Violin Blogs

Mr. Hill Meets Mr. Nurnberger

I was in love with the Hill bow, but I needed to be sure to think rationally, not emotionally, about things, so I promised myself to visit at least three more shops before I concluded my shopping. The Tulsa Violin Shop had a few, but none interested me. After a small bit of internet research, I decided that Kanasas City was the closest town with the most options. My mom was game for a road trip, so we set out early for a pleasant day in the city. After all, everything's up to date in Kansas City...

Dan Lawrence's shop, the first one we visited, lay in cognito. From all outward appearances, it could have been simply someone's home in a suburban neighborhood. We were almost certain we'd read the house number wrong, when finally we saw the shop's sign next to the back door. But passing through the entrance was like stepping into Narnia! Inside lay a beautiful, spacious shop with rows of instruments in all price ranges. My favorite bow in his extensive collection was a contemporary Brazilian by M. Pereira, which I would highly recommend to anyone shopping for a great bow in the $2000 range. Still, it didn't sing like the Hill. Dan and I talked about his rental program, and I tried several of his student models in case I needed to track down a good instrument for someone in my studio. Alaska is not the place to shop, and ordering on line can be risky, since you can't try your instrument out until you get it in the mail. I'd been hoping to find some trustworthy sources for my students to use, and his instruments were of great quality and fair price...
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Violinist.com Interview with Luthier Peter Prier

 The first violin-making school in America was founded in Salt Lake City, Utah?

It's true. I confess: This is a fact I did not know, until last month.

For years, I've been hearing about the exceptional violins coming out of Salt Lake City and noticing the city popping up frequently in the resumes of luthiers. I'd never spent any time in Salt Lake City, a city which lies at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains in the western United States. You may remember that the 2002 Winter Olympics were held there. I found it to be a beautiful place. A ski trip is planned!

But when it comes to violins, one name kept popping up: Peter Paul Prier, master luthier and founder of the Violin Making School of America. The school is now owned and run by Charles Woolf, right next door to Peter Prier and Sons Violins in downtown Salt Lake City. (Here is a list of other violin making schools in the U.S.)

Peter Prier was the reason I wanted to go to Salt Lake City, and the one of the reasons we planned our summer road trip specifically to include this city. Thus I spent a morning in July, talking with Peter Prier and learning about the fine craft of making stringed instruments, about what it takes to become a luthier, and about the school he founded in 1972.

The school, Peter Prier's shop and a recital hall stand in a row along East 200 South Street in downtown Salt Lake. As I walked into the door of Peter Prier and Sons Violins, I was somewhat startled to hear the strum of violin strings overhead– then to look up and see a violin rigged to the door, so the opening door strums the strings. I smiled.

Prier is a maker, dealer and teacher, and my little tour felt like it spanned both centuries and continents...

The Stillness Between the Notes

Vajrapani Institute. Santa Cruz Mountains. I arrive on a Wednesday afternoon, stressed and overactive, seeking silence, solitude.

I’ve come to the right place.

As a Buddhist center and retreat facility, the institute offers private cabins for silent retreat. With my bags, my clutter, my mind a symphony of thoughts, to-do’s, worries, plans, I settle in my cabin and commence what I came to do: sit.

Silence is harder than you think. So is sitting. 

Both challenge the mind. Your thoughts fight you like animals, intent on staying put in your head. The music, the soundtrack of your life, your past and future, play on and on, like a movie being run to an empty theatre house. 

At first, you don’t even notice it’s a soundtrack.

Finally you catch on. You are the observer. The rest is stuff.

Morning fog chills the outdoor air like autumn but the sun burns it away and bakes the earth, this parched place that hasn’t seen rain for several months, nor will it any time soon. But the redwoods fill the landscape with green. The retreat cabins are on an isolated ridge. As far as the eye can see are green shaggy mountains, blue sky, pale gold dirt.

A breeze sends a whisper through the pines. 

Otherwise, silence...

Musician & Muse: A Short Life of Violinist Stefi Geyer, Part III

This is the third part of a three part essay. In case you missed them, here is part one; here is part two.

Bela Bartok was not the first composer to come under Stefi Geyer’s spell. Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) was also afflicted with a deep, passionate love for the virtuosa violinist that lasted for years. Schoeck had first heard her perform in 1905, when she was seventeen. “She thrilled me to the depths of my being,” he said. Their paths crossed again in 1907 when she performed in Leipzig while he was studying with Max Reger (the same composer whose works Stefi and Bartok had played together in Budapest). “My heartthrob, the lovely Stefi Geyer, was here recently; she played wonderfully and enchanted me more than ever,” he wrote to his parents. Even toward the end of his life he sighed, “She knew how to move so beautifully and to walk so beautifully.”

A few months after breaking things off with Bartok, Stefi finally met her long-time admirer in July 1908. Immediately Schoeck began to write for her. First came a tiny Albumblatt, then a full-length Violin Sonata, and then an actual Violin Concerto. All three were dedicated to Stefi. He continued in his attempts to woo her throughout 1908, later claiming they wrote passionate love letters to each other. If they did - and historians are skeptical on the point - they were later burned by his wife. Adding weight to that skepticism is the fact that Schoeck complained to others that all the physical contact he had been able to wring out of Stefi was a chaste kiss, and that Stefi was his only female friend that had not at some point made a pass at him.

Sometime around 1910, Stefi Geyer became engaged to Viennese lawyer Erwin Jung. Predictably, Schoeck referred to him as a “Viennese ponce” - or a person who fakes having class or culture. During her engagement, she invited Shoeck to come to visit her and her family in Budapest. He accepted the invitation, went to Budapest, wrote an unconvincing postcard to his friends that he had gotten over her, came home, and then promptly began writing a violin concerto for her... Read more...
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Musician & Muse: A Short Life of Violinist Stefi Geyer, Part II

By Emily Liz
August 29, 2010 09:34

This is the second part of a three part essay on Hungarian violinist Stefi Geyer. Read the first part here.

The nineteen-year-old Stefi Geyer was an extraordinary person and violinist. Even in a studio as crowded with talent as Hubay’s, she stood out as one of the conservatory’s most exceptional students. She had already played a wide variety of repertoire throughout Europe, and had even recorded in 1906, back in the days when recording consisted of playing an unedited take into a giant horn. She was very pretty, with blue eyes and blonde hair that she wore in two small buns on either side of her head. That beauty, combined with her grace, cleverness, and talent, proved alluring. On June or July 1, 1907 (depending on what source you read), Bartok began to write a violin concerto with Stefi in mind. He left Jaszbereny to continue gathering folk song in Transylvania, but the concerto - and the girl - was always in the back of his mind, as evidenced by the letters he wrote to Stefi that summer.

The letters are long, passionate, and wide-ranging: they are Bartok at his most open and unguarded. We have lost Stefi’s replies, so it is a one-sided conversation, but even so, we learn a great deal about both of them. At the beginning of their relationship, he wrote mainly of music - Wagner, snippets of the concerto in-progress, the characteristics of the folksong he was studying - but by late summer, Bartok had moved beyond music to speak of his own personal beliefs about religion and society. "The middle class, which stands between the highest people and the peasant class, is, owing to its stupidity, actually unenjoyable. We like the childlike naivety of the peasants, which manifests itself in everything often with primitive strength; the intellectual strength of the highest people is impressive, but the idiocy of the middle class - including most of the ‘gentry’ - which lacks natural naivety, is insufferable," he wrote. This was probably not the wisest thing to write to a middle-class girl he wished to woo.

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