 Hello everybody, my name is Spott and I was asked to meet with this gentleman Mark Cooley here and ask him a few questions about his life and playing the viola. And I'm very happy that I was asked because I'm a former viola player myself and this is a real viola player. So anyway Mark, it's a pleasure to meet you, pleasure to be here and talking to you since we have a common interest and well let's get started. You've had a pretty interesting life, you've played with a number of people both in the classical realm and in the popular music realm, you've done a lot of teaching, instrument building and repair and even photography, which is very impressive. It all had to have some place to start and from looking over the notes that I got, it looked like you started from a state of what I call emotional distress, things were against you and somehow you overcame that. What can you say about that? Well I grew up in a small town, rural town in far northwestern Illinois and even for a small rural town, we were a very poor family and being a small town, it was rough for me. I came from a violent family upbringing and that violence spilled over into the way I was treated by my classmates because my father actually physically abused me in public and that gave all the other kids the kind of the license to do whatever they wanted. So it was difficult for me but I was very lucky there were several people that, adults that saw the situation that I was in and helped me out tremendously. There were several teachers, one that really encouraged me to learn about my Irish heritage and one that my violin teacher who got me at a very early age into teaching and there were several other people in the small town that got me into being socialized a little bit more. One was the postmaster of the small post office in our town. She encouraged me to come to different things that she had organized like t-shirt painting and things like that that weren't really of interest to me but got me to mingle with other people and not be the loner that I was and it got me into an area where I didn't have to be afraid of people and another person in that early part of my life was the minister of the church that I started going to. He was very impressed by the fact that I was so interested in learning that at one point he was training me, helping me to learn, to prepare to go into the ministry, to go to the church-related college, the college that was related to the denomination, the church that I belong to. Then there was also a local judge that had a large property across from where we lived. He was a big influence because he taught me to take care of the property that he had there. Part of the property was groomed and he had flowers and trees and he taught me a lot about landscaping and then when it came when I got into the music he actually gave me money to go to music camps in the summer and without that I would have not I think made that step from just being a music student up to being a serious music student. So all of those people and there are others but those are the main ones that really made a huge difference of me going from what could have been a very violent and criminally based life into a life where I sought out to be more educated and learn things and to want to learn things and I directly attribute my desire to learn to those people. And how old were you when, let's say there was the first, might have been the first spark, some influence that made you think, hey, I can take my own life and my hands here approximately. Yeah, that's not hard for me. It was actually, this is a story I tell a lot of people, especially my students. I didn't get started playing until a very late age and one hot summer afternoon I was, we were outside, as we usually were, just playing at the age of 13. I was at 12 at that time and I came in to get a drink of water or something and the television was on as it usually was in our house and it was back in the old days on Sunday afternoons before they had all the sports that they do and they just put on whatever they could find to put on the small rural television stations. And there was a videotape of a man playing the violin and actually at that type it would have been a kinescope but it was David Oystrock who was one of the great Russian players studied with Leopold Auer, the same teacher that Heifetz and Milstein studied with. Actually Milstein and Oystrock didn't study directly with Auer, they studied with his assistants. But when I saw Oystrock on television and saw that he was making this beautiful, beautiful sound with this small wooden instrument it just, it made such an impression on me that I wanted to play the violin from that day on and I have always, even from an earlier age than that I always was intrigued with wood and wooden objects and the grains of wood and knowing, it was just something that fascinated me and to know that you could take different woods and make them into this basically small box and get this beautiful and large sound really intrigued me but it took me quite a long time to badger my parents into allowing me to take music lessons. It wasn't until I was 13 that and in the middle of the school year that I finally wore them down and was able to start taking music lessons. Fascinating, that's a pretty good story. Do you remember after you started taking music lessons and got your hands on a violin? Violin is your first instrument, correct? Violin is my first instrument. You picked the tough one, not like guitar or drums. Do you remember the first tune you learned? Yeah, it was, as a matter of fact, yeah, it's another story that, as I said, I started in the second semester and they were giving a winter concert and I had only played for a few weeks and for some reason the teacher decided that I had made enough progress that he was going to stick me on this concert, playing twinkle twinkle little star and that was my first piece that I really learned because I was forced to learn it in a very short period of time and get it ready to play. That was my first solo also, so not that long after I started playing, I was playing my first solo which frightened me to death but it got me starting and started wanting to be a soloist. So that's the first piece that I played. So in your case it wasn't ego deflating, it was more ego supporting? Yes, it showed me that, yes, I can do this and it, like all musicians, it could have gone better but I felt that it went well at that age and it encouraged me, it certainly wasn't a discouraging event in my life. I was the only person to play a solo on that concert so it was to me an honor and again it terrified me because it felt like a big burden before but afterward it's kind of like backpacking another thing that I love to do. At the time when you're doing it, it seems like, why am I doing this? Once you're through it you think about, wow, that was amazing, I'm so glad I did that and that is kind of the experience that I had in my first experience with performing all by myself in public. And then from there, did you go into more, well you've worked with a number of violin teachers and apparently you even started teaching at a young age as well. So at that point you were developing a repertoire. Is there any way this question could be like what kind of repertoire and with what teachers were you working and what kinds of things were you learning? That's a very good question. People, when they know how old I am and they tell them how long I've been teaching, they usually sit down and try to figure out the math and they say that really doesn't add up. That means you would have started teaching when you were 14 or 15 years old and I said yeah. And the reason for that is that the teacher that I was talking about earlier saw that I was serious about playing and learning and he had a very large, after school he taught a very large class, a Suzuki class which is a method of teaching and he had over 40 students in this class. So what he did was he would use me to tune all these children and as he would be in the podium teaching he would have me go around and correct positions, hand positions, arm positions, bowing and if I heard somebody playing incorrectly to try to get them to describe to them what they needed to be doing to be playing in tune and that's how I basically learned how to teach was by being a teaching assistant and that's why at that early age it wasn't long after being his teaching assistant that there were other students that needed someone to help them and there were other private teachers in the area so I started giving private lessons very soon after I was an assistant teacher and that's how I got started so early and I've taught for ever since and the numbers have gone up but it's usually had, through all the years had been pretty consistently 20 to 40 students somewhere in there, private students So when you started teaching at what age about 15? 15, yeah That's amazing Were you teaching mostly people your own age or children? Mostly Did you ever have to teach adults? It varied, early on it was students my own age then it got to be younger and younger students until I was teaching beginners and then once I graduated from high school and went on to college then I had the whole range I had all the way from very young students to I think the oldest student that I started on violin was 84 and she actually did an excellent job for the two years that I had her she made very good progress so I've had the whole range of students and students from all classes of life with all kinds of, all the way from kids that could be categorized as geniuses to kids that had learning challenges and that was one of the things that helped me to learn that you have to adjust your teaching style to each student you can't just have one cut and dried way of teaching it varies from student to student Yeah there's no one size fits all Exactly Yeah So I was going to ask you something but from what you've said there's probably no particular age that you've found that makes a better student No not really It's a matter of interest and desire Yes definitely that's the big thing Interest and it helps a lot the only thing that really is a big advantage is if it is a student a younger student that has had siblings I've had more times than you might think I've had students where I've had three students from the same family and the first, you can always tell that there's a big difference between how difficult it is for the first student the first member of the family to get started and by the time you get to the third member of the family it's so much easier because they've been exposed and some of them actually had attended the other family members' lessons just because they were dropped off at the same time and they would have their lessons sequentially and so you'd just go from one and the other one would study while the other was having their lesson and just being there they would absorb a lot and then hearing their other siblings' practice that I think is probably the biggest advantage most of the other things that are passed off as quick starts and ways to help students get going fast I found are dubious at best the only one that I've really found that is almost always useful is having a sibling that plays Was there any particular technique or approach you found yourself relying on with most students? I use basically what would be called the traditional way of teaching which is different than say the Suzuki system which was teaching about rote and having the students play back what they hear the teacher play that tends in my opinion that tends to be too rigid and the students tend to miss a lot of things about theory and a lot of the flanner points and with the way that I teach you just basically sit down with a student you give them music to play and you play along with them and then you have them play it back and then you analyze what they do and you point out to them what needs to be corrected and you have them correct that and one of the things that I always tell my students is that especially in a market like Sheboygan where a lot of the students are not going to go on to be soloists or even play in major symphonies I've always told my students that if I don't teach you anything else I want to teach you analytical skills how to analyze because that's really what practicing is about and if you can analyze and in your practicing you can utilize that in whatever you go into and you can use it in math, you can use it in theater you can use it so you can use those analytical skills in every other field that you're going to go into and that is I think one of the most overlooked advantage of giving your child music lessons that's one of the things that they learn is how to analyze teach them to think around the notes and through the notes When did the viola come in? The viola actually came in very quickly after the violin I loved the lower sound and the deeper, more soulful sound that a viola gets and so I will be playing a recital soon and I'm playing a viola piece, a viola concerto and there are the Telemann, a G major viola concerto and I actually learned to play viola with that piece I took that piece and I taught myself how to learn because the viola, most people don't realize this is actually in a different clef it's written in the alto clef and not very many instruments use that clef so you have to learn how to read a different clef to play the viola and as a matter of fact the viola is referred to in some languages as alto in a lot of parts when they hand out the parts on the top the viola will be written alto so it is considered an alto instrument, the alto instrument of the string section and so I took this Telemann concerto and I taught myself how to read the clef and then I played both instruments as a matter of fact I think my first paid gigs were on viola rather than violin and when I got into college I played kind of on the side and my teachers said as long as you play that well you might as well take a double major and so I had a double major in both violin and viola which adds a lot of practice time and a lot of performing time so I had to split the time you'd have to give double the number of recitals and because I would usually be the concertmaster of the orchestra I would spend a semester being concertmaster and then I would spend a semester being principal viola and it would go back and forth and it also means when you're doing your chamber music in a string quartet I would play violin one semester I would be playing violin or in some semester I would be in two ensembles I would be playing violin in one and viola in another so it means a lot more playing and it's not something that's done a lot a lot of people will play both instruments but not very many people get a major on both instruments in performance so you went from you did classical work and then you also did work in the pop field and this is a question I wanted to ask you one of the people you worked with was Burt Bacharach and his first big break was composing the theme music in the movie The Blob which most people don't know it's just a crazy piece of music what was, since we're at the point where you started making money what was your first break in making money or being able to support yourself from playing well that's hard to say because I was already making money playing in high school playing for, when you're a freelance player and you make your living as a freelance player you have to do a lot of weddings and funerals and bar mitzvahs and you name it and so I got, I was already doing a lot of that type of work I think when I joined the Musicians Union is really the big leap because that's when, because major symphony players are tied up with symphony jobs so the freelancers in the Union get to do the tours or the shows with the pop players more frequently than the full-time symphony players and that's really what got me into making where you could make a living is that and when I started to get principal concertmaster positions with community orchestras did you prefer one world over the other or did it matter? no it didn't really matter the pop music was fun because it usually wasn't difficult and the audiences were enthusiastic it was fun to do but your first love of course is always the classical I always loved and being, you know, playing concertmaster or doing one of the things that I love I suppose if I had to pick one of the things that I really love to do the most is play concertmaster for musicals because you get these solos all the time that are kind of built for me the kind of playing that I do is is a ringer which is someone that comes into a community orchestra for the last rehearsal and the concert doesn't go for all six or eight rehearsals you come in and they expect you to know your part and they expect you to help drag the weaker players through and as a ringer you learn to be very they have a big sound to be able to to back off when you need to or bring a play out when you need to and that's what you need to do when you're the concertmaster in a pit orchestra or doing musicals would be a pit orchestra and when you get some incredibly beautiful solos in musicals a very little known musical I always get confused with carousel it's not carousel it's the other one love makes the world go round anyhow it has a beautiful duet between the lead male and female with the violin solo tied in and it's one of the most it's right in there with any of the beautiful operatic solos that there are like that so there are a lot of rewarding very rewarding things in doing musicals for violinists definitely are I was noticing that a couple of the more pop artists you played with there was Barry White and Tom Jones which are two of my favorite over the top dramatic performers and that's I just love that but also with the Milwaukee Ballet the Jof Ballet which is based in New York Bireside Theater concertmaster for the Manitowoc Symphony Orchestra locally that's a lot of work you've done but I want to talk about your instrument here this instrument apparently was built roughly around the 1820s and it's a very rare instrument and tell me about that this instrument was built by a man who was considered the second best French violin maker of all times his name was Charles Gann and spelled G-A-N-D and he was the instrument maker for Napoleon and after Napoleon was deposed and even after Napoleon died he was still kept on as the official court instrument maker so he never really made instruments that were for sale he made instruments strictly or almost strictly there may have been a few instruments that were made for individuals but he was strictly there to make new instruments to replace the old instruments in the French Royal Orchestra and the only other duet he had was to make a violin every year for the competition for the Royal Conservatory and then the first prize was a violin made by Charles Gann and this is the only viola known to exist that was made by Charles Gann the rest have been lost throughout history and it has a lot of distinguishing characteristics that anyone that's familiar with his work would recognize right away so the way you distinguish it from whether it was made before or after Napoleon died is that this has a label that says made for the orchestra of the king which would have been Louis the 17th who was a figurehead and the ones before that had a label that said made for the orchestra of the emperor which of course would have been emperor Napoleon so e-bayers need to know that e-bayers yeah definitely if they find one it seems that you're going to be parting with the instrument yes because of my health I'm no longer able to play viola I was supposed to give up playing viola ten years ago but let's say I went against medical advice and have continued to play now it is to the point where I it is because it is the physically most demanding instrument in the orchestra to play it is getting to be too difficult for me to play so this concert that I'm giving will be the last time that I play it and it will be going to be appraised and then it will be going eventually on auction that's it's sad to see the instrument go yes that's very sad especially an instrument that was in the hands of someone who really really knew how to play it as I heard you play and as a matter of fact I think maybe maybe we should, I'd like to hear you play a little bit I think that would be wonderful please to do that and this piece that I'm going to be playing is part of a cello suite that Bach wrote and people don't realize this but Bach was an avid violist and one of the manuscripts for these were written for cello actually says written for alto viola cello which is kind of suspicious because it leads me to believe that he actually wrote them on the viola and knowing cello he then wrote them out for cello but I suspect that he had quite a good time playing these since they're very well suited for the viola this is the prelude to the first Bach suite for cello fine instrument in the hands of a fine player now will that be one of the pieces you will be playing Sunday? no that will not it may be an encore but it might it's not one that's scheduled to be playing I'm lucky enough to have a chamber orchestra to accompany me which is very very humbling that my friends were willing to get together and some of these people are professionals and willing to get together and put on a concert back play accompaniment for me and it will be your last performance and probably my last performance probably my last playing performance so I'm very honored that they're willing to do it for me you know most of my most of my music was done more like the rock and jazz field but I've always loved classical and knew quite a few classical players when I was learning and being in bands and et cetera I came to the decision one day that the difference between rock and classical players is that classical players are paid when they get paid to play music and rock musicians when they're paid are paid to load and unload their equipment basically now I know that you had a lot of experience in the pop field and in the classical field as we're wrapping this up are there any really amazing funny or noteworthy stories you have about some experience performing in either of those realms oh yeah there are many I do have if I've got time there are two in the pop field there the ones that stand out the most for me one has to do with the Packers and it was the year after they won the Super Bowl and we were working with we were doing the back rack and I was sitting actually closer to him when he was playing the electric piano when was this did they win the 97 so it would have been 98 and during the break of the rehearsal his assistant came onto the stage with a shopping bag and Mr. Backrack got all excited and looked like a child in a candy store and he's looking at all these things in this bag and it turns out that this concert was partially sponsored by the Packers and the coach I forget his first name now Mr. Holmgren was in the audience and he brought a whole bag of autographed items to Bert Backrack so it was interesting to see this famous man Bert Backrack one of the most famous pop writers of all time so excited about getting this bag of autographed Bret Farr materials he's from California though you know that's like so that was one of them as far as really in the pop field the performers that stood out the most to me was Smokey Robinson was a real honor he was one of the most professional one of the most incredibly generous men that I have ever worked with and is just an expert at working the crowd getting the crowd to get into the music and once he gets warmed up he still sounds like the Smokey Robinson he was so fun to be able to look up from the music and see Smokey Robinson standing ten feet away and he took the time after the performance to stop and say thank you to every orchestra member which is very rare he's just an absolutely wonderful man I've always felt that his song writing abilities were rather underrated I think that if you listen really listen to his work I think that his work has a lot in common with Hank Williams it seems that they're writing from a lot of the same feelings anyway you said that you might have had some story there are all kinds of odd things that happen going back into the classical field I used to play in an orchestra that used to be the music under the stars orchestra in Milwaukee and it was a tradition for this orchestra to play in Washington Park every summer and they had huge crowds and one summer we did a show with a woman that was doing an Edith Piaf tribute and the ambassador from France was there and we were getting ready to play and in his honor we not only played the national anthem as we always did before each concert but we also played the French national anthem and just as we started to play a big gust of wind came up and blew my music off of the stand and this was a good 20 yards away the music blew directly into the lap of the ambassador from France and the odds of that happening are what are the odds of that happening during the intermission he brought his music back and gave it to the stage manager and I got the music back so it was things like that that you remember things that stick with you but your music blew away so what did you do I looked over the shoulder of the person in front of me basically yes and it surprises people that when I talk about what are the first things you teach your students one of the first things when I know that they're going into an orchestra is how to fake because you're not going to be able to play every note you can't it's physically impossible so you have to know that when you get off if you get off how to look like you're with everybody else and how to get back in with everybody else is one of the major skills you have to know whether you're a violist or a cellist is how to fake it's a very important skill it's one of the purposes of an orchestra yeah exactly okay well this has been great talking to you and I'm just going to conclude by saying that it's it's really a thrill to see this instrument to hear this instrument to meet you to hear you playing it to watch you play it it's making me want to go back home and get mine out of the case even though it's broken now and do something with it you know it's you're right I should and I've always felt that it was a little it was kind of a shame how most people really don't understand the viola there's a lot of people who think that oh the violin they look at you and they say oh he's playing a violin but there's not unfortunately there's not a big vocabulary for it or repertoire for it which is fortunately changing you and I both know that and I just hope that if nothing else there might be a musician a budding musician out there watching this thinking hey that might be the instrument for me and I think that would be the best outcome of this that and if there are any budding composers that would like to write some music for you know more music for the viola solo that would be also something that I would hope because there definitely needs to be even more music written for the such a beautiful sounding instrument it really does need the repertoire so ok well Mark this has been a pleasure I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I want to thank everybody for joining us today and I'll just leave you with three words practice, practice, practice