...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.