world" and frequently joins forces with her in helping to develop her most up-and-coming protégés. She has been described by one of New York's top managers as someone whose word can make or break a career.

DeLay was born in 1917 in the tiny cattle town of Medicine Lodge, Kansas. The eldest of three sisters, she comes from a family of teachers and preachers and is a direct descendent of Thomas J. Hooker (1586-1647), a Puritan clergyman and the chief founder of Hartford, Connecticut. You can't get much more American than that, unless it is to receive the National Medal of Arts, as she did from President Clinton in 1994. In spite of growing up in a strict, authoritarian atmosphere, DeLay became a skeptic and a questioner early on. She remembers being ejected from Sunday school at the age of 5 for refusing to believe that Jonah had been swallowed by a whale-it just didn't make sense. DeLay was reading at the age of 3, was playing the violin at 4, and gave her first public performance in the local church when she was 5. Her precocity (she was later found to have an I.Q. of 180) was deliberately ignored by the family, presumably to avoid the sin of pride-both theirs and hers.

Now 83, DeLay shows little sign of slowing down, although she has had to resort to a wheelchair and crutches. She continues to teach at The Juilliard School, as she has since 1948, and at the Aspen School of Music, where she has been since 1971. She also flies regularly to the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where she is on the faculty, and makes forays to various parts of the world, particularly the Far East, to give master classes.

What is it that sets DeLay apart from other teachers and explains her success? While her students are expected to have a high degree of technical facility-a basic requirement for entrance to Juilliard, which is not in the business of teaching beginners-and to put in a minimum of five hours of practicing per day by the time they are in their teens, DeLay has no method to offer, no rules to be obeyed. What she does have is what she describes as an approach, which differs from one student to the next, and which may have its origins in the spirit that got her expelled from Sunday school: Don't be afraid to question everything. Be doggedly persistent in looking for your own answers.

Watching DeLay teach, as I did for a number of years, was initially mystifying. No instructions were handed down. No direct criticisms were offered. Instead, lessons seemed to consist almost entirely of questions: Can you see a better way to make a transition to the next theme? Do you think the phrase would sound better if you took more time with the down-bow? What do you think Beethoven had in mind in this section? It took some months to realize what she was up to. DeLay was teaching her kids how to think for themselves, and to gain confidence from their ability to do so, and she was doing it in a way that avoided any hint of intimidation.

DeLay has been denounced by critics for her lack of prescriptive "method," and they account for her success by claiming that she takes on only the cream of the crop. She has also been accused of turning out mindless automatons with no individuality-although how one could fail to differentiate between, say, the patrician elegance of Cho-Liang Lin's playing with the fiery tempestuousness of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's, is difficult to see. Perhaps the most familiar criticism, with reason, concerns a phenomenon her students refer to as "Being DeLayed," which means sometimes waiting several hours for a scheduled lesson.

How does DeLay see the future for all the talent pouring out of Juilliard into a world of limited performing opportunities? "I think all of them have to do two things," she says. "One, they have to understand as much as possible about what is happening to music electronically. Who is going to be making the sounds? Who will be recording on whatever format comes after CDs? How will the Internet be used? Two, all of them have to study carefully what's happening to live music in varying communities. We now have a required course at Juilliard in which the students learn first hand the mechanics of putting together a concert, including finding a space and getting an audience. That's one area where they can all make a contribution."

Sarah Chang, who started studying with DeLay at the age of 5, and continues to keep in close touch with her, summed up her feelings for her former teacher in words that speak for many of DeLay's students. "She has been in many roles in my life, and she has always been great. First and foremost as a teacher, but there is so much more to her, so much more to learn from her, because she has made such a success of her life in every way."

Barbara L. Sand, founding editor of Chamber Music magazine, is a regular contributor to The Strad and also writes for other music journals including BBC Music Magazine and the American Record Guide. Her book Teaching Genius-Dorothy DeLay and the Making of a Musician (Amadeus Press) was published in May 2000.