Blog # 1 by Phil Setzer

So where do I start?  This is a blog, not an autobiography.  But to write about anything important to me, and maybe interesting to the reader, I have to give some background of myself.

Born March 12, 1951.  My dad, Elmer Setzer, plays violin in the Cleveland Orchestra, teaches at the Music School Settlement on Saturdays and also privately at our home.  He also plays in a string quartet called the Symphonia Quartet, comprised of orchestra members, which performs a series of concerts every season and many lecture-concerts in schools.  My mom, Marie Setzer, also plays violin, not professionally, until many years later when she also joins the Cleveland Orchestra.  In the meantime, she takes care of most everything else and raises my younger brother, Marc, and me.

Music is almost always in the house.  Parents practicing, radio, record player.  When I’m four,  I say “I want to play the violin.“  “4 is too young,” I am told. “A violin is not a toy—you have to be serious about it.  When you are 5, if you still want to play, we’ll get you a violin and you can start lessons.”  On my 5^th birthday, apparently at an ungodly hour in the early morning, I walk into my sleeping parents’ room and proclaim:  “Well, I’m five—so where’s my violin?”

I started lessons with my dad, who was already famous in Cleveland for teaching beginners.  He must have known what he was doing, because, in a couple of years, I had made enough progress to be accepted as a student of Joseph Gingold, then the concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra.  

Gingold was wonderful to me, especially at that age.  His warmth and encouragement were truly inspiring, although I do remember him complaining that he wished I would grow up a little more quickly so he wouldn’t have to bend down to fix my hand positions! Gingold left Cleveland after a couple years of my studying with him and, at the age of 50, went to Indiana U., where he taught for many years.

My early years were also marked with the opportunity to hear concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra, beginning with children’s concerts and moving on to inheriting my mother’s subscription seat when she entered the orchestra.  Hearing the Cleveland Orchestra during the 60’s, with George Szell at his zenith, as well as the great visiting soloists appearing each week, was as great a musical education as could be imagined. I also played a lot of baseball and football and shared my parents’ love for the Cleveland Indians and Browns.

So many memories—too many for a blog like this—but I will mention the pleasure of throwing the ball around with my dad in our backyard, which we did often, and his sharing with me his favorite spots in the music when we would sit down and listen together.  And…my mother’s great cooking.  My mother’s father, Leonard De Maria, was Italian, and Mom inherited the genes for cooking great Italian recipes, often ones that had been passed down from my great grandmother to my grandmother, Helen. 

Helen McGuinn was Irish, but had learned how to cook from her new mother-in-law, who only approved the marriage between Leonard and Helen on one condition—“Helen, you must learn how to cook the kind of food that Leonard is used to eating.  He will never be happy eating Irish food!” Smart woman, my great-grandmother!

My parents gave me so much: their love for my brother and me, their undying love for each other, and they gave us music, with all the encouragement and appreciation and pride in their sons’ achievements.  They died within a few months of each other, Mom the fall of 06 and Dad the winter of 07.  I still can’t believe they are gone.