Connection to Musical Greatness

It has been said that every person in the world is within six degrees of separation from any other person, i.e. a chain of acquaintances at most six people long connects you to every person on the planet. I am, for example, only two degrees from Leopold Stokowski, and three from Glenn Gould. The story goes something like this.

The last year and a half of college, from the fall of 1994 until February of 1996, I lived in a stately turn of the century mansion in what used to be the posh, luxurious area of Rochester, NY. Located two doors down from the George Eastman House, apparently it had once been owned by a friend of the Eastman family. At some point it was converted into apartments, and the stables made into garages. I had the attic – a barely livable but wonderfully distinctive collection of triangles under the eaves of the sharply pitched roof. The superintendent of the building was one David Fetler, an unassuming old man, stooped and wrinkled but surprisingly energetic and agile for his age, with a look of purposeful seriousness on his face. He spoke a perfect, idiomatic American English, but with a slight accent that I could never place. The same will be said of me when I am his age, I suppose. He did light maintenance – raking the leaves, that sort of thing – arranged for hired guns to do more serious work like plumbing, and regularly drove off in the direction of downtown in his blue Honda. He lived alone in a half-basement unit with a separate entrance. Sometimes, walking by the window of his apartment, I would glance inside, almost involuntarily. If his curtains were open, I could see a console piano with piles of sheet music scattered on top.

J. and I had started dating in the summer of '94, shortly before I moved into the attic apartment. We were shy, awkward, inexperienced and utterly clueless about how a relationship between two 21-year-old college students should be conducted. This was Rochester, however, the home of the Eastman School of music, among other places, and J. was an active and accomplished French horn player, a part-time student at Eastman, and a classical DJ on WRUR when we met. Needless to say, we indulged our natural predilections and, not realizing we were probably hiding emotionally from ourselves and each other, wallowed in the endless supply of free and cheap concerts and other musical events the city had to offer. Countless dates were spent listening to music and talking about it afterwards at Tivoli, a faux-Italian cafe on Monroe Avenue that stayed open mercifully late for the few nightowls eeking out drops of after-hours life from what was essentially, music scene notwithstanding, a small steel belt city on life support. One evening, we found ourselves at a concert by the Rochester Chamber Orchestra that played at the time (and still does, I believe) at the Hochstein School, a converted Romanesque church on the Western edge of downtown with unbelievable acoustics. Well, who steps up to the conductor's podium but David Fetler, my building's superintendent. Shocked, we turn our programs to the conductor's bio page.

Born in Riga, Latvia, he moved to the US at the age of twelve (perfect explanation for the accent – twelve was the age at which I started speaking English), received a degree from Julliard, taught at Eastman and served as assistant conductor to Leopold Stokowski! After that concert, I started to address him as Dr. Fetler (he didn't object) and cautiously started to try to engage him and ask him about his musical past. He was polite, but not particularly forthcoming, and as socially awkward as I was at the time, I am sure I did a terrible job of it myself. I regret it now – Dr. Fetler seemed like a perfect example of a regular guy with a fascinating past full of stories. The kind of personage you meet all the time in movies and books but all too rarely in real life. I wish I found a way to get to know him. My biggest coup was recommending two of J.'s musician friends for an amateur orchestra he conducted at a local festival in the summer of '95. He took both, and thanked me for helping him fill out his wind section. And how does Glenn Gould fit into all of this? Gould recorded with Stokowski towards the end of the latter's career, and was a lifelong fan and admirer.