In my teenage years, I spent time during the summers at my aunt and uncle’s home on the water of the Great South Bay of Long Island. Broad wooden docks surrounded the property.

I became friends with David Soyer, the cellist who helped start the Guarneri String Quartet, one of the greatest American string quartets in history. He was a founding member in 1964 and played with them until he retired in 2002. 

He and his wife rented a house next door on the property owned by my aunt and uncle. He kept his small sailboat tied to the dock.

I don’t know why he befriended me. I was always around so I suppose it was because he needed a sailing partner who knew how to sail. It did not matter that I was only 16 years old. He liked to sail and needed a hand onboard so we sailed.

Each morning on bright days when he had the doors and windows open, I was woken by the sounds of his cello as he practiced.  Despite being able to play the entire major and minor cello canon, he practiced his scales every day as his teacher, Pablo Casals, had taught him.

That is a lesson I learned for life yet haven’t ever applied.

One day I asked him if he would let me take some portraits of him while he was practicing.  He knew I was an inexperienced wanna-be school yearbook photographer. Maybe he thought it would be good practice for me. The main thing I remember was that he took me seriously and treated me like I was an experienced grown professional photographer. He made me feel he respected me and what I was doing. That is important for a 16 year old boy without a father around who was good at doing that.

In later years, while in college, my girlfriend and I attended a concert given by the Guarneri String Quartet at Yale University.

It was oversold so we were placed in a single row of chairs on the stage immediately behind the Quartet. We faced their backs and looked out at the audience sitting in the dark, seated in that very public front row, directly behind David. 

That night they played some of Beethoven’s string quartets for which they were especially well-known. After taking several standing ovations and coming back to play more, he bowed his final bow, turned and smiled at me, winked, and tapped the bow of his cello against my leg, and disappeared off stage.

I saw David a year later, when he invited me to a recording session in New York. It was a huge studio at RCA Records. Besides the immediate other members of the Guarneri String Quartet, producer, and sound engineers, I was the only person there. He said I could take pictures but quietly and only between takes.

So I did. I under-exposed them, poorly developed them and they were grainy in the wrong way.

It is sentimental to say, but I suppose I should have practiced more.  

The Guarneri String Quartet, RCA Recording Studios, New York City, 1970, burnesingman (c)