I've just finished teaching at the South Bend Symphony's Dake Summer Chamber Music Academy . As always, It was an all-consuming week of coaching, rehearsing, encouraging, entertaining, and performing, but I left after the final reception feeling giddy with success. The group I was coaching was very young, in musical experience if not years, and did not contain an oboist, or even a wind player. We had been assigned two short movements of a baroque sonata, and after the first day of work we were ALMOST able to limp through one and a half of those movements. So between my inexperience working with young string players and the starting level of the group, I had little optimism. But my kids worked. They worked hard. We sat in that room, the three of us, and we pulled that piece apart every way I could think of. We played it together and separately. We played short passages and long passages. We took out the fingerings and played the rhythms together. We went slowly and fast