Niccolo Paganini
October 27, 1782 - May 27, 1840

Today's guest blog is from one of our favorite guest bloggers. He asks (and answers) the toughest question anyone in classical music has ever faced: How do you get a teenager interested in classical music? The answer: Shostakovich. 


Why am I asking what teenagers and Shostakovich have in common? Because it seems like every nerdy young string player I know (myself included) seems to go through a serious obsession with Shostakovich. There’s something so attractive about his sarcastic, rebellious overtones, and what teen doesn’t love to be sarcastic? Not to mention the many raw emotions conveyed in his music. Maybe this attraction to Shostakovich and his music is merely a teenage phase, or maybe it’s a burgeoning discovery of a serious love of his music. We’re going to try to break it down and find out.

Ever wondered just how crazy and/or avant garde your favorite composer was? SHAR Apprentices James Engman and Josephine Llorente have put together this handy graph! It displays, on X and Y axes, the relative sanity and aesthetic taste of your favorite compsers. Agree, disagree, or think the graph needs a slight change? Leave a comment for the SHAR Apprentices below!



Felix Mendelssohn
As far as child prodigies go, Mendelssohn was pretty grounded and together. Felix and his three siblings were born with silver(ish) spoons; later he and his wife Cecile had five children of their own. Yawn. And although I love listening to/playing his music, Mendelssohn was also famously more cautious than some of his zanier contemporaries (ahem, Wagner). Double yawn.

George Gershwin
Gershwin’s life/personality seemed relatively normal; he was a Brooklyn-bred, first generation, high school dropout. And oh yeah, he was also sort of a musical genius. Although Porgy and Bess was initially slammed by critics, it was later lauded as one of the most important operas in history.

Franz Josef Haydn
Although Haydn had a bit of a rough start to his life, including bouts of starvation and homelessness, later in life he enjoyed wealth and fame in London and Vienna.  He was also described as likeable and humble — no easy feat for a prolific and successful composer.

I know it’s hard to view Papa Haydn as revolutionary in his musical contributions, but for us string players, but he was definitely a trailblazer... can you even imagine what our rep would look like if his string quartets didn’t exist?

Robert Schumann
I don’t have perfect pitch, but in my heyday in music school, I pretty much had an A440 stuck in my head at all times. Like me and George Costanza, Schumann went nuts over one note. (Remember this episode of Seinfeld?) All kidding aside, the reason he was institutionalized was because of severe depression. His works were fairly conservative in regard to form, but he helped push the boundaries of romantic music.

Johann Sebastian Bach
In his time, Bach was a name synonymous with “musician.” Being from a large family of musicians, Johann met and exceeded all of his expectations. Having never left Germany once in his career, he was a bit of a homebody. Besides conquering the study of counterpoint and being one of the greatest virtuosi ever, he was pretty much just a full-time family man.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Our favorite hearing-impaired composer places high on the crazy and genius/influential scale. He was definitely the tortured artist type — moody, passionate, and absolutely brilliant. We can thank him for bringing us into the Romantic era.

Johann Brahms
The mystery of his impoverished childhood has been debated — many think he may have been employed at the request of his parents in a dance hall. The circumstances of that appointment raise more questions regarding his very close relationship with Clara Schumann and his troubles successfully courting women. On many nights long-bearded Brahms could be seen in cheap clothes, walking with no socks on, to his favorite pub the Red Hedgehog. He would often hand out candy to children along the way. Despite his eccentricities, his music was labeled by the other half of the War of the Romantics as being “old-fashioned.” He admittedly focused on the study of counterpoint and imitation and development — much like his role-models, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Dmitri Shostakovich
As a musician I feel like I have the right to say that MUSICIANS ARE CRAZY. Sure Shosty was often described as a bundle of nerves, and he even allegedly had some OCD, but he was a child prodigy and musical genius. I should also probably mention that he had to grapple with keeping Stalin happy and staying alive. With the cards he was dealt, I think Shostakovich was pretty together.

Shostakovich’s music is deeply emotional and restrained in the best way. Even though he’s pretty average on this particular matrix, he’s ranked high in my book.

Hector Berlioz
Because of his fascination with opiates, some of you may think Berlioz should be ranked higher on the crazy scale, but hear me out. If you heard that a famous rock musician did some drugs and then created a composition based on that experience, you would probably shrug and move on. Berlioz was just ahead of his time. After writing Symphony Fantastique and other works, we can thank Berlioz for significantly changing the instrumentation of the modern orchestra.

John Cage
In my opinion, there’s a "good crazy" and a "bad crazy." People who are bad crazy hurt people for no reason. People in the good crazy category think outside the box and have weird interests like Cage, who happened to be an expert of mushrooms (the funghi, not the drug).

Without a doubt, Cage was a leader in avant-garde music. Just looking at one of his pieces shows that the dude thought way, way outside the box. I’m pretty sure he’s the only person who could release a work of silence and still be super respected by the music community.

Johann Strauss II
Strauss was the tin pan alley composer of classical music. He came from a musical family; his father Johann Sr. and two brothers were also composers. When I think of a musical Austrian family I think of a happy bunch, but the Strauss’ were less like the Austrian Von Trapps (pre-war, of course) and more like the American Jacksons. Johann Jr. and his father were in serious competition, and we all know who won the title of "The Waltz King."

Karlheinz Stockhausen
His ex-friends would say Stockhausen totally belongs in a looney bin. After reading this article, I can understand why. Maybe there’s some bias in the article, but Stockhausen is at best portrayed as eccentric and delusional. I can’t even imagine what it was like to rehearse the the Helicopter quartet with Stockhausen, who is often described as a hot-tempered perfectionist.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky was known to be extremely sensitive and painfully shy. His anxiety began early in his childhood and continued in his adult life; there is speculation that he even ended his own life. The Russian composer made his most significant impact in ballet music, but his worship of Mozart influences his work's strict classical form.  

After you’ve been playing the violin for a couple of years, it starts to get tiresome when you feel limited to the scales, etudes, and few solos that your teacher gives you. If you’re a beginning to intermediate player who’s looking to build up a repertoire beyond the songs in the Suzuki books, here are some sheet music suggestions for you.



Miniature Masterpieces, arr. by W. Ambrosio (1920 305). This collection of 21 violin pieces – all in first position! – includes works by popular composers such as Saint-Saens and Wagner.





First Solos from the Classics by S. Applebaum (1851 010). Everything is in 1^st position. Thebook includes famous melodies from an assortment of classical eras, all arranged for violin and piano.





Fun With Solos by Evelyn Avsharian (A70). Everything in this book stays in 1^st and 3^rdposition and is a source of fun and exciting recital repertoire.





Violin Favorites by Juchem/ Brochausen (1846 107). This collection of twelve violin piecestouches on great composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Dvorak.






Easy Classics for Violin by Peter Spitzer (1872 042).Here you will find popular classical melodies (such as “Ode to Joy” and “Can Can”) arranged simply for one or two violins.




First Solo Album by Harvey Whistler (1885 016). This collection of eleven short pieces for violin and piano keeps the violinist in first position and is great to use for recital repertoire.




This only begins to touch on the tremendously wide range of violin sheet music that we carry at SHAR! If you’re looking for something specific or you need more suggestions, please give us a call at 1.800.248.7427 – we are happy to talk with you!

Over the years I have purchased sheet music, borrowed violin sheet music from the library, and given away scores upon scores (pun intended) of other pieces of violin sheet music. But of all the pieces that have been given and taken away, I have found that the following five books will stay with me.

Wedding season is underway! Do you have the sheet music you need for all of your upcoming wedding performances?

Dear Alberta,

It's fitting that such an elegaic concerto is the last concerto of our letters. (Sad face!) Edward Elgar composed his cello concerto, Op. 85, in the summer of 1919; it's hard to ignore the fact that he composed the concerto in Sussex, where the previous summer he had heard the thunder of heavy artillery drifting across the English Channel from France.

War and art are such strange and perfect bedfellows. Although the poet Philip Larkin would probably take issue with the expressiveness of Elgar's concerto – he preferred understatement, probably to a fault – I can't help but think of Larkin's poem "MCMXIV," an elegy for the year 1914, the last year untouched by the horror of truly modern warfare. The last stanza of the poem reads: 

            Never such innocence,
            Never before or since,
            As changed itself to past
            Without a word – the men
            Leaving the gardens tidy,
            The thousands of marriages,
            Lasting a little while longer:
            Never such innocence again.

I know I keep quoting poetry to talk about music, but what other kind of language can say what I hear? The concerto sounds, at times, like Larkin's valediction: "Never such innocence, / Never before or since / ... / Never such innocence again" (Of course, the whole concerto isn't so elegaic, but I couldn't help but hear these lines in the opening of the Adagio, which is mournful stuff.)



The more I listened to this concerto, the more it gnawed at me. Why do I hear such sadness in this piece, Alberta? Does the cello, with its lower range, have a voice that reaches us in a way other instruments can't? Is it just me? It's possible that it's not just me: all the commenters (yes, I read them) on YouTube seemed to be crying into their keyboards too. I guess it didn't help that we were all watching the Jacqueline du Pré performance.

It's intense stuff: Du Pré drapes her body over her cello (the 1712 Davidov Stradivarius) and her lithe and willowy bowing seems to come almost from the instrument itself, a gravity only she feels. Some players impose themselves on an instrument, it seems – they control it – and others have a conversation with it. (At times it seemed like the Stradivarius swayed before du Pré swayed.) I've never seen a musician listen so intently – to the concerto, her conducter, and the instrument – while playing so expressively. All of this is to say that maybe du Pré  is to blame.

In any case, I'm suspicious of my reaction to the Elgar concerto because it's so strong. Am I really hearing the Elgar cello concerto when I feel such heavy sadness? And am I imposing all this stuff about World War I and an instrument and composition that so deeply inspires both the performer and listener? 

If it's all projection and sentimentality, tell me why I feel a gravitas that's not my own.

Yours, Joe