shift.

I'm getting a new violin teacher, since the current one is moving to Austin for a 2-year residency with her string quartet. I had my first lesson with the new guy this weekend, and it looks like a good change: he's less dedicated to Classical Violin™, and I suspect has more experience teaching adults.

(Teaching adults is definitely a newer thing for the previous teacher, who compulsively tuned my violin at the start of every lesson--at the recital I discovered that this is normal, since of course most kids can't do it, especially for violin--and slipped uncontrollably into the "we" voice at times. She's Canadian, and very nice, and it doesn't bug me that much overall, so it hasn't been worth trying to change.)

Teacher #2 seems totally cool with my "close enough for rock 'n roll" tuning that one would expect from a guitar player (unlike many other instruments, the standard guitar tuning mathematically cannot be perfect, and then also my actual violin playing is the real tuning challenge, not whether my strings are in 100% perfect fifths), and his coaching feels more useful generally.

Evidently he also likes Nordic fiddle music! These guys, for example, who have a new album out:

And was interested to hear about a new band (Dreamers' Circus), as well as not one but two weird Swedish instruments which are not the nyckelharpa: the 5-course modern cittern, and the träskofiol, which of course is a large wooden shoe with violin fittings tacked on. So I'm feeling like he's better suited to help me reach my goal of playing folk music in bars.