![]() |
News by E-mail |
|
|
Violin BlogsViolinist.com members may keep personal journals on the website. Violinist.com's editor selects the best entries for the column below. Links to all other recent blog posts may be found in the column on the right. Top BlogsDecision By Emily GrossmanSeptember 2, 2010 11:35
Matt had a lot of instruments, and he seemed excited to show them to me, including his own fiddle, which had been set up with a flatter bridge and strings closer to the fingerboard for easy fast fiddling. "You lose some of the projection, but that's not really an issue when you play in a band." I noodled around on it and immediately noticed that it liked to slide. You could feel it under your fingers when you searched for the tones. Every violin bears the impression of the one who plays it, like a thumbprint left in clay. If you listen to it, it will tell you where it's been. In the previous shop, I played a violin from 1720. The moment I touched it, I felt as though I'd stepped through a time portal, and I was playing with Bach and Mozart, all light and golden and refined. It demanded to be played just so, and I gladly obliged. Matt handed me an unlabeled fiddle from somewhere in Eastern Europe. "Oh, this one cries when you play it," I remarked as I pulled out a deep, dark wail from the lower register. If I had more time, I would have asked it to tell me its story, why it ended up so sad. But now I was being shown something else, and another thing. So many violins, so little time! And I still needed to make up my mind about the bow. Matt was giving me handouts now. He had a collection of his own arrangements of fiddle tunes that I could have. And here was one of his CDs. As though he could still see the question mark floating over my head, he went into further detail about the qualities of the Nurnberger. In pristine condition, as though it had hardly been played, this was the perfect example of a Nurnberger... Read more...
Happy 65th Birthday Itzhak Perlman By Pauline LernerSeptember 1, 2010 14:39
Yesterday, August 31, was Itzhak Perlman's 65th birthday. Today we can honor him by watching and listening to some of his work. One of the most moving pieces Perlman ever recorded is the theme from Schindler's List. Read more...
PLAYING FOR LIFE; How to keep your child engaged in music, from early childhood through the teens By Susan PascaleSeptember 1, 2010 09:05
How many parents have given their children years of music lessons, only to have the child one day announce: "I quit!" It can be heartbreaking for the parent, not least because of the thousands of dollars they may have invested in lessons and instruments. But inevitably, years later, the former teen will say, “I never should have quit the violin (or cello or viola)! I wish my parents had forced me to stick with it!”
Being a music school director for the past ten years, and the parent of three youngsters (an 8-year-old, a teenager, and a former teen), I have seen this sort of thing happen again and again. So I have made it one of my primary missions to create an environment that keeps kids in music, from tot through teen years. Here are some of my most powerful techniques for keeping children involved in, and passionate about, their music.
1. Start them young - on piano. I have found that children who begin with piano, and then come into my violin or other stringed instrument class, ALWAYS do better than children who have not had early piano training. Violin and other stringed instruments are difficult, due to the many aspects one must focus on at once... Read more...
Mr. Hill Meets Mr. Nurnberger By Emily GrossmanAugust 31, 2010 19:20
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...
Violinist.com Interview with Luthier Peter Prier By Laurie NilesAugust 31, 2010 15:13
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... Read more...
The Stillness Between the Notes By Terez MertesAugust 31, 2010 13:53
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... Read more...
Musician & Muse: A Short Life of Violinist Stefi Geyer, Part III By Emily LizAugust 31, 2010 10:11
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...
Musician & Muse: A Short Life of Violinist Stefi Geyer, Part II By Emily LizAugust 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. Read more...
|
Support Violinist.comSearch Violinist.comEditor's Blogs
Plus: The Weekend Vote Other BlogsCreating a New Studio from Scratch: Advice? Help from a beginner adult player Violin dorks meet kindred spirits Thanks Southwest Strings! Violin - a childhood dream stradi-various! IMPORTANT ALERT - UPDATE! Vernon's big mouth Show Pieces Sabbatical Looking for part time Piano Teacher Got My Fiddle Starting Again...From Scratch Very special illness that wouldn't allow all of us here to play... Some very good articles about violins and violin making - for free download Decent cheap strings for poor students chin/neck/shoulder rest quest might be over Where to sell a full-size Paul Hillaire violin in NY state? College audition dilemma (violin) Want to buy a new case, any suggestion will be very good Interlochen or Bust My Catholic Wedding Story BRAHMS 4! How to choose the best violin outfit for a student? |
|