Lesser talents

May 21, 2007 at 3:09 AM

Carl Flesch, the great virtuoso and pedagogue, extolled amateur violinists but he cautioned them to avoid pretensions of professionalism. This good advice is always on my mind when I post a blog entry. I am conscious of my lack of talent. It is driven home to me from time to time.

Most recently I played with a town gown orchestra for a local university. But some background. This university has a full blown professional music school and offers music degrees through PhD. The performing ensembles are only open to music majors and quite frankly, even if they auditioned non-majors, there wouldn’t be many that would make it. It is a top flight university and they have a good number of talented undergraduates who have chosen careers other than music but they still want to play. The university offers them an orchestra and, to augment the numbers, community players (like me) can also play. At concert time a few ringers from the music school are coaxed in to fill vacant chairs in the winds and supplement the strings.

Since I joined mid-year without audition, I was sitting alone on the last desk of the first violins. (If I am lucky, I may be sitting there next year after auditions.). I got to sit next to the ringer, a graduate performance major. Our program wasn’t easy and the first run through at dress rehearsal had her a bit flummoxed. (I was a bit smug.) Second run through was much improved but by performance time a few hours later she performed her ringer task very admirably.

Of course I was awed. She has a lot of talent. I rehearsed the part for hours at home and attended all the rehearsals. I could play it but at significantly more effort than she exerted. I chalk up the difference to that elusive quality called talent. You cannot add one wit to your talent but I believe that you can cultivate the talent you have and do much more with it than you think.

The enabler of talent at any level is technique. Technique can be learned and it can be applied to make you incrementally better than you were. However, the purpose of technique isn’t to make you better than someone else.

I love the democracy of v.com. We have virtuosos with full fledged careers, artists with developing careers, professionals who play in top flight orchestras, gig players, pedagogues of every level and amateurs who range from beginner to whatever playing in idioms from classical to blue grass and everything in between. We come here hoping for some insight that will add to our enjoyment of the violin.

The old modes of learning properly gave eminence and precedence to the experiences of the very talented. They either became pedagogues of some success and repute or they wrote books (that were only published based on their reputation). Now, thanks to the internet, someone with less natural talent can share their experience in confronting the challenges of the instrument. They can describe how they solved problems intellectually. They may be able to restate the advice of an inarticulate musical genius so that it can be digested by those of more modest capacities. They can describe the application of an idea to their own circumstances. They could also be an idiot or a moron. The opportunity comes with a challenge for those who consume the ideas. Is the advice good advice? Is it valid? Is it consistent with the historical traditions of violin playing? Why so? Has it been proven for others? The weblog comment format and the discussion forums provide a great opportunity for comments and criticisms that can warn others, temper the advice or dismiss it.

It is a big experiment. Can lesser talents profit from the experiences of other lesser talents? Is the sharing of experience have any value versus the sharing of expertise?

Time will tell. Thank you Laurie for letting some of us ramble on.

From Pauline Lerner
Posted on May 21, 2007 at 3:55 AM

I think the sharing of experience is very valuable. A person can learn so much from someone else's experiences. You can get a reassuring feeling when you recognize that you are not alone, that someone else has had the same experience and, possibly, the same emotional response that you have. You can learn from someone else's mistakes without having to make them yourself. You can get ideas about new things to try. When you read about an experience that you have not had, you can still get some fresh ideas that may help you with your own issues. Reading about each other's experiences helps make us a community.

I must say "thank you" again to Laurie and Robert for giving us this virtual community.

From Laurie Niles
Posted on May 21, 2007 at 5:00 AM

You are welcome, Corwin.

From Eugene Chan
Posted on May 21, 2007 at 5:18 AM

We even have pianists who know little to nothing about the violin but blog about violin competitions anyway! :-)

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on May 21, 2007 at 11:05 AM

I agree your stand-mate must be very talented, but I think it's likely that the biggest difference between the two of you is still experience. While she learned that music in an afternoon, you aren't seeing all the hard work she has put in in the practice room, the years and years of it that got her to this point. I think all the experiences shared here are valuable.

From Corwin Slack
Posted on May 21, 2007 at 12:28 PM

Karen, indeed. But I am in my 50s and practice every day. She was in her early twenties. If she has more experience than me it is because her talent engine has propelled her far past me.

Interestingly she had a miserable technique which made the talent aspect all the more remarkable.

From Yixi Zhang
Posted on May 21, 2007 at 11:22 PM

"However, the purpose of technique isn’t to make you better than someone else."
Very well said indeed!

Regarding professional though, although I find a lot of people in my non-music profession can display a lot of incompetency and mistakes and I usually don't hesitake to point this out as constructively as I can. But I also feel funny when people outside of a profession think little of the professional. Just because the professionals aren't perfect does not mean they have gone through
rigorous competition and more systematic in depth learning than the armatures do. Until I've walked their path in their shoes, thinking less of them makes me feel,uh, ignorant.

Professionals don't have all the experience required to deal with all the problems (musical, technical, emotional, health, etc and they can be interrelated) that we have in the violin world. They don't even have all the basic techniques that some of us have frequetnly talked about.

This does confirms what you've indicated and what I believe that the internet learning fills all sorts of gaps that professional violinist aren't able to fill.

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on May 22, 2007 at 11:03 AM

I find it most helpful to learn from someone who has achieved a higher level of proficiency than I have, but who has had to work at it, and to whom things don't necessarily come easy or automatic.

One example that comes to mind is reading notes way above the staff. I've always been terrible at that. At one point, when I was a teenager, I asked my teacher (a very talented professional) how one could recognize those notes. How could you know that was a B or C or whatever? They all looked the same at that height. He didn't really understand the question. He drew some notes with 4 and 5 and 6 ledger lines and flashed them at me like flash cards, and said "how many lines? how many lines?" I started to feel nervous and said "I don't know. That's the problem. When it goes by that fast, I can't see it." I didn't know that I had ADD back then, maybe the ADD contributed to my inability. Who knows.

But then, fast forward 25 years, and I'm reading Robert Gerle's _The Art of Practising the Violin_ after reading about it on this site. On p. 68, Gerle draws an imaginary auxiliary staff an octave above the E string and advises you to see it in your mind's eye. All of the sudden, the proverbial light goes on. I can do this! Yes, it requires work, not that it's easy, but this is work that will have a positive outcome. I can finally see a way forward.

I'm sure Gerle is talented too . . . but so was my teacher. And I know some people can just read ledger lines automatically without freaking out or needing crutches, they just memorize, somehow, how the notes look, or it "pops out," and the notes don't all look the same. But others, like me, apparently benefit from an imaginary auxiliary staff. Gerle must have known or taught some of them, or maybe even been one himself. I don't think it matters who is the greater or lesser talent here, what matters is what works.

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Lesser talents

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