Tiny Successes and Monumental Failures on the Violin

Right now I am sitting in my room listening to semi-finals of the Menuhin Competition on YouTube — recorded fewer than two weeks ago in Geneva. It makes me antsy in some ways; one can't help but be impressed otherwise, unless one is stricken by envy. I have to admit that I enjoyed the Mozart, Bach, Kreisler, Suk and Dvorak in the first round — although I felt that the approaches to Mozart and Bach were 'identikit' amongst the older violinists — more than the hyper-sophisticated Brahms, Piazzolla, etc. of the second round.

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I haven't gotten around to practicing the violin much in the past month. In my mind I am still on a practice schedule and enjoy stealing 10 (or, lately, 5) minutes from my morning preparations to achieve at least a little. But, in reality, I need to leave earlier for work because of the new office location in any case; and my workload is in such a state, and my responsibility as 'team leader' is such, that I can't justify arriving only just on time; and I don't want to play the violin before 8 a.m. for the sake of the neighbours. So that schedule is barely happening.

But I feel that the interruption of my regular practice (which leads to broader-minded reflection); as well as observations that I've gathered from the competition; have led to mental leaps of understanding. For example, I am not supposed to saw my entire arm at a figuratively obtuse angle to the strings, but use my wrist to help draw the bow. I saw the finger-pulling and wrist-waggling technique in a YouTube instructional video before, but hadn't really grasped the genius of this concept. Now I am able to pass the bow straight(!) across the strings, which also helps me to play with a decent tone.

In retrospect, it is entertaining, but kind of awful too, to imagine how I played when I tried out at the amateur orchestra's practice in February. It intimidated me from the outset, because I'm a low-level employee at a pretty democratic tech start-up, a newcomer to the orchestra with no 'in' with anyone else, with rusty German. The musicians were, as far as I could tell, white-collar professionals 0.5 to 4 decades older, and partly extremely German with the critical-minded lack of democratic feeling that this entails. (I emailed the concert master afterward, and received a polite reply saying that 'one had the impression that I was somewhat overtasked.' That's fair enough; it was other things that hurt my feelings.) They were also traumatized by a civil war within their orchestra and altogether I popped in at an anxious time. At times I've rarely felt more like people were exerting mental voodoo powers wishing me away, despite the kindness of others. Either way, I don't want to picture the embarrassing or insulting(?) way my more harebrained efforts in life look like from the perspective of critical onlookers...

(On top of my overwhelmingly exact violin bowing form, I also found out that I seemed to have no rosin left on the bow after the 'intermission' in the rehearsal ended. So when I set my bow to the string, it startled me by sliding off. I could barely produce a tone above a scratch. And that was not a reassuring precondition with which to start a fast movement in a Beethoven symphony that I was sight-reading after not taking violin lessons in 20 years. Thankfully the scratches were inaudible amongst the superior music of everyone else. But I already realized at the time how silly that was.)

When I practice at home, sometimes I go through the Suzuki instructional notebooks as well as playing scales or easy pieces in other notebooks or the first Kreutzer études. I like 'reconnecting' to the Suzuki classes I started when I was five years old. I remember random things in the course of playing. For example, I remember that the teacher kept criticizing the height at which I held my elbow; the height is supposed to vary with the string that one is striking at the time; and so I keep correcting myself in imitation. The pieces which I'm playing through are each a 'blast from the past,' too; some I've barely ever played since before 1996, so it's like lifting the glass dome off a museum piece that has been kept untouched in half a century.

It's brutal having a harsh taskmaster sitting inside one's head, ever on the alert for a failure. But the music school hasn't gotten back to me about my request for lessons, as far as I know. (There's an infinitesimal possibility something landed in the spam folder unnoticed.) And so I haven't had a teacher who can criticize me from a comfortable distance and well. I also don't know if I want lessons at present. Firstly, because of the aforementioned work situation; and secondly, because of the constant fear I have of not being able to like music any more if I'm taught it. (Which is no reflection on past music teachers — just a present paranoia.) So I'm stuck nagging myself and basically needing to imagine how I'm doing things wrong.

Not to sound too masochistic or self-pitying, but I do that nagging and imagining all the time about everything anyway — except in ballet class, when I can count on the teacher to criticize the whole class with frequency, vigour, and knowledge, and I am blissfully free of the responsibility.