Joel Krosnick
Cello and Chamber Music Faculty

New Haven, Conn., native Joel Krosnick earned a B.A. in English literature and music from Columbia College. He was a professor at the University of Iowa, University of Massachusetts, and California Institute of the Arts before joining the Juilliard String Quartet and the School's faculty in 1974.

Joel Krosnick enjoying a beer in Dusseldorf in July 2004.

What are the most striking differences between Juilliard now and when you first started teaching here?

When I first taught at Juilliard, we of the J.S.Q. taught only string quartets—six groups a year. After Joseph Polisi became our president, he expressed a desire that we teach our instruments also. Since then, I have become intensely involved in the lives of many wonderful young cellists, which has radically changed my life at Juilliard, resulting in many more hours spent at School, with incredible fulfillment, pleasure, and exhaustion.

How has your teaching changed over the years?

When I started at the University of Iowa at age 22, I had little experience in either understanding how it was I played or how I might help someone else play. But I took the students into my own desire to grow as a cellist and artist, and went from thinking about my own work to thinking about theirs—and back and forth, again and again. Slowly, at UMass and CalArts, I began to understand more about my own struggles to improve and grow, and simultaneously more about how to help others. By the time I began to teach the cello at Juilliard, I knew that I could affect my own playing with careful thought and work, and that I could begin to transfer this knowledge to others who were also seeking to overcome many of the same difficulties I had struggled with.

Who was the teacher or mentor who most inspired you?

I studied with Luigi Silva (late of the Juilliard faculty, though I studied with him growing up in New Haven, when he taught at Yale); his thoughtful clarity about all manner of cellistic and musical concerns affects my own thinking to this day. My predecessor in the Juilliard Quartet, Claus Adam, gave me great help and encouragement at a very important time of my life. But perhaps the one mentor without whom I cannot believe that I would be a cellist is the pianist, conductor, and great musician Jens Nygaard. Jens had the gift of being able to understand in brilliant clarity and detail how to play the instrument (which he did not play) with utmost ease, comfort, and technical brilliance. With great patience, he helped me at a time when my early gifts had become clouded over with difficulties. He believed in my gifts and never let me give up.

What's the most embarrassing moment you've had as a performer?

One evening, at a Juilliard Quartet concert in New Haven, I broke a C string. The backstage area in Sprague Hall had little light; as I unwrapped the new package for a C string, I noticed that the string tuned very strangely. But I was in a hurry, and tuned it up as well as I could, then went back onstage. As we played the Berg Opus 3, I realized that the package, clearly marked as a C string, had in fact contained a G string. The flabby sound it produced when tuned down to a C instead of a G was embarrassing and frightening. At intermission, I managed to find a young cellist who gave me a proper C string.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

In the process of helping my wife Dinah to raise two wonderful children, I discovered a part of myself that surprised me. I played around with markers and paper with my kids, drawing fantasy animals that had the wrong number of eyes, noses, or legs; an elephant-like face might be adorned with wings, etc. We spent hours together, drawing all manner of these funny animals. Well, my son and daughter grew up, and I didn't! I have gotten more and more involved and (I think) sophisticated in drawing lavishly colored, abstract faces and shapes, and it has become a part of my life I could not be without. Many of the drawings adorn the walls of our home, and several are in the Juilliard Quartet studio; I have given them to friends, who seem to enjoy them. When I see some of them, I am thoroughly surprised that this stuff is coming from me.

If you weren't in the career you are in, what would you be doing?

My first grown-up hobby was cooking. I discovered that it was fun, a totally different form of energy from playing the cello and a very valuable social tool. (As a friend of mine, who gave me my first cookbook, said: "People will always come and eat your food!") Over the years, I specialized in different sorts of cooking: Italian, French, and especially Asian dishes. I am always very proud to cook feasts for my students a couple of times each year, and share with them the fact that there is more to life than playing the cello, no matter how marvelous that is. So, if I weren't a cellist, I would be a chef; at one point in my late 20s or early 30s, I did think about that.