Comments

That Bell CD is one of my favorites. There's something so refreshingly honest about his interpretations on it. “What then are difficulties? What does difficulty mean? I think very often this is best answered in terms of the player not the music.”

Very true! A difficult task means the task and me are not a good fit. The misfit may be temporary due to my current state or skill set, and I can make the better fit once I’ve properly altered my current state or skill set. But it could also be a misfit with my natural disposition. In such case, the task can be impossibly difficult to me.

I sometimes wonder there may be such fundamental misfit between my violin playing and me. I’ve done some difficult things in life to believe this. I pretty much taught myself English in China. I then finished grad school and law school as an adult ESL. I also did classical voicing (soprano). None of them is as hard as violin playing in the sense that I could figure those supposed very hard stuff out in a short period of time and then things got easier and easier. When it comes to violin, I feel it just gets harder and harder, and after years of playing, I still can’t figure the bloody thing out. I’m afraid offering flawed jewel is all I can do at the end of the day and that’s pretty sad.