Parents often ask me how long and how often their children should practice. For beginners, I usually pass on the advice my teacher gave me long ago: the student should take the violin out of the case and tune it every day. That’s it.
That’s not really it, of course. But the thing is that the case is sometimes a barrier to playing. If you take it out and tune it, you’ll find you want to put your fingers on the neck. You’re going to want to try that bow out on the strings. You’re going to want to play a little something. And before long, you’re practicing.
Once you’ve got a regular practice habit, once you decide you really want to play, then things get more detailed. this article has some interesting things to say about quality of practice vs. quantity. What do you think?
Remember that great arrangement of Guns ‘N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” I posted a few months ago? Well Adam DeGraff of the Dueling Fiddlers is back with a new tutorial, this time for Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” Go forth and fiddle!
It’s recital season time. One of the studios I teach at has a recital program that involves putting some of the students together in bands. Mostly this has meant vocalists and those playing traditional rock band instruments, but we’ve started including some violin, which means I find myself arranging violin parts. This year I’ve got students playing Green Day’s “Good Riddance” and Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”
One of the challenges about arranging rock for violin is that often the violin is called upon to cover a guitar part, which means playing chords. This is less of an issue for an advanced violinist, but it can be difficult for students who are both used to playing on one string at a time and also used to thinking of their instrument as a tool for melody, not so much harmony. Playing rock arrangements is a great way to get students (and me too) to think outside the box as to what the violin can do.
Landing double and triple stops accurately is tricky, especially if you’re fairly new at violin. When you are a rank beginner, double stops happen all the time accidentally. You spend a lot of time trying to make sure you’re playing on just one string at a time. But when you get a little more experienced and actually want to play on two strings at once, it doesn’t always happen the way you want it to.
While my students have been working through playing on multiple strings in lessons this week, I’ve been working on some of my favorite chordal violin pieces at home, to remind me of the challenges. I’ve been playing Biber’s 16th sonata of the rosary (the passacaglia):
and the Gavotte en Rondeau from Bach’s Partita E Major Partita:
The above video, featuring Gil Shaham is not my favorite video of the Gavotte en Rondeau. That honor goes to a 1970s recording of Itzhak Perlman Gavotte en Rondeau is not this one, but a film from the 1970s that features Itzhak Perlman. You’ll have to click through — embedding has been disabled. It’s worth it, though, for the excellent shots of his amazing bow technique. It’s interesting to compare it to Shaham’s version, which seems to be more about Shaham and less about Bach. Also beautiful, but quite different.
When I first learned the Bach and the Biber, I was using Baroque equipment — a violin with a flatter bridge, and a short bow curved the opposite direction from a modern bow. You can see a comparison of baroque and modern bridges and bows here. With modern equipment played in the traditional manner, you can only play, at most, two strings at a time without doing what we call “rolling” the chord — playing one note at a time in close succession to approximate the sound of playing all at once. With baroque equipment, you can play on a maximum of three strings. But as far as I knew, there was no way to play on all four.
However, today Shar (the store every string player should know about) posted a link to a performance by Chinese violinist Chuan Yun Li, playing on all four strings with modern equipment. How does he do it? Watch:
It’s a creative and surprisingly effective solution to the problem. But please, violin students, don’t try this at home without quick access to a bow repair shop!
I started playing violin when I was in the third grade. My elementary school gave everyone a hearing discrimination test at the end of second grade and those who got above a certain score were offered in-school violin lessons in third grade. In fourth grade, everyone else could take an instrument and those who’d started on violin had the option of switching to something else. But I loved the violin. It was what I’d wanted to play anyway, mainly because I loved listening to my parents’ recording of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti by an obscure European orchestra featuring a then-unknown young flutist by the name of Jean-Pierre Rampal.
I studied classical music exclusively, with an emphasis on baroque-style playing, until I got to grad school when I started to experiment with other styles. I quickly fell in love with Irish fiddle and spent a lot of time in Chicago-area Irish bars playing seisiuns — semi-organized gatherings of musicians who want to play traiditional tunes for free beer. I found though, that Irish wasn’t just fun to play. It helped loosen up my baroque playing by freeing me from the printed page and teaching me to listen better and understand how ornaments worked and what they did rather than just reading the ornaments off the page or following teacher instructions. Learning by ear taught me to take greater control over my interpretation and helped me get out of a rut of playing notes and start playing music.
My latest stylistic interest is bluegrass and one of the bands I’ve been enjoying a lot is The Punch Brothers. Here they are playing “Rye Whisky.” The instruments you are seeing, in case you’re unfamiliar, are fiddle, acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo and double bass, and of course the voice. Note that the bass is mostly playing pizzicato (plucking the strings rather than using the bow), as is traditional for bluegrass (he does actually pick up the bow before he starts to play, but he doesn’t seem to use it). The mandolin, guitar and banjo play during the vocals. The fiddle sometimes drones during the vocals, but doesn’t play out except when the singing cuts out. This is actually analogous to the way instruments were used during the baroque era. It was practical — winds and bowed instruments covered up the voices in the days before amplification. Plucked instruments like lutes and harps played with keyboards like harpsichords (where the strings are also plucked) and portative organs (much smaller and quieter than church organs) and bass instruments like theorbos and archlutes and viols (bowed).
Here’s an example: the Prologo (“Dal mio promesso”) from Monteverdi’s 1607 opera Orfeo. This is not my favorite recording of the piece, but you can hear when the string section cuts in and out around the voice. The big instrument in front is, I believe, a theorbo, although without being up close and personal, I wouldn’t swear it wasn’t an archlute. They look quite similar.
Recently, The Punch Brothers’ banjoist Noam Pikelny won the first annual Steve Martin prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. Here he is playing “Duelling Banjos” with Steve Martin on the David Letterman Show (actual playing begins around 3:40.)
Since I mostly listen to the Punch Brothers on a bluegrass station, I was unfamiliar with their forays into baroque music until a friend posted this incredible arrangement of the Allegro third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #3. First, here is the traditional version, as played by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra:
And here is the Punch Brothers, the same band playing Rye Whisky above with one additional violinist, the arranger of the piece Rob Moose. Note that this version includes an opening transitional section that is not part of the Freiburg recording but is part of the original piece.
I really love how the mandolin is suddenly sounding like a lute to my ears, just because of context. I love the lightness that the change in ratio of plucked to bowed strings adds. And I find I’m not thinking of it at all as a bluegrass band. It’s very idiomatic. I think Bach would be pleased with the performance. Most of all, though, I love the way I’m suddenly hearing a little baroque in the bluegrass and a little bluegrass in baroque. As an ethnomusicologist, I am unlikely to ever suggest that all music is music. That’s not how I think about it at all. As a scholar, I’m interested in the connections between the styles, connections that come from shared interests and instruments and contextual demands. As a violinist and teacher, I love working with multiple styles as a way to develop technique, skill, and playfulness that can’t help but improve musicality and a love of what you do.
Adam de Graff makes me want to learn to play the violin all over again. If you think fiddle-playing is an ossified art, confined to conservatory halls, you haven’t heard The Dueling Fiddlers. Check out their website, which proclaims, “We are Rock Violin. You are too.”
Last year, de Graff, who is one half of the Dueling Fiddlers (the other is Russell Falstad) posted a video on youtube of him playing his own arrangement of Guns N Roses “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” When requests for the sheet music started pouring in from around the world (as he states in the first video below), he decided to host a Rockin’ Fiddle Challenge .
The contest is now over, but you can see his explanation of how it worked here:
If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, the basic idea is that you could try your hand at de Graff’s arrangement, upload your version to youtube and enter the contest. The above video gives you Graff’s email so you can request a .pdf of the sheet music. Graff also breaks down the piece into ten parts on his youtube channel and teaches you how to play it (the videos are labeled SCOM 1-10).
To give you an idea of how great this arrangement is, here is Guns N Roses’ original version of the song:
Here is Adam de Graff’s version:
And here is Rockin Fiddle contest winner Amy Lidell, age 16:
The Duelling Fiddlers have other great arrangements, like this version of AC/DC’s Back in Black:
And here’s their mashup of Ashoken Farewell (the theme from Ken Burns’ Civil War series), Green Day’s Time of Your Life (Good Riddance), along with quotes from a host of other songs (including every violinist’s staple, Pachelbel’s Canon in D). The call it, of course, “Farewell and Good Riddance.” Oh, and they recorded it standing in the middle of a river.
Reinterpreting rock songs is a fine upstanding tradition. One of the first arrangements I remember hearing – and it completely blew my mind at the time – is the Kronos Quartet’s arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze. Here they are circa 1988 (alas, the opening is clipped off ):
Many years ago, I was lucky enough to stumble into an Irish fiddle class at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. I’d just started on graduate work in ethnomusicology and I had always loved listening to Irish music and thought, as a long-time violinist, I’d like to try my hand at it. The class was taught by guitarist Jim DeWan and fiddler Liz Carroll. At the time, I didn’t know a lot about Irish music and hadn’t heard of Liz Carroll, but I quickly learned that she is one of the most incredible fiddler players working today. So in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, here are a few examples of Liz’s excellent work:
Liz with John Doyle (formerly of Solas) playing some lightning-fast reels:
Liz and John Doyle playing at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, 2009:
More reels with John Doyle:
That last one is my favorite of the three videos for two reasons: 1) You can really hear Liz’s amazing rhythmic sense and 2) Her feet. I noticed Liz’s dancing feet from the very first class. When she sits, she practically dances along with the music. It’s contagious. I remember talking to her about Cape Breton-style fiddling and she was admiring the way Natalie MacMaster dances while she plays. But Liz dances too, in her own way.
Here’s Natalie playing and dancing. Stick with this recording until the end — it’s where the fireworks really happen:
And here she is on a TED talk with Donnell Leahy playing and talking about what she does:
Playing Irish fiddle quickly became one of my chief musical joys. I’ll talk more about how it compares to playing classical music and what it’s like to jump into another style another time. But for now, I hope this taste of Celtic fiddle has whetted your appetite for more.
Frequently, parents of my younger students ask what their children should be listening to at home. My usual answer is “anything and everything.” Listening to a wide variety of styles and genres of music is the best way to build a critical ear and a love of music. Find out what your child likes explore it.
That said, there are a few classics that I love to introduce. One of my own favorites — and one of my son’s as well — is Sergei Prokoviev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” a piece for orchestra and narrator designed to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra.
I first introduced my son to the piece with the help of this book, which somehow insinuated itself into my collection:
You can find an English language version here. I like it because the pictures are engaging — you can see the duck swimming around inside the wolf’s belly, but also because it contains snippets of the notated themes for each character.
We also made a set of puppets — paper cutouts on sticks — with each character. My son colored the fronts, and we put pictures of the instruments that played their themes on the back. We would put on the recording and act out the story with the puppets.
But as much as we like the book and puppet shows, we love the old Chuck Jones cartoon version. Here it is, broken into two parts.
