Music Camp With a Little Summer Thrown In

SHELTER ISLAND, N.Y. —  The music, sweet and delicate and about as perfect as it will ever be played, comes floating out of a big white tent almost every evening.

The notes seem to hang in the warm Shelter Island air for just an instant before they fade into silence above the waters of Southold Bay.

If the students are skillful, they are rewarded. Itzhak Perlman, their teacher, will lean back with his fingers locked behind his head and nod a bit. And smile, with pleasure.

Perlman likes to call himself a fiddle player. Most musicians recognize him as one of the best-known and admired violinists in the world.

Perlman, who can go anywhere he wants and play anything he likes, is spending the summer at a former girls camp overlooking Crescent Beach on Shelter Island with 39 students who have come from all over the world.

“I wanted a program where kids from all over the world would come and work, really hard,” said Toby Perlman, who manages the program with her husband. “An environment not just conducive to learning an instrument but the whole performing process. And be able to enjoy the summer, too.”

The reality, she added, is not quite what the students--their ages ranging from 11 to 18--had expected.

They practice intently. They have time to walk in the woods or along the beach and to listen to music.

But they also have to sing in a choir, all of them. And they have to do what almost every teenager in every summer camp does. They have to clean after themselves.

“Some of these kids had never cleaned a desk and never made a bed before,” Toby Perlman said. “All they had to do is practice. That’s the way they were raised.”

On a recent day, she was busy ordering lumber, digging holes in the ground for some plants that had been recently donated and checking schedules to see that everyone and everything was in the right place. “I’m like a den mother,” she said.

The camp is filled with odd juxtapositions. Joan Harrison, for example, is teaching students to make a quilt with musical designs, painting with stencils and cutting fabric.

A performer with the New York City Opera, she teaches cello. And, she says, her biggest surprise is just how well the students on Shelter Island have buried the competition that might otherwise be so much a part of their lives. “They’re nice kids, they help each other,” she said.

Giora Schmidt, 17, of Philadelphia, has been in the program for five years and says the rustic atmosphere makes this year her best experience.

“It’s a relaxed setting to do good work in. . . . It’s nice to just sit and talk on the grass,” she said.

Many of the students have been with the music program for several years. Minji Grace Cho, 13, of Albertson, N.Y., is starting her second year and is learning to trust her own musical instincts and how to experiment on her own.

“I’m learning a lot. Not just about music, but about myself,” she said.

For the Perlmans, who spent six years trying to find a home for their music program, the camp is just about everything they could have wanted.

Almost. They’re expanding the temporary wooden stage under the big white tent, which holds 230 people, by 8 feet to add just a little more room.

“We were looking for our own place. The minute we saw this, it was heaven,” Itzhak Perlman said.

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For him, heaven includes lodging for the teachers, a big central dining hall and an administration building with a large donated television and library of taped concert performances.

There is no cable TV. But there are the woods and the water and the rustic atmosphere to relieve some of the stress that teenagers playing for Itzhak Perlman will feel.

It’s not that he’s a harsh taskmaster. Perlman offers suggestions with a wave of his hand, or a simple da-dum, da-dum, ta-dum.

But each of the students at the Perlman Music Program knows that 10 others wanted to be in his or her place. And, they take even a da-dum, da-dum seriously. “No one comes here as a hobby,” Perlman said. “The pressure comes from within them.”