Interview with Phillip Ruder, former violinist with the Argenta Trio

Conducted by Forrest Hartman

Name: Phillip Ruder

Age: 73

City of Residence: Bend, OR

Years with Argenta: 1994-2007

Forrest: Where did you grow up?

Phillip: Chicago.

Forrest: Did you have an interest in music as a boy?

Phillip: Oh yes. Like many violinists who made a career out of it, I started very young. I was 5 years old. I lived in an inner-city neighborhood in Chicago, and there was a violin teacher at the corner, above a bowling alley. My mom just took me one day. His name was Mr. Glass. She took me upstairs to his little studio, and that’s where I had my first lesson.

Forrest: Had you expressed an interest in playing violin specifically?

Phillip: No. I don’t think I did. I think it was pretty much my mom’s idea. It was in her mind that this was one thing that might possibly prove to be a life-changer for me. I’m from a Jewish background… and my mom and dad were not from an educated background. They were wonderful people, but they had very modest means and education. In the Jewish culture – this was 1943-44 – if you wanted your son to excel, you tried to make him become a doctor, a lawyer or a musician. And she chose, for me, violin.

Forrest: It’s interesting. I talked to another musician who said something similar. Today, music seems to be one of the things parents steer their children away from because it’s such a tough career. Were things different when you were growing up?

Phillip: It was always a difficult, challenging career, but somehow the Jewish people from that generation really admired some of these world-class musicians, like Heifetz and Rubinstein. They were Jewish, and it was a way out of the ghetto, to put it bluntly. A lot of those great, Jewish musicians from that era were also from modest backgrounds and just excelled with their talent and music. They made a wonderful life for themselves. So, people like my parents, like my mom, just transposed that success story to their own kids and hoped that it would work for them as well.  

Forrest: Considering all that’s happened, you must be grateful to her now.

Phillip: Yes. I am. They showered me with love and gave me that opportunity. Although, I still remember times when I wanted to play ball and do things after school that most kids did with sports. I always was interested in baseball and sports. So, I had to fight her, I’m sure, on a number of occasions about whether to practice or not. But, for some reason, I did persevere in practicing and pursuing music, and it was really due to her determination to start with.

Forrest: She must have been very proud to see the career that you have built.

Phillip: Oh yes. She was very proud. I remember, as a kid, going through an airport with her, and I was carrying my violin and so forth. She would, at the drop of a coin, talk with a stranger saying, “My little boy plays violin. You should hear him play. I’m so proud of him.” She was that kind of personality. She didn’t hesitate to brag.

Forrest: You talked about wanting to play ball and things. We’re you able to do that or did music take too much time?

Phillip: I was able, occasionally, to play ball, but I never played any organized things. In those days, I don’t think there was Little League, but there were school teams and pickup games in the schoolyard and so forth after school. It was only on rare occasions that I could do that. It was mainly at recess that I could play. Again, I went to an inner-city grammar school, and during recess we’d play ball in the schoolyard. That’s what most of my memories are of sports; playing during recess when I had the opportunity to do so. And, I’d go to the schoolyard by myself and throw the ball against the wall on a weekend or something. So, I was persistent in my own way.

Forrest: Was there a point with music where things really clicked and you decided, “I’m going to make a career out of this”?

Phillip: Yes. When I was 12, I won a competition to solo with the Chicago Symphony and that was, I think, a turning point. I did play with Chicago Symphony, a Mozart concerto. I always worked fairly hard and went through high school, and it was just a foregone conclusion in my mind that music was going to be something I would pursue as a career.

Forrest: It must have been quite an experience playing with the Chicago Symphony at age 12.

Phillip: Yes. I still remember it pretty clearly. My teacher was in the orchestra in the first violin section. I still remember playing, and all the kids from school came to hear me play. It was in Orchestra Hall on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. It’s something I’ve always remembered, no question about it.

Forrest: Did any of the musicians or the conductor give you encouragement either before or after?

Phillip: Yes. They did. I remember one of my teacher’s friends who actually lived in my neighborhood in Chicago was very supportive and encouraging. As I said, my teacher was in the Chicago Symphony. In the summertime, he would take me out to Ravinia and see rehearsals in the outdoor theater there. So, I got to know people in the orchestra, and they were always very encouraging. I played in a little community orchestra there that the principal violist conducted in Chicago. I remember soloing with them. I think it was called the Northside Symphony of Chicago. So there were things like that which would encourage me to believe that maybe this was my future.  

Forrest: Can you talk about how you decided which college to attend?

Phillip: When I was in high school, the music teacher there suggested that there was a teacher at Northwestern University who was making quite a name for himself. He was from Cuba. So, I made the rather painful choice to leave my teacher and try this violinist at Northwestern University when I was a junior in high school. I went to study with him and then went to Northwestern to continue with him for one year as a freshman. But I wanted to leave home because I knew it would be good for me to get away and be off on my own a little bit. I used to go to Aspen in the summer, starting in high school. In Aspen, I studied with this teacher called Totenberg. In fact, his daughter is a journalist for National Public Radio. She covers the Supreme Court. I think that was a great turning point for me. At a certain point, I said, “I’d really like to go east and find a teacher,” and I thought I’d study with him. But he said there was this wonderful violin teacher named Bronstein. He’s passed away now, but he was a contemporary of Heifetz and studied with the same teachers Heifetz had. He taught at Manhattan School in New York and also at Hartt College of Music in Hartford, Connecticut. During a lesson I had in Aspen in the summer, Totenberg called the president of Hartt College and said, “I have this young man here who would love to come to your school and study with Bronstein. Can you give him a scholarship?” They arranged it right there in front of me on the phone.

Forrest: It was that easy?

Phillip: In those days, I think it was easier than it is today to get this kind of help. There was a trust between the two of them, and without an audition or anything, he just arranged a scholarship with Bronstein. I knew I didn’t want to go to New York. I had certain instincts that I think served me well. I don’t know why I had those instincts. First of all, I was from Chicago, so big cities didn’t mean a lot to me. I somehow preferred to go to a smaller city where I felt I’d have a better chance of gaining experience, and it turned out that way. Hartford is not a tiny town, but I had more opportunities at Hartt. Bronstein would come every two weeks from New York and teach, and he was just terrific. He was the most significant teacher I had in my life. I’ve always been just ecstatic that I made that choice. There are always turning points, and you make good decisions and bad decisions. That was certainly a good decision. 

Forrest: Your degree at Hartt was in violin performance?

Phillip: Yes. I got an undergraduate and a master’s degree there.

Forrest: After graduation, what did you do?

Phillip: I won an audition to be concertmaster of the New Orleans Philharmonic. Today, it’s called the Louisiana Philharmonic, but in those days it was New Orleans, which was a major orchestra and a very good orchestra. To be concertmaster was a really great opportunity. I was 25 at that point, and that’s where I met my wife. She is from New Orleans. She’s not a musician. She wasn’t in the orchestra, but I met her there. I had two wonderful years there. I soloed with the orchestra a number of times and played chamber music and gained an enormous amount of experience both about what to do and what not to do.   

Forrest: Was it unusual for someone as young as you were at that time, to hold such an influential position?

Phillip: Yes, it really was. It was pretty unusual. Then, after that, I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts. I got an opportunity to play with the Claremont String Quartet, which was a very good string quartet. They did recordings. They did tours of Europe and elsewhere.

Forrest: You were married at that point?

Phillip: Yes. We got married, and lived in Winston-Salem for two years. We toured Europe with the quartet, and we had a series at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. … Then, I found out about an opening for concertmaster at the Dallas Symphony. So, after two years with the Claremont Quartet, I auditioned for the concertmaster of Dallas Symphony and was able to get that spot for four years. I was 29 then. Then, after four years in Dallas, I got the concertmaster of Cincinnati Symphony through an audition. We stayed there for 21 years. We raised our kids, and Cincinnati was really a wonderful orchestra. I played solos with them many, many times, and we made four or five recordings a year. There were tours, and I played a lot of chamber music and had opportunities to meet a lot of wonderful musicians. It was after that, when I was 55, that we moved to Reno.

Forrest: That was a pretty big move after playing with Cincinnati for so long. What made you decide to make a change?

Phillip: At that point, our kids were grown. They were out of the house, and we had started going to Oregon in the summertime. I was concertmaster of the Sunriver Music Festival, and we just fell in love with the West. We bought a house in Sunriver, in central Oregon, and we’d go there in the summer. I had a good deal from Cincinnati. They’d let me go in the summer, and the summer times were mine. I did things like Aspen and the great Grand Teton Festival in Wyoming and the Sunriver festival. We really enjoyed the West, the climate, the mountains, just the general beauty of it. It’s kind of a story, how I found Reno. As I said, we had that house in Sunriver. I would go there even during the winter sometimes when I had a week off. Sometimes I would go through Reno because you either had to go through Portland or Reno to get to Sunriver. It’s about halfway between the two. I would stop in Reno sometimes and play poker for a day or two because I like to play poker. In those days, there was a poker club downtown called Harold’s Club. It’s no longer there. I was playing poker, staying overnight in Reno, and at this hold ’em table the dealer called one of the players maestro. So, I said to the dealer when he had some time off and he wasn’t dealing, “I saw you call that gentleman maestro. Is he a musician?” He said, “He’s our conductor.” It turned out to be Vahe Khochayan, former conductor of the Reno Chamber Orchestra. I introduced myself to Vahe, and to make a long story short, we became friends and he came to visit us in Sunriver during the summer. He told me at one point of this faculty opening at UNR for a violinist who would play with the Argenta.  It just seemed to come at the right time in our lives. I was 55. The time seemed right to try something new. So, I was interviewed and auditioned for UNR and played with the Argenta. At that time it was (pianist) Ron Williams and (cellist) John Lenz. That worked out, so we decided to give it a try, and it was a big move. But why not?  

Forrest: Was there any concern on your part? Living in Reno is great, but from a career standpoint, it’s not the Cincinnati Symphony.

Phillip: I wasn’t worried. I liked what I saw at UNR and with the Argenta Trio. As I say, we were ready for a life-changing move, and we still had that house in central Oregon. Yes, there’s always a risk that it won’t work out and that you’ll be disappointed, but it seemed like a risk well worth taking. We did make the move and we never looked back. My wife and I both enjoyed it and were happy to have done it as we got into it. Everybody was so wonderful in the community. We both felt welcomed, and it was a good move. We built a house and enjoyed that enormously. I started playing with both orchestras in town and enjoyed the musical life to a great extent. It was very different, no question about it, but it was also an adventure, and it was fun.

Forrest: What were the big differences in the musical life between Cincinnati and Reno?

Phillip: Well, Cincinnati was a very established orchestra and there were all kinds of people in the orchestra there. Some people were full of ambition and love of music and there were also people who were a little jaded. There were always tugs of war between management and the orchestra, and contracts would come up every few years. Although there was a very good relationship between the orchestra and management, it was a very professional, money-driven type of lifestyle. In Reno, nobody makes a living by playing in the Philharmonic or the Chamber Orchestra. They do it mostly out of love for music. So, right away, there was a very basic difference between what drove people to be in those organizations as opposed to Cincinnati Symphony. Not that some in the orchestra in Cincinnati didn’t love what they did. They certainly did. I mean, I did. But, as I say, there was a huge range of personalities in that kind of orchestra. It’s a very grassroots kind of thing in Reno. The Chamber Orchestra, in particular, grew from musicians starting it and making sure that it continued. I found the people who loved the orchestra in Reno, the audiences, enjoyed music in a direct and wholesome and sincere way. There was a lot of support because of that. We also enjoyed getting around more easily. When we moved there in 1994, Reno was starting a big growth spurt. We enjoyed the convenience of the smaller city and being so close to the outdoor things. My wife, Ruth, and I are very much into hiking and enjoying the outdoors. That was so much more accessible and beautiful in Reno than the Midwest. 

Forrest: As I understand it, a major part of your contract with UNR was playing with Argenta. The other part was teaching, correct?

Phillip: Absolutely. My role at UNR, right from the get go, was I taught violin, and viola at times. I also conducted the orchestra and started the graduate program, which we call Orchestral Career Studies, which tries to prepare grad students for a career in music and to take auditions. The Nightingale Quartet sprang out of that immediately. You know, the quartet of four graduate string students. Argenta was the fourth component. So, it was teaching, conducting the orchestra, running the graduate program’s Orchestral Career Studies and then playing in Argenta.  

Forrest: Obviously, you had quite a performing career before coming to UNR. Had you done a lot of teaching and conducting?

Phillip: A moderate amount of conducting. I conducted the strings occasionally in Cincinnati Symphony. We did concerts where we would divide the orchestra into a smaller orchestra and a string orchestra, so I would conduct the string orchestra. But it was very modest. I was a violinist. My conducting kind of sprang out of practical opportunities like that. Now, with teaching, I was an adjunct professor at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, which is a very good music school. I did some teaching of audition classes and a few private students. In Dallas, I taught at SMU as an adjunct professor. I’ve always taught, so the teaching was always there. The conducting pretty much began in earnest at UNR.

Forrest: Did you enjoy having these new aspects to your career?

Phillip: That was part of the motivation of moving to Reno and UNR. I wanted to try a new sort of focus. Let’s say, a new professional recipe.

Forrest: What was your initiation with Argenta like?

Phillip: John Lenz and Ron Williams were the other members. We got along really well right off the bat. John and Ron are wonderful people. We all immediately meshed and had, I would say, no problems in terms of communicating and sociability. It was very easy right off the bat, and we rarely had any disagreements about repertoire or anything like that. The usual routine of Argenta in those days – I don’t know what it is today – is we would set aside Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 to 11 in the morning for rehearsals. So, we would rehearse four hours a week. We had at least three concerts a year at school, and we’d probably have some extra rehearsals as the concerts grew close. We played out of town a little bit, but not a whole lot. Then, in the summer, we’d have some concerts. For the concerts in the summertime at school, (current Argenta member) Jim Wynn was the pianist. Jim started his involvement in those summer concerts long before I showed up because John Lenz and Jim Wynn were buddies from school. Getting back to your original question, it was a very smooth transition for me and hopefully for them as well.

Forrest: Chamber music ensembles are interesting to me because the leadership dynamic is much different than in a symphony or chamber orchestra. They’re almost more like a jazz trio or pop band because there’s no conductor. How did you go about business?

Phillip: It was very much a democratic process. The healthy way to do it is for every member to feel completely free and uninhibited about making suggestions and, in a nice way, to offer criticism. Like, “Hey, why don’t you try playing that a little bit softer.” Or, “Let’s make an accelerando here.” Or, “Your rhythm isn’t too good right over there in letter B.” You have to drop any defensive mechanisms you have about getting criticism, and you have to feel free to offer suggestions to the other members. That’s the way to do it, not that it always works that way. In some groups there are more insistent leaders or aggressive members. Then, some members are more passive… With Argenta, it was always a very democratic process. I don’t recall any leaning toward one person or the other in terms of paths and musical decisions. It was always pretty evenly divided.

Forrest: John Lenz was always the cellist when you were in the ensemble. Was there a significant dynamic change when you switched pianists from Ron Williams to Jim Wynn?

Phillip: Yes. I think things did change a lot. Jim liked modern music more, for example. Jim himself is a composer, and when he was in New York he played in a very adventurous modern music group. So, the repertoire changed quite a bit. That alone is a significant change of direction. Inevitably, people are quite different in terms of musical taste and sense of tempos, choice of tempos, how to rehearse. A very natural change happened between Ron and Jim, as would happen between any two pianists. In piano trio life, if I can modify my previous comment of a minute or two ago, a fair statement is that the piano part is a little more dominating than the string parts. So, it’s only natural that, in that area of literature, the pianist – just for self preservation – would have a little bit more import into choice of tempo, how to rehearse, things like that. Their part is a bit more complicated than the violin and cello parts. That’s not so true in the romantic literature or modern literature. But in that Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Schuman, even Brahms, area, which is a real foundation of the traditional piano trio literature, the pianist would have a lot to say because of the busyness and complexity of their part. 

Forrest: Did you enjoy making some repertoire shifts along the way because of the variety?

Phillip: Of course, yes. It was always fun. We were very careful not to repeat things too often and to do new repertoire. Jim was always very eager to experiment with new repertoire, and so were John and I. We were all on the same page about exploring new things. The only thing that would keep us back is we couldn’t rehearse everyday like some piano trio where literally that is their whole life. That would set some limits on repertoire. To do too many things by Schoenberg or Elliot Carter or some of these real tough, complicated contemporary composers, you have to be a little bit more practical.

Forrest: During your run, you got to expand the repertoire even more because you often had violist Virginia Blakeman-Lenz in the group. Can you talk about that?

Phillip: Yes. We enjoyed doing a number of string duos, trios and piano quartets with Virginia. In fact, for awhile, we called ourselves the Argenta Quartet or Argenta and Friends. She did teach viola at UNR for a number of years and did a wonderful job.

Unfortunately, UNR did not have the money to fund a full-time position for Virginia, but we all enjoyed working together and we played together four or five years. We were able to enlarge our repertoire that way. We made a recording with her called “Patterns.” A few of Jim Wynn’s compositions were on that recording that we made. That’s my recollection of those years. We also tried to involve other faculty members at UNR to play on some of our concerts. There were also other adventures, like Casual Classics. We had some family type concerts that we offered for a number of years. I don’t know if anybody has mentioned those, but they were part of Argenta’s offerings to the community. That had a run of about six or seven years, back in the late ’90s.

Forrest: When you retired in 2007, you told me in a newspaper interview that you never planned to play violin again, but you ended up going back to it. Can you talk a little about that?

Phillip: When I retired, it was actually after the August Sunriver Music Festival. It was August of 2007. I was happy to stop playing for awhile because it had been nonstop since I was 5 years old. I was 68, so that’s 63 years of pretty much nonstop playing. It was time to really get away from it, and my wife and I did some travelling. But, after about a year and four months, I just began to get the itch again. We were still living in Reno, of course. I just started picking it up. It wasn’t a big deal. I started playing scales, and it was pretty hard. I’d lost my callouses and my muscles and everything. I started playing again, 15, 20, 30 minutes a day. What I really missed was the camaraderie with musicians. Musicians are an odd lot. They’re wonderful people and have a sarcastic, cynical sense of humor, which I enjoy. It’s a certain kind of black humor. So, I said, “I’m going to go back and play in the orchestra, sit in the second violin section and just enjoy getting together in the evenings for some of those rehearsals and the concerts.” That’s what I started doing again. It was an absolutely, completely different level than I had been doing, and I felt I was contributing again to the musical life of the community, which was important to me. I was seeing my friends and playing wonderful music. I did that for about three seasons I guess. Then, we moved (to Bend, OR) this past fall. We moved at the end of October.

Forrest: Do you still play?

Phillip: The last concert I played was the end of September before we kind of unexpectedly sold our house. Then, we moved at the end of October. The move has been so laborious that I haven’t played since we moved. I haven’t touched the violin since the end of September.

Forrest: Is it your intention to go back to it?

Phillip: I honestly don’t know. We’re finally getting settled. We’re only renting here, so we’re going to have to move again this summer. We are going to stay in Bend. Our daughter lives here now, and we’re very close to her. It’s a wonderful area. Bend is about 80,000 people, so it’s smaller than Reno and different. But physically, it’s not radically different than northern Nevada. There are mountains, skiing, fishing, outdoor stuff, bicycling, hiking, you name it. Those things that people love to do in northern Nevada, they do here. So, in some respects it’s not that different. It’s just a little bit more rustic.