Happy Violinmas

Anna got me the sparkly blue electric violin I'd been ogling for weeks, as well as appropriate stickers:

("This machine kills demons" is on a violin case in Charles Stross's "Laundry Files" Lovecraftian spy novels, which in turn is a riff on Woody Guthrie.)

It actually plays decent, for the price ($100 or so). Not a good choice for absolute beginners, though. And I'm renting an upgrade violin from one of the many high-quality luthier shops in the area, which leads me to recommend that you do that instead of buying one from Amazon. Having had the experience with guitars, I was starting to sense that I'd outgrown the instrument.

[Chris]:  Okay, tell me straight up: how crappy is my violin?
[violin teacher] It's not crappy! It's not like it's impossible to play. For an Internet violin, it's great.

I went into the shop and said, "I bought an Internet violin, and it's been fine, but I've never played a nicer violin, and I have no idea what the differences are, so I would like to try a nicer violin." And behold, I have a nicer violin on a rent-to-own plan.

Sometimes I back into things, so now I'm learning more about this finicky instrument I thought it'd be fun to learn. Having read Stradivari's Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection, I'm now reading Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung. I'd heard the author in passing doing a radio interview, and was struck not that she'd had her Stradivarius stolen, but that she'd felt moved to write a book about it (and apparently a good one).

(If you couldn't quite catch that, another violinist does an interview to talk about the Caprices and what's special about it:)

Happily, my violin ambitions don't really go farther than playing Irish music in bars.

Min Kym does an amazing job of laying out the connection between a virtuosa and her instrument, so we can later understand why--besides the loss of an essentially priceless instrument--the theft was so disabling for her. There are aspects of her life I can relate to, though.

We’re eight, or five, or seven. We race ahead (of course we do). We are child prodigies. We can’t help it. That’s what we are. We don’t ask for it (we don’t train to be it), haven’t been driven by ambition (not yet). We are child prodigies, cuckoos in the nest, oddities, freaks. Later, when we go to music school or college, we might meet someone who is like us, who has lived through the same experiences (there won’t be many), but in the meantime we are on our own. No matter the love and support we get from our families or friends, no matter the guidance from our tutors, we are on our own. We’re not like anyone else. Yes, we can ride a bike or play in the streets, watch TV or jump in the pool, but we are also child prodigies with an ability outside all that. Maybe it will peter out, maybe we’ll crash and burn, maybe turn out to be the best exponent since…since the last one, who knows? We are child prodigies. We don’t quite know it yet, but there’s a long way to go.

I wasn't a music prodigy; maybe I would have been, in a musical family? would I have been a math genius? Impossible to say. I was really, uncomfortably, smart, in a way that set me apart from everyone around me.

I think I've never really talked or written about that part of my life.

It's probably time to start.