Martha Anne Toll revisits her early violist days in Duet for One

A musical map of Philly

Duet for One, Toll’s second novel, spans the 1980s to the mid-aughts. Urban details come alive on the page, especially around Center City, near Rittenhouse Square, and West Philly. In one scene, Adam, the violinist adult son of duo-pianists, grieves his mother while sitting near the bronze goat statue, Billy. Toll points out that the square’s current goat is a replica, having been replaced in 2018, “after so many children displayed their affection by touching its nose.”

Rindelaub’s Bakery, formerly on 18th Street north of Walnut, makes a cameo. Many place names are fictionalized while remaining in their original locations: Curtis is called the Caldwell Institute of Music; Dara, the novel’s violist, leaves a concert at the Independence Theater (modeled after Walnut Street Theatre) and takes a long walk past 30th Street Station to her West Philly home.

In real life, Toll’s music lessons took place at the New School of Music. Dara’s are held at the same location, called the Twenty-First Street Music School in Duet. Adam takes daily walks along the Schuylkill to watch the rowers. He passes the colorful doors on Delancey to visit a love interest and has a funny exchange with a fishmonger at the Reading Terminal.

Toll rode the Manayunk local from Cynwyd Station starting at age 9 to pursue both dance and viola studies. Classical music research for the novel was sourced from her own experience: by high school, she was studying under Max Aronoff, an original member of the Curtis String Quartet and founder of the New School of Music.

She graduated from Lower Merion High School mid-year and took the SEPTA 44 bus every afternoon to the windowless sub-basement of the library of the American Philosophical Society next to Independence Hall. She had a job lightly oiling the bindings of the library’s treasured collection. She practiced her high school French, thumbing through Diderot’s Encyclopédie and filing the letters of Ben Franklin’s grandson William, who served as Franklin’s secretary in France. The errant William apparently abandoned one mistress. “I almost had a heart attack when a lock of her hair fell out of a letter I was filing,” Toll says. “William must have left her pregnant, and she was pleading her case.”

Sauerkraut, butter, and eggs in Head House Square

Toll’s roots in Philadelphia precede her viola studies by three-quarters of a century. Her great-grandmother, after fleeing the 1905 pogroms in Ukraine, sold sauerkraut in Head House Square. “Despite having four young children, my great-grandmother considered herself first and foremost a businesswoman,” Toll says. A generation later, Toll’s grandmother left the sixth grade to help support her family. She sold butter and eggs in that same square, where she met her husband, Toll’s grandfather. Toll is thrilled to see her novel on the shelves of the eponymous Head House Books, where she gave a reading in June.

Today, she closely follows Philadelphia’s vibrant classical music scene. She’s heartened by the growing prominence of women, including Naomi Woo’s appointment as assistant conductor to the Philadelphia Orchestra. “Women conductors were incredibly rare in my day,” Toll says. She’s particularly tickled that the person who had Woo’s job when Toll was growing up—William Smith—appears in Duet for One as Charles Jones.

She stepped off her semi-professional path as a violist to become a lawyer. Most of Toll’s career has been in Washington, DC, where she ran a social-justice philanthropy and, for the last 25 years, has been writing fiction and book reviews. Toll continues to have strong family ties to Philly. Every Thanksgiving, 50 far-flung relatives gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, as close to one of the famous squares as they can get.