Comments

Intriguing thought on Rosin. It’s not just the violin, but the Erhu also uses rosin on the horse-haired bow, and so far as I know, these two instruments don’t share a common ancestor. Even if they do, I suspect rosin was widely used those days for all sorts of purposes, including coating and adding friction to certain surface. So using rosin for bow-hair may not be as much of an invention as a natural choice at the time, as natural and obvious as useing wood for the body and gut for the strings. Just a hunch. Smart Music sounds interesting. Too bad it's not free. I can't even get it to download and play its samples. I got it to play, but I didn't see the very elementary exercises you described. I understand that a computer can be a good teaching tool, but playing with other humans is instructive, fun, and reality grounded. Each parent and/or teacher must make a lot of decisions regarding computer based music training. The only case in which I would wholeheartedly support computer use is a situation in which there are no violin teachers the students can go to. One of my students grew up in a very isolated rural area, and she tried to teach herself violin from Essential Elements. It didn't work too well. Pauline, you're right, I don't think this would work at all without a teacher. My daughter has one at school and another in the Saturday school. And she has me :) Part of the issue here is that she's still bored with the school curriculum and needs something fun to hold her interest. In spite of all her complaining and whining at the time, she learned quite a bit from her Suzuki teacher and is pretty far ahead, in some ways, of what they are doing in class. In other ways though, such as reading music, she's right where she needs to be.

And happily, this is not taking the place of playing with other people: it actually got all three of us (me, my daughter, and my son) playing together or in combinations. What it seems to be taking the place of, much to my relief, is the nagging mother/sullen, recalcitrant child dynamic.