The violinist Aaron Boyd was teaching a master class in Dallas on Friday, Feb. 17, when a student ensemble played a phrase of a Beethoven quartet in a way that made him start. Mr. Boyd, a member of the Escher String Quartet, had been distracted all week by thoughts of Eugene Phillips, his violin teacher from childhood, whom he knew to be ill.

Now, listening to the quartet he had been coaching, he was “struck by the thought that that was a Phillips sound,” Mr. Boyd recalled recently. “I realized at that moment that a personality as strong as his goes from us into others. I had this feeling that even when he dies, he has already become sound.”

Later, he learned that Mr. Phillips had died that same day, at 97.

Few readers will be familiar with Mr. Phillips’s name, but he was a Renaissance man: a violinist who played in the Pittsburgh Symphony for nearly 40 years and continued working with students, composing, sketching and carving wood sculptures into his 90s. Thirty years ago, when I spent a year in Pittsburgh as an exchange student from Belgium, he was also my teacher.