A Valentine for Mr. Beach

Joseph M. Beach at his home in Lexington, Kentucky (photo by Donna LaBach)

(first published in The Cincinnati Post, February 14, 1996)

The movie "Mr. Holland's Opus" is a tribute to music-making and music teachers.

Though dismissed by many critics, "Opus" debuted at a respectable No. 2 in mid-January. Thanks to word of mouth, it unexpectedly moved up to No. 1 at the box office the next week. It remained in the No. 3 spot last weekend and has grossed more than $40 million. The film's star, Richard Dreyfuss, has been nominated for a best-actor Academy Award.

I had already discovered classical music before I met my Mr. Holland -- in an old record cabinet at my grandparents' house in Lexington. There wasn't much classical music there - just a handful of 78 rpms, among Xavier Cugat, Spike Jones and Frankie Laine, which were more to their taste.

It was an album of Brahms' Fourth Symphony, and some of the records were cracked. I didn't know until years later how the second movement ended. But I was hooked. I had never heard such beautiful music.

Well, probably I had, but I didn't remember it. My parents had split up when I was 8. My father was a musician and used to play classical records at home.  No doubt, I carried some of the music in my head. I still get a funny feeling when I hear Franck's D Minor Symphony.  But the music stopped after my parents' divorce. I became an enthusiastic tomboy. Then I found those cracked records.

Not long afterward, Mr. Beach came to town. I was 11 and in the sixth grade.

He dropped by my classroom looking for kids to start on musical instruments. Egged on by a friend, I raised my hand. I said I'd like to play the violin. He said he had no violins left; how about the viola? I wasn't sure what that was, but I said yes, and soon after, I was excused from class to take my first lesson.

I was a late starter - most kids begin lessons between 6 and 9 - but I was fast. So fast he put me in his summer orchestra after sixth grade. I felt painfully shy among the older kids.

The next year I trekked to Mr. Beach's house once a week for lessons. We didn't have a car, so I took the city bus. I rode downtown with my books and my viola, then transferred to another bus. I had to do the same thing to get home.  Mr. Beach, who was a violist himself, drilled me in scales. He also picked out my first solo, "Valse Triste" by Sibelius. He was very proud of me. He was very displeased the next year, when my mother said I had to quit - the bus trips were too long, and it was dark before I got home. He turned me over to a graduate student from the University of Kentucky, who came to my school to give me lessons.

Although I never studied with him privately again, Mr. Beach was the orchestra director at the high school I attended. The Henry Clay High School Orchestra was one of the best in Kentucky, winning superior ratings at the state music festival each of the 29 years he was there.  Unfailingly optimistic, he always made the best of the talent he had. He was even-tempered but firm. There always seemed to be a smile on his face and a twinkle in his blue eyes.

Mr. Beach gave me many opportunities to perform. I remember being scared stiff when I played Ippolitov-Ivanov's "Caucasian Sketches," Enesco's "Rumanian Rhapsody" and the Handel-Casadesus Viola Concerto. He was always supportive. And proud. When I graduated, he put my name at the top of a plaque listing the outstanding player in each class.

Mr. Beach's favorite composer was Brahms. He played Brahms for his two children when they took their bottles. One of them, a physicist specializing in nuclear medicine, is now assistant concertmaster of the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra.

Mr. Beach's former students can be found in all walks of life. As in "Mr. Holland's Opus," one of them, Martha Layne Collins, became a governor (Kentucky). Another, who now heads the composition department at the University of Kansas, appeared on his doorstep one Christmas with a fugue he had written using the letters of Mr. Beach's name.

In 1993, a scholarship fund was begun in Mr. Beach's honor at Henry Clay. At a concert initiating the fund, he led the orchestra and 28 of his former students in the last movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Many of his students were in the audience.  I was one of them.

Joseph M. Beach, a 1948 graduate of the Cincinnati Conservatory (now the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music) retired in 1981 after 42 years of teaching, 29 of them at Lexington's Henry Clay High School. He lives in Lexington, where he plays viola in the Lexington Philharmonic and runs a repair shop for string instruments, the "Fiddle Hospiddle."