Truth be told, I stumbled into my lessons with Andy by pure chance. When I was 14, after years of studying with a series of young teachers fresh out of graduate school, yet another one told me that she had found a symphony job and would be moving out of the state. She suggested that I try to work with her teacher, Dr. Galos. The transition was a jolt, as Andy was in every way different from any person I had ever encountered. At our first lesson, I was immediately struck by his quirkiness. He was one of the shortest people I have ever known, coming up to about my chin, but what he lacked in physical size he more than made up for in character. With his passionate rants against injustice in the world, his wild and ridiculous tufts of hair sticking out in all directions, and a mischievous gap-toothed grin, he was a far cry from what I had expected.

While I had immediately known that Andy was on a different level from any musician I had worked with, it took me a little longer to fully realize his true greatness as a musician and teacher. Andy came from the great Russian violin tradition, and was only a generation removed in his education from Leopold Auer, one of the most important violin teachers of all time. He was extremely proud of this legacy, and he made it his life’s work to impart his knowledge to as many students as possible. He gave average students the opportunity to be part of an incredible musical lineage, when he could easily have held a position at any major music school, teaching students who were already note-perfect.

After a few weeks of studying with him, he knew me well enough to trust that I would understand what he meant by his unusual outbursts. If I played a passage with less skill than we both knew I had, he would simply shout “Oye, Virginia! O! Y! E!” instead of giving meticulous instructions as most other teachers would. While some people might have been put off by his good-natured shouting, I always considered such incidents especially endearing, and felt honored that he expected me to know what had gone wrong and to fix it for myself.

Blunt and simple instructions like these taught me invaluable lessons, and with time, I was able not only to listen to myself just as critically as he did, but, more importantly, to be truly individual in my musical interpretations. After years of immersion in the world of middle-school orchestras and Suzuki classes, I was finally encouraged to be an artist, and that became the focus of our lessons. Within the short space of two sessions, Andy managed to teach me to play with a completely different tone, much more musical, rich, and lyrical than I had ever produced before. Although my initial inspiration to improve under his teachings had been a mixture of fear and awe, when I began to see such dramatic results, I no longer needed a reason to work hard—I simply wanted to. In the time that I studied with him, I became much more serious about every aspect of music, and this difference was obvious in my playing and attitude.

After three years of studying with Andy, we had grown very close, and when he passed away this summer, it was a major shock to me. It still seems ironic that an old man who was literally one of the smallest people I have ever met was, in every other way, one of the largest. Looking back, he seems like too eccentric a character to have really existed, but the lessons he taught remain very real and important, and I often think back to his teaching mantras (“Keep your fingers down!”, “When in doubt, roll it out!”) while practicing. Dr. Andrew Galos, known to students and colleagues alike as simply ‘Andy,’ never failed to surprise and educate me with his attitude, enthusiasm, and spirit, and quickly became not only an essential musical influence in my life, but like a friend and grandfather to me as well. When I think about the points at the heart of his teaching, repeated without fail at every lesson, I am inspired to keep alive all the things he taught me and become the musician and person he always believed that I could be.

This essay was written by Virginia Smith, Garfield Class of 2005, Oberlin College Class of 2009.