Things I Could Learn From My Dog

Sometimes wish I were more like my dog, Proton. I don’t envy his bad, ten year old hips, floppy ears, and tendency to drool, all of which may come to me eventually if I live long enough, and I’m certainly glad I don’t have a penchant for smelling and eating brown, fragrant items left on the road by other dogs. But he has an attitude toward life from which I could benefit.

He doesn’t handle steps very well anymore and sometimes trips on the two that lead down to our back yard. This would make me very angry if I were in his place, but he gets up and goes on as if stumbling had been part of his plan all along.

We walk together twice a day. Not as far as we used to, but as far as I think he can handle. He’s getting gray around the muzzle, literally and figuratively, and even though our walks appear to be an effort for him, I think he enjoys them and the vet says it’s important to keep him moving.

He staggers occasionally, but he keeps going with no apparent annoyance or embarrassment. I often have to pull him away from an especially enticing bit of some unidentifiable foul substance, but he takes this in stride as well, not seeming to resent my interference. He’s on to the next attraction with little apparent regret at the missed opportunity.

This is the attitude I need to apply to playing the violin in public (“Playing in public” includes even at my lessons, which involve only my very kind and patient teacher). Mistakes are part of musical life, especially mine, but rather than accepting that they happen and continuing to concentrate on the rest of the piece, I get rattled or annoyed at myself, and that makes it much more likely that I’ll make another. This downhill slide usually ends badly.

If I were more like Proton I could ignore the mistakes of the past, even if they happened only two seconds ago in the last measure. Concentrate on what’s coming up. Go back later and fix whatever problem caused the mistakes, but don’t dwell on them now—there are more screw-up opportunities ahead.

And that’s another thing: I anticipate the hard passages ahead and basically mess them up before I get to them. Apprehension will do that—If I expect to mess up the hard parts then that’s just what I'll do.

I don’t know what Proton’s approach to that one would be, but I’m sure it would be better than mine.

It's Never Too Late

When I was a child there were two interests that occupied most of my time: music and science. I had a small telescope and a chemistry set, and I took violin lessons. The telescope was a health hazard because the sky was clearest in the middle of winter, when it was easy to get frostbite. The chemistry set was mostly a fire hazard. The violin wasn’t a hazard exactly, except to the dog’s hearing. None of these did much for the social standing of an already nerdy kid with thick glasses, but that’s another story entirely.

I had always intended that my career would involve science in some way, but when I was about sixteen, I briefly entertained the notion of becoming a professional violinist. “Briefly” means about two weeks and one conversation with friends who told me I was nuts and that “they played better than I did and even they didn’t have a snowball’s chance.”

My friends’ advice was well intentioned, albeit hard to accept, but unnecessary: I came to my senses on my own. I decided that doing science for a living and playing music for fun was far more secure than the other way around and, given the level of my playing at the time, a great deal more realistic.

So I chose physics as a major in college. Four years later (yes, this was back in the days when a four year degree could actually be completed in four years), I discovered to my shock that the job opportunities available to a fresh graduate with a BS in physics varied all the way from scarce to nonexistent.

What did I do? I did what anyone would do—I went to graduate school, duhh. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I sort of fell out of physics and into metallurgy, but that turned out to be a good thing. There were actual job opportunities (I never did any real science except in graduate school, but I did get to do a lot of sciencey stuff).

I played violin or viola (there’s that Dark Side again) occasionally for the next forty years or so in chamber music groups, church services, and the like. I even messed around with country and folk fiddle. I had always liked fiddle tunes, but it’s hard for a classically trained player, even a not-very-well-classically-trained one, to play them without sounding like--well, a classical player.

After retirement a few years ago, since I had more time to do pretty much what I wanted, I started to play more. I was still in country fiddle mode, but classical music must be part of my DNA, and I happened to attend a performance by a local chamber orchestra one evening. Watching the string players, I realized that some of them appeared to be roughly on my level. I thought to myself, “I can do that.”

Auditions were required, so I thought it prudent to find a teacher and clean up my technique a bit. And what better place to look than in the orchestra? I asked the leader of the second violin section if he would take me as a student. Although he wouldn’t admit to being an actual violin teacher, he not only helped me a lot, he even talked them into letting me in without the audition.

Now I’m in the orchestra, and I love it. And I have begun studying with the concertmaster, a woman who turned to teaching after a very successful concert career. She is without question the finest violin teacher I have ever encountered. I am incredibly lucky, and it is only luck; it just never happens that violinists in my situation get to study with teachers of her caliber.

So, being nearly seventy with arthritic hands and fifty years of bad violin habits to overcome, I’m again doing what I really love, warts and all. It really is never too late.

Give It A Rest!

If you have ever played in an orchestra, or have even watched closely during an orchestra concert, you know that there is often a lot of sitting around that goes on. Almost no one in the orchestra has to play all the time. One of an orchestra player’s essential skills, therefore, is to be able to count. I can hear you thinking, “Well, duhh, everyone learns to count by kindergarten. What are you talking about?”

Counting measures of rest (the parts where we don’t play) is what I mean, and unless we do it accurately we’re likely to start playing again at the wrong time, which can be very embarrassing (don’t ask me how I know this). Of course, one of the responsibilities of the conductor is to cue each player (or section, in the case of the strings, which are there in mob force) when it’s time for our entrance, so we could be lazy and wait for the cue. Not a good idea. We might come in on a cue meant for a player right behind us, or the conductor might get distracted by other concerns and forget the cue. It’s best to think of the cue just as assurance that we counted right.

One thing that makes counting harder than it seems is that it’s sort of double counting. We have to count the beats in each measure to know when one ends and the next begins, and we have to count the measures, too. This takes concentration, and it’s easy to get distracted by random thoughts unrelated to what’s going on, or by the beauty of the music.

If a rest lasts more than about eight measures, I generally count them on my fingers. I always felt like an idiot doing this and tried to conceal it, at least from the audience, but in a recent performance I shared a music stand with an excellent young violinist who told me she does the same thing. Besides, even counting on my fingers I’ve sometimes come in at the wrong time. I need all the help I can get, and then some.

Obviously, all this counting depends on knowing where the beat is. This is not always easy. Some musical passages don’t have a clearly defined beat. This is another thing the conductor is for, but some give a very well-defined beat and others sort of stand there and act the music out—“Beat? Beat? I don’t need to show you no steenkeeng beat!”

This may be fine for the New York Philharmonic, in fact they could probably give a passable performance with no conductor at all or, in some cases, in spite of him. A lesser group, probably not. We were recently led by a sparkly young Brazilian guest conductor whose beats and cues were unmistakable. She was on top of every aspect of the music and a real pleasure to work with. Just the kind of conductor we need, because the New York Phil we’re not.

Notes from The Dark Side

For roughly the first half of his career, my father was the Head of the Music Department in a small liberal arts college in Iowa. But every summer for a period of about seven years he packed the whole family off to National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. I was about thirteen when this started and didn’t think very hard about what motivated him, other than since it was a music camp, it was just his thing. I found out later that he wanted each of us kids to have the benefit the camp could provide, and there was a deep discount offered to the children of camp staff members. He couldn’t afford to send any of us there unless he went also and joined the teaching staff. So that’s what he did. What he earned for the summer just barely covered the family’s expenses and our camp tuition.

It was an priceless experience. I was used to being a fairly large fish in an extremely small puddle of a school orchestra back home. The first orchestra rehearsal at Interlochen was a rude shock. I don’t remember what we were playing, but it started off with an impossible run up the fingerboard that left me in the dust. The other violinists, most of whom had been there in previous seasons, were unfazed. By about half way through the eight week (!) season I could keep up, but getting to that point took a lot of work.

The next season started off with a shock of a different kind. The initial seating assignments for the string players were announced by posting a list at the entrance to the dining hall. My name did not appear on the list for either the first or second violin section. Entirely against my will and without my knowledge I had been forced over to the Dark Side to play the viola!

I knew absolutely nothing about the viola, except it was heavier than the violin, used a different system of notation, I didn’t own one, and I had to suffer this purgatory for two weeks. There were several other violinists who had been similarly violated and we were given no instructions except to go borrow a viola from the instrument shop. For learning to read the music, we were on our own.

One thing that I should point out here is that the better you play, the closer you sit to the front of the section. Every week we performed a little ritual of one-on-one comparisons with our peers using the harder passages from the week’s music. The rest of the section voted on who played better, the winner taking the seat closer to the front. A lot of self-esteem was at stake in these little dramas, let me tell you. And here I was, stuck playing an instrument I wasn’t familiar with and couldn’t read the music for, competing against a bunch of actual violists, complete with horns and pointed tails. And meanwhile, my colleagues in the violins were getting all the good seats.

The viola part for most orchestral music is even less inspiring than the second violin part, by the way, just to add to the insult. However, somehow I survived my two weeks, learned to read the notes just in time to return to the violins, and now can even admit that in retrospect I’m glad for the experience. I haven’t played the viola for some time now, but I still know how, and I’m ready if the need arises to return to the Dark Side.

One Alleluia To Go

Performance anxiety (no, not that kind, although maybe that, too—I mean the kind you get when you have to play a musical instrument in public) is a hazard for all musicians, professional and amateur alike. I used to get it in spades when I was a kid. Now I mostly avoid it by only playing in an orchestra, where there’s usually so much other stuff going on that unless I really mess up big time no one notices.

I used to get performance anxiety even when I didn’t have a performance planned. My parents had friends over for dinner occasionally, and if things got a bit dull my dad would say, “Son, go get your violin.” I lived in dread of this every time we had guests because it almost invariably happened when I had not practiced for several days (this was more frequent than it should have been).

I would get so angry with Dad for doing this! Then, in my characteristically introspective and self-deprecating way I would think, “Well, Dummy, if you didn’t let so much time go by without practicing you’d be ready for him.” I had to admit that this was completely true, but did I change my slacker ways? Of course not.

Thinking back on it, he may have been trying to subtly encourage me to practice more regularly. He never prodded or pestered me, but he had his own way of hinting that you never know when you might be called upon to play something.

He was right, too. I remember once in college when my roommate, a music major, happened to notice my copy of a transcription for violin and piano of Vocalise, a composition for voice and piano by Rachmaninoff. I had played it in church once or twice, but not for a long time. In fact, I hadn’t played at all for a long time (I was a physics major; playing the violin was not in my curriculum). My roommate knew the piece but was surprised to see that it had been transcribed for violin. “Let’s go find a piano and try it out,” he said. “Oh, no!” I thought. Tragically, the only piano we could find was in the student lounge, which, shockingly, was full of students.

That didn’t bother him at all, but for me it was instant panic! The long time without practice, the lack of preparation for even the idea of playing, and the other students who certainly weren’t expecting some guy to wander in and start playing a violin, all added up to a case of nerves like I had never had before and have never had since. We played it, but my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t produce a smooth tone to save my soul. Roomie didn’t say anything, but he gave me a puzzled look and I’m sure he thought, “What’s wrong with this guy?” I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Oh—full disclosure—I did really mess up big time in an orchestra once. I was playing viola in a performance of Handel’s Messiah. Just before the end, everyone goes “Alleluia” about four times, then there’s a whole measure of dead silence, and then one final “Alleluia.” Well, this time it wasn't dead silence, because when everyone else came to that measure, I still had one Alleluia to go, and I played it! It probably wasn’t a coincidence that they never asked me to play again.

...The Best Violining I've Ever Heard!

My four-year old grandson Mark (not his real name) loves to draw pictures. He and his family live close to us and his mom, our daughter, brings him and his sisters over at least once a week. Markie spends much of his time drawing things, and one day one of them was me, practicing my violin. I would say it was a pretty good likeness. He captured my gray hair, the bow, even the details of the eighth-notes on my music.

One detail that he must have embellished from memory is the violin itself. A violin is a complicated shape, and his bears a striking resemblance to a guitar, complete with sound hole and six pegs. His daddy plays the guitar, so that had an obvious influence on his image of my instrument.

One day he came into the room when I was practicing and said, “Grampa, that’s the best violining I’ve ever heard!” So far in his young life he hasn’t heard really good “violining,” which is lucky for me, since mine is far from world class. Where I live there are so many good players, I’m not even county class. Some day he’ll find that out, but until then I’ll gladly accept his praise.

I probably can’t hope to get really good at playing the violin by the time Markie can tell the difference. I’ve been playing off and on for fifty years, of which all but the first eleven or so were mostly off.  Only since my retirement five years ago have I been free to spend a respectable amount of time with the instrument, and only in the last year have I found a really good teacher. She is making a big difference in my playing, but reversing fifty years of bad habits is an uphill battle for both of us.

My father, who spent his career nurturing the musical development of young people, often said that the early teenage years were the crucial ones for establishing solid musical technique. Like a lot of young people, I had other things besides the violin to occupy my attention back then. This probably disappointed my father, but he never said so. He believed strongly in providing his kids with opportunities, which he did selflessly and generously, but letting them find their own way and make their own choices.

Yes, I practiced, but not as religiously as I would if I had it to do over again (actually, I suppose that’s not true—if I had it to do over I would undoubtedly make the same mistakes again, since I would be the same goofy, distracted teenager I was the first time around).

Building technique on the violin is much harder when one is pushing seventy than it was at fourteen, but I suppose what we euphemistically call maturity contributes to determination and persistence what it takes away from aptitude.

Scales and Vegetables

My father, in addition to having a PhD in music theory and composition, had the good sense to marry a woman with a degree in “home economics”. I don’t know whether this is still offered by colleges—probably not, since these days young women are more interested in being turned into attorneys and stock brokers—but my sisters, my brother, and I were mothered by a trained expert. One thing she always insisted on was that we Eat Our Vegetables.

Practicing scales is the musical equivalent of eating your vegetables. It’s important for building and maintaining good technique. Some people don’t care for either vegetables or scales, but I like vegetables and to some extent even enjoy playing scales.

I have just finished the Hrimaly two-octave scales for the violin and have started on the three-octave series. Proton, my black Labrador music critic, usually keeps me company while I practice. He hates the F major scale, the first step on our descent down the circle of fifths toward The Hell of Six Flats. I’m not too fond of it either, since it goes way up in the nose bleed part of the fingerboard where one finger has to get out of the way before the next one can be put down. I think the notes up there remind him of a dog whistle. Or maybe he has perfect pitch—I don’t know—I certainly don’t. Anyway, he goes to the door of the room, which I keep closed to avoid inflicting my scale practice on my wife, and waits more-or-less patiently to be put out of my misery. Sometimes I’d like to go with him.

Each step down the circle of fifths adds a flat and makes the scale harder by taking away one more note that resonates with an open string and can be used as a pitch reference. By the time I reach the smoking pit of G Flat there are none left and I’m adrift. The only non-flatted pitch is F. What good is that? After I’ve been up to like 17^th position and back I’ve usually modulated gradually to the nearest sensible key—G major or something—I tend to play sharp if I have nothing to hang onto.

Not only is it good for technique to practice scales in even the painful keys, now and then you actually have to use one of them. The orchestra I play in is preparing the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth for its next performance (life being too short for the whole Symphony, I suppose). It starts out innocently enough in F, then suddenly sneaks into six flats for awhile, then veers crazily into four sharps. At least he had the sense to come back to F at the end. Better composers than he have ignored that rule—think J. S. Bach’s A Musical Offering, in which one of the canons ends a key higher than it starts. Of course, Bach was using this device as a metaphor, sucking up to King Frederick II.

By the way, my dear mother also worked outside the home, as a teacher, so she wasn’t a complete fossil.