A few days ago one of my students handed me her violin to tune at the beginning of her lesson, and to my great dismay I found a couple of very deep cracks running out of the right f-hole.
It was clearly a new injury; I am very familiar with her fiddle. It is a nice-quality student instrument that the family had recently purchased, which made it all the more painful. What happened? It could have been the school field trip, in which the violin had been transported with a lot of other instruments, possibly jostled around, possibly left in a too-cold or too-warm vehicle.
But I found another possible culprit: her violin case, in which the violin is quite elevated and the spinner for the bow is awfully low. She'd placed a cloth underneath the violin, elevating it further, and I could easily see a scenario where the lid came down and the spinner intersected with the wood. Thank goodness, they will take it to a good luthier, who should be able to diagnose the problem and fix the crack quite well. And possibly hook her up with a new case!
But it is very, very upsetting when one finds damage on one's instrument, whether it is caused by blunt trauma, injury in transport, or the long-term use of something like a case or a tuner that cuts down into the wood. Most often, a good violin maker can fix most problems -- I've even heard of resurrecting a violin after it's been driven over by a car! But still, we want to avoid the damage in the first place!
Have you ever damaged your violin, or had it damaged by something or someone else? Let us know what happened. Maybe your story will help someone else avoid the same fate!
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The following was originally going to be the last page of my book The Violin Lesson, but in the end I decided to delete it – partly because of the never-ending quest to try to lower the page-count, partly on the grounds that it went too far away from what the book was meant to be about, and partly because I always try to avoid anything that may be too "weird and wonderful." But I have regretted leaving it out ever since. It is, after all, something I frequently tell students, which is precisely what the book was meant to contain. So although at some point in the future it may be put back in "The Violin Lesson" in a revised edition, I thought it might be good to place it here as a blog meanwhile.
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The great American business and motivational speaker Brian Tracy, among other "life-coaches" and teachers of accelerated learning, often raise the same interesting question: how do the owners of huge Indian elephants manage to get them to stand still so meekly, when the huge creatures are held only by a length of weak rope tied to a thin stick stuck carelessly into the ground?
With one swish of their trunk they could knock their owner flying; with one tug they could pull the stick out of the ground. Why do they simply stand there instead? Keep reading...
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I was trying to impress my daughter, 19, with my new electric violin, which admittedly, I have no idea what I'm going to do with, other than try to mitigate a kind of mid-life classical musician crisis.
"Isn't it cool?" I said, plugging in the new five-string Yamaha Electric Violin and showing Natalie, as she lounged on the nearby couch, checking her phone. Though she doesn't play the violin, she has had the strange life circumstance of growing up amid hundreds of hours of ambient violin-lesson noise. She also has wide and eclectic tastes in music, from rap to classic rock, alt music and folk to "Claire de Lune."
"I just have to figure out what to play on it," I admitted. She looked up.
"Hmmm. How about....'Come On Eileen'?" she said, fiddling with her phone. The 80's pop song came pouring out of her phone.
"Of course, challenge accepted."
So I started playing along. Actually there's a lot of violin in that tune, and nice little licks. Once I'd figured them out, I tried to change them up a little.
"How do you do that?" she said. "Okay here's another one."
Bohemian Rhapsody? Sure, why not? I picked out the melody here, the harmony there, took a stab the guitar solo...Pretty fun, actually!
"Okay give me another one," I said.
"Stairway to Heaven."
How does she even know that song, isn't it from the '70s? But actually it's kind of lovely on the violin, you can poke it up an octave in places, add a few little things here and there...I was actually having quite a lot of fun.
"Mom, how can you do that?" Play by ear? Come on, I'm a Suzuki teacher!
It's actually fun for someone to be impressed, but it was pretty clear to me that this is an extremely underdeveloped aspect of my playing: the ability to play by ear and improvise. Too much stumbling. And why can't I just immediately play what I hear in my head? Is there a way that I can strengthen that connection? And certainly I was playing it awfully safe. Keep reading...
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