Dorothy DeLay, 84; Taught Many Noted Violinists

Dorothy DeLay, teacher and mentor to some of the world’s most celebrated violinists, died Sunday at her home in Upper Nyack, N.Y., after a more than yearlong battle with cancer. She was 84.

DeLay’s long teaching career spanned two generations of players. Her students included violinists Itzhak Perlman, Midori, Cho-Liang Lin, Gil Shaham, Schlomo Mintz and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Other pupils, such as Joseph Swenson and Peter Oundjian, went on to become conductors. Her violinists have joined the Juilliard, Cleveland, Tokyo and Fine Arts quartets.

At the Juilliard School of Music, where she taught for half a century, students clutching violins would line up for hours for the chance to study with DeLay, whose students regularly snagged top prizes at competitions, often a first step to the high-stakes concert circuit.

Parents called DeLay from all over the world, hoping she’d listen for five minutes to their “brilliant” children and recognize them as prodigies.

They hoped lightning would strike as it did in 1986 for then-6-year-old Sarah Chang, now one of classical music’s hottest properties. After listening to Chang play on her one-eighth-sized violin, DeLay agreed to take her on as a student.

Young violinists trained by DeLay were noted for a distinctive sound that has been described as lush, burnished and beautiful

“Dorothy DeLay represented the highest level of violin teaching during the second half of the 20th century,” said Joseph W. Polisi, Juilliard president, in a statement. “Her legacy is reflected in the thousands of violinists who are currently performing and teaching around the world.”

Born March 31, 1917, in the cattle town of Medicine Lodge, Kan., DeLay had been described as looking more like a nice Midwestern grandmother than a groomer of concert professionals.

The stereotype of the stern, usually male European violin master was flouted by the warm, nurturing DeLay--who, according to a 1989 story in the Los Angeles Times, often addressed her callers as “Sweetie,” “Honey” or “Sugarplum.”

She was given to offering homespun advice on romance or fashion in counterpoint to her musical instruction. Her philosophy: “Teach the student, not the subject.”

Even when their fame outstripped hers, many of her students continued to call her “Miss DeLay.”

DeLay’s teaching career began in 1947, when she was a student of Ivan Galamian at Juilliard. At that time, she began accepting invitations for part-time teaching and assistantships at the Henry Street Settlement, Juilliard and Sarah Lawrence College. The experience led her to realize that she enjoyed teaching more than performing.

The daughter of music instructors, DeLay began playing violin at age 4. At 16, she enrolled at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, then transferred to Michigan State University after her parents insisted that she broaden her education beyond music.

After graduating in 1937, DeLay moved to New York to enroll in the Juilliard School. She toured Latin America as a member of Leopold Stokowski’s All-American Youth Orchestra. At the end of that tour, she met Edward Newhouse, a writer for the New Yorker, on a cross-country train journey. They married in 1941.

DeLay’s concert career was interrupted by World War II, when Newhouse was transferred to a series of Army Air Corps bases before they settled in New York. DeLay returned to Juilliard in 1946, where she began studying with Galamian.

By the late 1960s, however, differences in teaching philosophy began to drive a wedge between them. In 1970, their relationship ended abruptly when Galamian demanded that Juilliard students working with both teachers choose between them. Perlman, for one, chose DeLay.

After the bitter split, DeLay began to gain recognition in her own right. She was the first woman to be considered a master violin teacher in the tradition of Galamian and Leopold Auer.

DeLay remained at Juilliard for the rest of her career, and was director of the school’s Starling-DeLay Institute, whose aim is to find and develop new artist-teachers of the violin.

She is survived by her husband; two children, Alison Dinsmore of Boston and Jeffrey Newhouse of Bronxville, N.Y.; and four grandchildren.