Fiddle Tunes

I finally went back to the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes! I went way back in 2019, and then didn’t, obviously. This time I rented a car and drove myself, which guaranteed that I had a ride—a problem I had last time—but I didn’t properly account for traffic. Much like the Bay Area, a trip I’d counted 2.5 hours for wound up more like 4.5. Unlike the Bay Area, I really love the landscape.

Not that the Pacific Northwest is monolithic, even if you stay west of the Cascades and the moisture it traps there. Port Townsend lies in the Olympic Rain Shadow, a term surely coined by real estate agents, but despite that, actually true.

When I worked for Chef, I had a lot of trips to Seattle, and over the years I’ve heard two kinds of Seattle residents (past, present, or future):

1. "It is so gray and rainy, it drives me nuts, especially the long winter nights."
2. "The weather here is actually fine, but don’t tell anyone, because then they’ll move here."

I’ve been to Seattle at all times of year, essentially randomly scattered through the seasons, and I gotta say, it does indeed seem fine. It rains sometimes. It’s overcast sometimes. It’s sunny sometimes. It’s hot sometimes. And the coffee is truly outstanding.

Playing the violin is a very emotionally fraught thing for me, and my brain has not yet found a way to learn tunes and still remember them the next day. I think next year’s solution is to bring a guitar, an instrument I’ve played for 30 years, and if I’m not amazing at it, I also know I can sit in a group and I don’t have to think about where B-minor is.

(Yes, I have a travel guitar in mind, which I do not yet own. This is me we’re talking about: I love shopping for instruments so much, I love helping other people shop for instruments. Once I think "guitar that’s pleasant to play, takes up little space, and likely to survive being checked baggage," there’s only one answer.)

I made it be more of a vacation: I had a really nice Airbnb to hang out in, and I got to see Rachel and Darren for the first time since 2019. I slept a lot. I made a friend or two. It was a good week, just…weird, because things are weird. The world is weird. This was a sort of normal thing to do. Which was weird.

Fort Worden is an incredible place to be; I feel like if I lived in town I would be spending a certain amount of time there. It’s one of three Army bases built to protect the opening to Puget Sound, but then we and our enemies all invented military aircraft, and suddenly the fort’s intended function was irrelevant. Eventually it was shuttered and then taken up as an arts center.

And, hey, if you’ve got a spare hangar for observation balloons, you can turn it into a concert hall, and have the giant doors open one side of the stage to the outside.

And, finally, the tides are like nothing I’ve ever seen.

I have never even heard of that sort of mini-tide. It’s weird.

I will enjoy visiting again.

in which musicians look at me funny.

I went to Wintergrass last week, in Bellevue, WA, spitting distance from Seattle. My many, many, many trips to Sea-Tac Airport were mostly for work, with only so much free time and energy for going places. So I’d never been to Bellevue. I spent the whole time in the downtown office-buildings-and-hotels kind of area, so arguably I still haven’t been to Bellevue. I hope there’s more to it than that.

Wintergrass is, surprisingly enough, a (mostly) bluegrass-focused festival, in the winter. The days are full of workshops, and the afternoons and nights are full of concerts. I mostly went because the Internet told me Le Vent du Nord was performing, and also Genticorum. The Quebecois bands don’t come to this coast much—who can blame them?—and at this point I’ve met a couple handfuls of people likely to be there, so it seemed promising.

It was fun! It’s still depressing to be around such high-level groups and have such a hard time joining in, the same as at Fiddle Tunes in 2019; I found a beginners-friendly subgroup, and eventually realized I should have just been with them all week. I have some perception stuff that makes music extra challenging, and one of them is that I don’t have a strong working memory for audio, and I can have a hard time determining figuring out what note someone else is playing. For example, say I’m trying to suss out a tune a group is playing: I’ll have a hard time figuring out the starting note. I do okay after that, but also I can have a hard time hearing which pitch is higher or lower,  and also I have a hard time hearing or singing or playing octaves.

I noticed something as I would talk to people. I have 6 violins (I think), and my two favorites are the "actually quite nice but still made in China for a certain price point," and the "absolutely stunning, much more expensive handmade in the U.S. by a master of the craft," both 5-strings. I bought the Very Nice Violin through a guy in SF who I met at Fiddle Tunes 2019, who introduced me to various folks as "the guy who bought the Very Nice Violin." (I have #4 of that model, and I got to play #5, which seemed about the same, but I’d need them next to each other to know.)

Then I tell people that I brought the Picnic Violin, because the Very Nice Violin hasn’t left the house yet and I would just be anxious traveling with it. I love the Picnic Violin, but it’s a commodity instrument, easily replaced.

And then some people look at me oddly. I think so many of them are professional musicians, they had some difficulty understanding that I would not bring my favorite instrument to this week where I would be learning and sharing music. It’s their companion for expressing themselves. It’s not like mine isn’t, but one of its gifts has been to help me be a better player, so I can get a great sound out of the Picnic Violin, and use it to learn on.

(In the beginner-friendly subgroup, one of the coaches said I was getting a really good bluegrass tone out of it. I started to say "Yeah, I like—" and he said, "No, you’re getting a really good sound." I should probably have that embroidered and hung on the wall.)

It’s nice to be home, though. The Very Nice Violin just has…more, of whatever quality you’d imagine. Responsiveness, volume, depth, anything. It’s just…more.

I’ll leave the house with it someday. But not yet.

that new-violin smell.

Seriously, though, I can still smell the varnish. I think it was finished a week or two before I picked it up.

When learning to ride a motorcycle, one cognitive challenge we have is the genuinely alarming angles we have to tilt over in a curve. It’s freaky, and 100% necessary.

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Motorcycle tires are an amazing technology, and the truth is that on pure dry pavement, and often wet as well, tires will grip really well at extreme angles. That’s why motorcycle tires have a round profile, instead of a car’s square profile.

So we tell each other: go ahead and lean the bike. The tires are better than you are.

This violin is better than me. I learn just by playing it. It has more dynamic range (quiet/loud), more depth of sound, crystal-clear high notes, a much more powerful (i.e. viola-like) C string. I know it makes me a better violinist because when I go back to any of my factory violins, I play them better as well.

It’s just very nice, and I love it.

another addition to the zoo.

Today is the 6-year(!) anniversary of picking up the violin! I thought it was 7, but my teacher points out he forgets, on account of the, uh…I dunno. 30-35 years of making music before that? The trumpet was a loss because I had braces and a developing case of PTSD from school, but I learned to read music, and when I went to boarding school I took guitar lessons and started singing. I still play guitar a lot. I don’t know how much I’ve improved over the years, but it’s my mother instrument. Piano would have ultimately been more useful, though it would have required a special education teacher to help me make sense of piano scores.

(I have trouble distinguishing details in a bunch of identical straight lines, which makes music an adventure, and piano scores just make my brain shut down.)

I’m buying a Nice Violin™: a 5-string by a guy who has mastered his craft and loves experimenting. He’s been collaborating with a fiddler/luthier who knows 5-strings inside and out and has been coaching the maker on what the sound and playability should be. The maker takes that back to his shop and just does his thing to make it sound like that. This is his fourth 5-string, so "#4" for short.

(I visited him over the summer: we thought we’d combine that with visiting Honor’s cousin in the same town. The cousin said "Oh, yeah! He’s a couple doors down, I helped him move his fridge." It cut down some travel time.)

It turns out I saw this one "in the white" in his workshop, unvarnished; he didn’t have it strung up, so I didn’t play it, but I did get to hold it up alongside the Dahlia (the model name for my current violin I’ve played for three years now). I’ll take pictures, but it’s a little silly how different they are.

I’m keeping the Dahlia, because while it’s an uncommonly good factory-built violin from China, if I take it out to a bar or whatever and it goes missing, that will be sad,  but it is replaceable. As is the bow I (will continue to) use, which is carbon fiber. The Dahlia also has a really, really good piezoelectric pickup in it, which is a handy thing to have around. Also I like playing it and it looks cool.

#4 deserves a name, and to tell the truth, the Dahlia might also. We’ll see what #4 tells me, beyond "you have a lot of practicing to do."

self-revision.

At the end of the day, who we are is a story. We tell it to the world, to tell it how to treat us. (Whether it listens or not.) We tell it to ourselves, to remember who we were yesterday, and who we want to be tomorrow. Our sense of self is a little like cooking: no amount of skill can make up for crappy ingredients. I make a killer salt-crusted roast chicken, but not if the chicken was bought several days past due from Grocery Outlet.

Growing up, I was the nerdy, book-absorbed kid, and Tim and Ben were so profoundly gifted with their bodies, that I always felt like I was also the awkward, uncoordinated one. In the team sports that were prioritized, that was absolutely true. I was, and remain, mostly rubbish at baseball, basketball, and soccer. I’m sure I would have sucked at football. I was dropped into a gymnastics class that was unable to help me. Martial arts were off the table, because that was fighting. (Or something. It’s complicated, and I'm not 100% sure what the problem was. My life would have unfolded differently, for sure.)

It emerged that I was pretty good at tennis. In the violent, traumatic time of 7th and 8th grades, I carved out some space for myself by being good at the ersatz handball played between the two classroom buildings. (We used a racquetball and no gloves, so you needed a baseline pain tolerance.) My boarding school requires you to do some sort of sporty thing every term, so I did tennis, volleyball, softball, soccer, and weights. I was still good at tennis, and I turned out to be quite good at volleyball. (Softball and soccer were still a bit of a waste, but with nobody pretending the game is anything more than a curriculum requirement, who cares?)

For some reason, I joined the swim team as a diver. I wish I remembered why. It was appalling. Incredibly anxiety-provoking. When you dive, failure is painful. I was bad at it. Senior year, a kid broke his ankle, and I was on the varsity team. I did really poorly. I hit my head on the board at an away meet. Clearly I was gawky and uncoordinated.

Except...I'm not, actually. Even before aikido got me inhabiting my body properly, I was naturally good at a whole bunch of stuff:

• tennis
• racquetball
• handball
• volleyball
• sharp objects
• hitting people with sticks
• climbing
• not falling down cliffs

Ben and I used to have these crappy dart launchers, the kind of rubber suction-cup darts that often don't quite fit and are never really straight, and even if they were, they have the aerodynamics of a handful of wet sand. I was pretty consistently able to hit the outside of Ben's ear, from 15 feet away. I knew how the launcher worked, I knew how the shape of the dart affected its flight. Straightforward enough, but my therapist assures me it's atypical, as is being able to grab an insect out of the air. (Even if all I can do is crush it. Not flies, but mosquitos, gnats, and moths.)

Remember that time I made friends by flawlessly throwing a hatchet? I had literally never thrown a hatchet before.

(It's vastly easier and safer than throwing knives, which is why people have been opening axe-throwing franchises for parties, not knife-throwing. I think the difference is in how closely a hatchet's mass is concentrated around its axis of rotation, meaning the blade is not going as fast as a knife blade does. The mass's inertia keeps it in alignment in flight. And, finally, the blade is heavier and has a lot more energy behind it, which knives don't, which is why just getting knives to stick in a target—never mind hitting what you were aiming at—is an achievement.)

So it's not that I didn't get my share of the sporty genes, as though to compensate for getting more than my share of the bookish genes; it's just that, as happens, my growth was asymmetrical, and it took a long time to find the body stuff I'm good at. Oddly, this excludes dancing, which is so hard for me it's not fun at all. Same with video games.

And now I can read and play viola music, leaving me no wiggle room to doubt that I am, inter alia, a viola player. One of the violin challenges is knowing—feeling—where the notes are on the fingerboard.

One of the viola challenges is that the notes are in a different place from the violin.

Guess who doesn’t have a ton of trouble playing in tune on a viola.

maybe some other time.

You may have suspected that I enjoy the process of shopping for, buying, and playing musical instruments. You may not have suspected that I enjoy it so much, I get really excited about helping other people shop for and buy musical instruments. I am limited in time, space, and money, but also the right instrument for me isn’t going to be the right one for anyone else. Five years ago I could not have imagined the violins I play now, which are…not persnickety, exactly. But you have to ask them the right way.

(I’ve tried some violins in the 1800-1875 range, and they are fascinating, but not so much that I want the project of owning one. They require maintenance, like your 1953 British motorcycle that leaks and burns a quart of oil every week. Very particular maintenance.)

It’s weird to anthropomorphize instruments, or anything else, but everything we make ends up with its own set of quirks so distinctive it makes more sense to just call it "personality." This is true with sailboats: on Outward Bound we sailed as a pair of 30’ wooden boats, built by the same people to the same pattern, but my boat topped out at 6 knots, while the other boat, in the same wind, would do 7 knots. Wood is obviously organic, but in the aggregate, it’s true of the 98%-synthetic Sunfish sailboats too.

We are fortunate to have some world-class instrument sales and service shops here, which is how I got to play a $110,000 guitar yesterday. It’s a 1940 Martin D-28, which my 70s Japanese pseudo-Martin so faithfully copies. I was not interested in playing it, but an older gentleman came in and asked to try it, and we got to chatting. He said "I would love this, but I don’t quite have the cash right now," which I would not have taken at face value before living here, where there’s a Ferrari dealership across from Taquería El Camarón.

(Until fairly recently it was also a Maserati and I think McLaren dealer. Maybe the pandemic forced them to cut back.)

I gathered he has more than a few Martins at home, collectible enough that $110,000 is a price range he’s familiar with. Aside from the starting challenge of having $110,000, it’s actually really hard to spend $110,000 on an ordinary performing guitar! If an instrument isn’t famous by association—like $1 million for a vintage guitar from Keith "I Can’t Believe I’m Not Dead By Now" Richards—you’ll have to call around just to find one. A gorgeous 1888 guitar (#SE-124) by Antonio de Torres, who more or less created the guitar as we know it, is entirely playable and costs $275,000. (Higher than they seem to sell for at auction.) By contrast, if you want a $275,000 violin, I know a couple local places off the top of my head that can probably give you several to try out. It’s not quite a joke when we say you can translate guitar prices to violins by adding a zero on the end.

ANYWAY.

This 1940 Martin really does glow, but only somewhat more than my not-Martin. It is loud, easily the loudest dreadnought I’ve ever heard. I played it briefly. And it’s…fine? It’s a vintage Martin D-28. I basically already have a vintage Martin D-28. And I’m not the world’s best guitar player, so it’s likely wasted on me unless/until I really put the time in to study the guitar in the way I’ve studied the violin. And by then, I might have developed a different (and certainly less expensive) taste.

I think $110,000 will buy me 1/3 of a Ferrari, though…

sometimes archaic technology is fine.

By default, the bowed strings use the same string attachment/adjustment design that every stringed instrument in human history used, until the Industrial Revolution: simple friction pegs, stuck in holes and turned as needed. I imagine this must have been quite an art before precision tools; now you can easily buy a reamer (for the holes) and a...peg...shaving...thing. It's like a pencil sharpener, but shapes the peg's barrel to match the shape the reamer makes in the hole.

Instruments like the guitar and bass quickly converged on geared tuners, because of their greater string tension, but the violin, viola, and cello have kept their friction pegs, on the grounds of being simple, functional, predictable, and lightweight, and being a safe baseline condition for these amazing instruments which can easily last hundreds of years with some care. Attempts at improvement have mostly failed for being too heavy––for the violin and viola, that weight falls at the end of your outstretched arm, like a see-saw, and the extra mass can sometimes inhibit vibration in undesirable ways––or requiring some kind of permanent alteration, like bigger holes, or gluing some kind of bushing into the hole. In the 1800s, you could do that (and more!) to your 300-year old Italian violin and probably no one would care; over time, violins, including almost every Stradivarius, had their neck extended to accommodate changing musical needs. 

(There is exactly one Strad in original condition, called the Messiah, and it lives a sheltered life in the Ashmolean Museum. It gets brought out every so often for virtuosi to play, because sufficiently powerful instruments, for lack of a better term, get crabby and temperamental when they're not played. I've played violins in their crabby state. My acoustic guitar probably qualifies, also.)

Of course, with modern technology, people set to work and designed things that look like regular friction pegs, but actually have complex gearing inside. They're non-invasive to install, and seem to just work. They're in use on at least one Stradivarius. I don't have them, because I'm not proud and I just have fine-tuners on the strings, because the orthodox use of tuning pegs hurts my hand, and heterodox use is just annoying.

ANYWAY.

I was thinking maybe it's time to change the strings, because I've been playing on them non-stop for about 9 months. I've never changed a violin string on a nice instrument before. Easy enough, I look for instructions.

The Internet reminded me that friction pegs do not do their work efficiently without a coating, because they have to do two opposite things:

1. Turn smoothly, with minimal friction, when pulled away from the pegbox.
2. Refuse to turn at all, using the friction between the peg and its holes, when pushed into the pegbox.

The homemade way to do this is with a coating of classroom chalk and a coating of soap (or maybe the other way around), but the most venerable option is W.E. Hill Peg Compound, which has this mind-bending list of ingredients:

• Graphite powder (lubricant)
• Petroleum Jelly (lubricant)
• China clay (sticky)
• Talc (lubricant and sometimes sticky)
• Red Iron Oxide (fancy name for rust: rough and granular)

That's...interesting. The instrument does need it, or at least mine does. I replaced the middle string first, then had to re-do it later, not just because it's the middle string and blocks access to other strings, but I only put the peg dope on one of the two contact surfaces (each peg has one for each wall of the pegbox) and it wouldn't stay remotely in tune.

The effort was worth it, since the violin is now singing and ringing the way it first was, which, I'd mostly forgotten, might be a bit much.

There are, of course, more difficult things to tune:

March 294th.

It's about time to pause my job search for a couple weeks, as the industry tends to just hibernate until the new year. New job openings will appear, as everyone finalizes their 2021 headcount. It'll be fine.

Last night the Shitgibbon and his pet lunatics sat down in the Oval Office and discussed how to stage a coup, by physical force, using the military and everything. Attorneys on Twitter are now (re-?)acquainting themselves with the dust-caked federal crime of "seditious conspiracy," which seems to mostly get pulled out for terrorists (even white ones) because, let's be honest: it exceeds the ambition of most criminals. Unlike every other conspiracy charge, seditious conspiracy doesn't require you to have gone as far as to start your overthrow of the government or its laws, so this seems to qualify. Good times!

This is the first winter I've had a violin nice enough to really feel affected by the weather. Higher-end violins are built more lightly, so they can resonate more, which makes them more sensitive and harder to play, and also makes them more likely to disintegrate when rented to students (who are mostly kids). I also haven't particularly liked my rental violins, so it's a treat to have one I really enjoy. It's still a stupid instrument.

My violin teacher, already working remotely, and with finances only somewhat better than you'd expect for a Millennial musician, went down to Puerto Vallarta a few weeks ago. My first question was "Are you coming back?" and the question is open, but he's certainly ripe for the expat life. Absent the ability of the Bay Area to put you in a room with the right people, you might as well go someplace else.

(There's a famous Scottish fiddler named Alasdair Fraser, who actually lives relatively nearby here, and whose son Galen is also a local musician. Alasdair wrote a pair of tunes I learned in simplified form, but my teacher described being out at a jam session, and "Galen's Arrival" came up, and Galen said, "That's me! I'm Galen!" and of course the song was written for his birth. But there are no jam sessions.)

We're staying home. We should walk the dog more. We're all healthy, for the moment, but the pandemic is looking grimmer than ever.

One nice feature of a new job will be that I'll have less time to read Twitter.

fortuitous!

I got a violin I love just in time to learn how to shift my left hand up and down the violin. These are called "positions," and they're numbered, 1st through whatever (7th or 8th, I think, not used by normal humans). You might think, looking at the unmarked black expanse of the violin fingerboard, that finding a note is a pain in the ass, and you are 100% correct! This is why I have spent 2 years and 11 months learning to play in tune (with considerable if not universal success) via ear training and muscle memory, and now I get to learn to play in tune again. It's nowhere near as bad as I would have thought, though, because shifting to higher positions builds on the muscle memory of 1st position. (In 3rd position, your index finger goes where your ring finger was when you were in 1st position.)

I've also been drifting away from the Suzuki book, learning fiddle tunes instead, but the way to be able to tackle any fiddle tune is to play music harder than fiddle tunes, so I've been learning some Baroque stuff instead. Exhibit A is this Vivaldi concerto, starting with the third movement:

I like Yitzhak Perlman's version, partly because I have happy memories of seeing him on Sesame Street when I was a kid, but mostly because he plays it slower than the other versions I found.

The reason I'm glad to be learning this on a violin I love is that the notes are really high, and trying to play this stuff really separates out how good the instrument sounds and how well it's set up, and if I tried to do this on that stupid rental I happily returned last week, I would probably go nuts.

(Among other things, I always had this one problem where playing the pitch of the E string on the A string just sounded terrible no matter what I did. Probably in the future I could take that violin and make it sound good, but for learning now, it was just pissing me off. In the meantime, now I know what to check for when evaluating a violin for myself.)

So the fiddle is still marvelous. Since I can record it easily, I've started playing around with recording stuff, specifically multi-tracking some duets. Let me tell you, I have never encountered anything that exposes flaws in my playing like trying to accompany myself. It turns out that feeling like you're playing in tune, or even playing in tune with the previous phrase, is not that same as actually playing in tune the entire time. What a stupid fucking instrument.

Back later, I gotta go practice.

The Perfect Violin

Okay, I've had this fiddle for a couple weeks, but it's amazing. The website copy comes off as a little hyperbolic:

designed for the highly trained player who can focus and control the power of this new model

Okay...really? Plus the "new model" is something like 15 years old, and externally at least the only difference is that it's a whole lot less ugly: here's a 2007 model, and the finish is sort of meh, and it has that funky non-traditional scroll that I assume is easier and cheaper to carve. But not mine!

I'm not 100% sure I understand the drive towards beauty in instruments. The saying goes "It should make you want to pick it up and play," and that's ultimately a shallow, aesthetic impulse. As far as I know, that striping ("curl") of the maple back and neck doesn't affect the sound: those pieces rely on uniform density and strength to do their job. Violin makers judge wood primarily by tapping it to see what sound it makes, and then secondarily by how pretty it is, because that's just what players expect. 

Does the varnish matter? It's not controversial that coating the wood in the wrong material will affect the tone: imagine encasing all these vibrating parts in something rigid like epoxy. You want it to protect the wood, which often means filling in the pores, which should be constricted anyway by letting the wood dry-cure for as long as you can stand, but maybe some of the porosity is involved in giving the wood the flex to vibrate... Applying non-invasive technology to the good instruments of any age, we're learning what makes them tick, and notwithstanding our recurring belief in a lost Golden Age (of anything), modern makers can build you an instrument that will stand toe-to-toe with a Stradivarius or a Guarneri, for $50,000 instead of $50 million.

You see how the finish is a lighter color in spots? That's antiquing to make the instrument look older than it is, a practice about as old as the expensive violins themselves. For the most part, it's not fooling anybody.

Years ago, NPR did an interview with the sound engineer at BMW who was in charge of how a BMW's door sounds and feels when you shut it. It's a recognition that our experience of an object goes far beyond its function. Consciously or not, you can tell when a door has been thought through down to small details, and that sets us up to expect a similar depth of thought in the driving experience, which hopefully the car can deliver on. And, of course, it looks pretty.

The instrument and I are still getting warmed up, but it's a keeper. I don't qualify as "highly trained" yet, and it is definitely a more advanced instrument, every bit as particular and demanding and rewarding as my reading has led me to expect.

It's not something I would have shopped for, but I have been hoping my next keeper violin would have a stripey neck.

The sound from the internal pickup really is amazing, too.

This is fun.

an exhausting violin excursion.

A couple weeks ago I had to drop the kid off at a Dungeons & Dragons game down south, and since it was more or less on the way, I dropped in to visit the (literally) world-famous Gryphon Stringed Instruments. After a delightful hour there, I stopped by to visit a violin maker/repairer nearby, Jerry, before heading home. He was writing a song about his friends in New England he'd visited over the summer, and we chatted about that and my violin interests, and he had me try a violin and bow he  was selling: Chinese, but by a Chinese shop he had advised and trained. He said it had been played for a while by a youth orchestra musician, whose teachers/conductors--ironically, of Chinese background themselves--banned Chinese instruments. That's a pretty big hammer for that problem, because there's no shortage of good-to-amazing instruments coming out of China now, and no shortage of bad-to-middling instruments coming from elsewhere, like Romania and Bulgaria.

I see where they're coming from: as with all things made in China, the secret to high quality is developing relationships with makers who know you will pay for it. A friend of mine who insists on running his own email server once discovered he was getting a lot of spam from Turkey, and realized that he didn't know anyone in or near Turkey and could reasonably expect not to get valid email from Turkey, and just black-holed all of Turkey from his email server. That's a lot more effective than banning Chinese violins, though.

This particular Chinese violin was radically different than my rental (which another luthier had pegged as Romanian, speaking of middling instruments). It was light and subtle; to get a good sound out of it, I had to play better, and it rewarded my better playing. Next to it, my rental felt like the tank it was, built with its freedom to resonate bounded by its ability to withstand being rented out to beginning (and often young) violinists. Jerry said he'd picked out the bow, a $200 carbon-fiber number, to match the violin, and in fact it did sound better with that bow than with my own. The violin felt so much lighter, the bow felt so much heavier.

Except I got out the kitchen scale, and the violins weighed the same, and the bows weighed the same. It was weird. The weight is just distributed around differently. Bows are the obvious cases, there: professionals can spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a bow, and presumably they would be happy to fritter away that money on food and rent if they didn't feel like it helped their music. It's a stick! But it's the right stick, with the weight and the springiness distributed all just so.

This kind of "home trial" is routine with stringed instruments, and as far as I know is almost unique in retail. Anyplace you'd want to buy a violin online from has a 7-day or more return policy, from SHAR or Fiddlershop down to this random guy who's so far out in the sticks of Illinois that's he's outside of St. Louis. You want that assurance even more for expensive instruments, of course--bear in mind that "expensive" in violins starts at like $9,000--at the same time that musicians are increasingly less likely to be able to float the cost on their credit card. So you give them an ID and a deposit or whatever, and you borrow the thing to try it out in your everyday surroundings.

Jerry may or may not have been sober that afternoon, but it was also a $1,200 setup he was offering at the "New England discount" price of $900, so he didn't look at an ID or anything, just had me write my name and address down. He said he didn't think I'd want to bring it back, so obviously that instrument was named the Foster Puppy Violin.

It was not quite the right violin for me, nor a great time to be spending $900, so I did bring it back, but I was struck by the experience and I decided to upgrade to the third and final tier of rental from the place I've been renting from.

Last weekend I went out to do that, but I decided to check out another, perhaps more obviously sober, luthier in the vicinity. He had photos of stunning instruments on his website--which is rad, most people don't bother--and no prices, which is common and doesn't mean much, but still feels ominous. I played a few old-ish violins in the $1200-2000 range, German and Czech, and they were so different. Instruments below $900 or so aren't usually very distinctive, but these were. One was full and rich, one was bright and sharp, one seemed sort of mysterious but wasn't what I wanted. The one I liked was a German violin from 1889 or so, and I suspect if I were ready to spend $1800, I could have taken it home happy. It may still be there when the time comes. There are so, so, so many violins.

In the 1800s, as Europe and North America industrialized, the violin-making centers in France and Germany stepped up production of what are called "trade" violins: imported into the U.S. and sold through stores and catalogs like Lyon & Healy or William Lewis & Son. (I don't know why Italy lost out on this trend.) They came at all levels of finish and quality and wood, but in particular many of them were built with the fronts and backs too thick, because it was cheaper to mass-produce them that way.

Now, 120 years later, they're still too thick, but now they're made of 150-year old high-quality European wood, so there's a long-running side business in taking these violins, which originally sound kind of muted and boring, taking them apart (which violins are meant for), and "re-graduating" or "re-voicing" them, carving and sanding away the overly thick plates so they can resonate. This is a specialized form of wood-carving, and you have to know what you're doing, but if you have the skills and motivation, you can buy an old German violin for a few hundred dollars, re-graduate it, and maybe sell it for a few thousand. The 19th-century charmer I played is one of these, discounted because of a particularly tricky repair that automatically devalues the instrument by 40-60%. (The luthier said some people seek them out for that reason.)

Someday.

lots of surprises.

I'm not sure how many people pick up the violin because of Swedish folk music. Outside of Sweden, and possibly Minnesota, probably not many. I'm actually not sure there's many inside of Sweden, either: tons of people (possibly most) spending their time performing folk fiddling traditions have music degrees and/or started playing as children, and after mastering the classical tradition, either returned again to the music of their childhoods, or learned it for the first time and found it more satisfying.

Don't get me wrong: I like Irish and Scottish fiddling, and Cape Breton, and bluegrass, and old-time. And Quèbecois, although I think you have to be able to dance while playing, so it will probably remain beyond me: the percussion in this track is the fiddler chair-clogging.

I don't really care for Cajun or zydeco fiddling, except in moderation, but I won't claim there's any logic to that, because it all sounds repetitive and similar to me, which is equally well said of most fiddle music I do like, to say nothing of lots of other music I enjoy.

Of course, all those fiddle traditions (and more!) are one family, carried from France and Ireland and Scotland over to Canada and Appalachia and Louisiana, mixing with everything they encountered, like Spaniards, enslaved Africans, and each other. Like any instrument unconstrained by the tyrannies of fixed pitch, the violin is tailor-made for musical syncretism. Want to play music with quarter-tones? If you can hear the difference, and remember where you put your fingers, the violin will play it for you.

Owing to Scandinavia's failure to thoroughly colonize the Americas, Scandinavian fiddle music is...something else. And then within Scandinavia, as far as I can tell, Swedish music is weird. The thing that grabbed me about Swedish music is the same thing that makes it hard: everything about it is just unexpected. I have all these decades of listening to classical and Irish music (and Cajun, until admitting I didn't like it), but I listen to Swedish music, and I constantly feel like I had NO IDEA that note was coming. To say nothing of the rhythms: a Swedish polka is the Polish polka we're used to, in 2/4 time, but the Swedes have a polska, which sounds like this:

Notwithstanding that the band is a supergroup of Swedish Folk Revival ninjas, this is a Christmas concert for normal people, and this is the kind of music the audience is expecting. The musician Lena Jonsson (not in that concert) described the polska as "in 3/4, but the second beat comes sooner," which is enough to make most of us ordinary (and non-jazz) musicians cry out to the heavens. "WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, THAT IS NOT WHAT A BEAT IS."

It's more of a pulse, and it's part of why the email from the local Nordic music ensemble told me to use the sheet music as a starting point, but not to invest too much time in it, since the band plays whatever it plays and mostly uses the music to remember how songs start.

I highly recommend watching the whole concert. It's so different, but so damn catchy.

signature.

So here's a thing from Fiddle Tunes.

There's a famous (as these things go) Swedish folk band called Väsen (pronounced, for those of you getting any funny ideas from German, "Vessen," with an "e" roughly like that in "mess"). The fiddler, Mikael Marin, plays I always assumed was a large 5-string violin, which it sort of is, except he's a violist and it's a 5-string viola. This is a little confusing in that a 5-string viola has the viola strings (C-G-D-A) with the high E from a violin; a 5-string violin has the violin strings (G-D-A-E) with the low C from a viola. You wouldn't be playing world-class viola or violin repertoire on either one: even if there weren't compromises in the sound (relative to the classical norms), you'd be hard-pressed to get the classical music world to take you seriously. They're mostly applied to folk traditions, like bluegrass. Or Swedish folk music.

Marin's instrument is visually striking just from a distance, because the fingerboard and tailpiece have a light-colored border:

It's hard to overstate how rare this is, except to say that to an untrained eye (including mine) every violin or viola looks exactly like every other violin or viola, going back centuries. And it's not like people haven't experimented, but they repeatedly come back to the classics: witness this shop selling no less than four copies (probably more) of Guarneri del Gesù's Il Cannone violin. Which was made in 1743! The modern guitar is a kaleidoscope of designs, and didn't even exist until the 1800s.

The fingerboard in particular has remained a sacrosanct black for a long time now, typically ebony, glued onto a neck made of maple. Some original baroque violins had inlays on the fingerboard, and of course Norway's Hardanger fiddle is off getting high on its own supply. The online consensus about fingerboard inlay seems to be that

• Over enough time and environment changes, the surface can become uneven as the inlay shrinks or expands at a different rate than the fingerboard.
• It makes a weird violin and you'll probably have trouble selling it.

Marin's viola was made by a famous Swedish luthier, Per Klinga (who died last year), and is clearly of the "I am going to play this until I die and I don't care who has to deal with it after that" class. I just assumed Marin had asked for it as a feature (and his wife Mia has a matching 5-string violin).

Except...Anna Lindblad, who was teaching at Fiddle Tunes with her bandmates, has one too! It seems pretty common on Klinga's instruments.

I got to see it up close when I went to ask her about it after class, and it's beautiful. I couldn't see everything the maker did, but the light-colored outline around the fingerboard is this stunning curly maple, all striped and finished to play with the light hitting it.

As it happens, Per Klinga's instruments are famous in and around Sweden and its music, and if anyone wanted to sell one, it would probably take all of a week before someone took them up on it. The old advice goes to buy an instrument that makes you want to pick it up and play; I couldn't pick it up, but I really, really wanted to play it.

back home on the farm.

The trip home was no less stressful than the trip out: while no instruments fell on my head--I claimed a window seat on the shuttle, out of range of falling luggage--when I went to print my boarding pass on Saturday, I discovered I had somehow booked my return flight for the same day I left, meaning I was supposed to leave on Sunday but had no flight booked. Getting home before Monday was expensive.

A variety of household stuff went dramatically poorly while I was gone, and kept going for a couple days after I got home, so in retrospect certainly the trip wasn't worth it, as amazing as it was.

I did the math later in the week, and including my lessons, I crammed about two months of playing time into a week. Physically this was not at all as hard as I expected: my decision to back off the guitar and mandolin, which use exactly the motions of the left thumb I need to learn not to use on the violin, is clearly the right one.

Every morning there were two classes with the "artist faculty," well-known (relatively) performers who span a bunch of different traditions: Scandinavian, Irish, old-time, Quebecois, Cajun, Cape Breton, and others more obscure or hybridized. After lunch there's "Band Lab," where you learn and prep a few songs to play at a dance on Friday night and a concert on Sunday. Finally the end of the day has sessions with tutorial staff, who are about the same level as the Artist Faculty, and cover the same range of styles, but not as famous.

I went to a class with Donna Hébert, who's sort of a general northeastern North America person, but then I remembered that Swedish music is why I picked up the instrument in the first place, so I mostly stayed with the Scandinavians the rest of the time. The morning teachers were Fru Skagerrak, a trio of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish women, and they were amazing. At some point I realized I'd actually heard of Anna Lindblad (Sweden), but mostly through random YouTube videos.

Everybody was really nice! And also way above my head. Most of the time, every available space, inside and out, was full of groups that sounded like this:

That's not a specific band, just a circle of very good players. They all either know the songs, or they have the skills to pick it up as they go. Nobody called the tune, or the change. It was pretty daunting, and the only circle I was really able to join was a group of drunk twentysomethings on Friday or Saturday night, who were declining (and/or too drunk) to play at their full speed. It was fun! But I have a long way to go.

The attendees were mostly white, with a skew towards folks near or past retirement, who could take a week without working. The one non-white performer was Fiddlin' Earl White, who seems to have spent his decades moving around the country every 3-5 years collecting and transmitting fiddle repertoire. He performed in the finale concert on Saturday (open to the public, which most of the week's concerts weren't).

Now, there was a Kids Track and a Teens Track, and the teens were led by The Onlies, a group that themselves grew up going to Fiddle Tunes and the kids' and teens' programs (there's an adorable video of them kicking ass at a dance in 2011). The Onlies taught the kids a Swedish polska (not the same as a polka), and then a super-catchy fiddle tune blended with a secularized (and also catchy) tune called "I Belong To The Band, Hallelujah!".

The teens played at the public finale! They were great. Then Fiddlin' Earl White gets up and does a set with his band, then says, "That tune they played before is called 'Chips and Sauce,' by the clog dancer Ira Bernstein. And I actually taught it to The Onlies, several years ago. Here's the original."

Around and around it goes.

Fru Skagerrak played a set, too, including a bunch of Anna Lindblad's songs that I now want to learn, as it turns out she is a kick-ass songwriter. They played a convincingly Swedish tune, which was actually written by a Cajun musician, who had met the Swedish group Väsen many many years ago when they were at some music festival in Louisiana, and the Cajun guy then went home and wrote a Swedish song. Which was then performed by a Scandinavian trio, at a festival in Washington state.

Around and around it goes.

The final song of their set was this Anna Lindblad tune, from her album Med vänner ("With friends"). The dancer is Nic Gareiss (here's a great video of the two of them playing Quebecois songs), and the guitarist is the amazing Roger Tallroth from Väsen. Lindblad wrote the song about the friends and music you meet at festivals like the Tønder Festival in Denmark, where she met the other 2/3 of Fru Skagerrak. It's a Cajun/Zydeco tune, by a Swede.

Around and around it goes.

FIDDLE TUNES SUMMER CAMP

I'm spending the week away from the family, in the breezy and gentrifying Port Townsend, Washington, at the annual Fiddle Tunes Workshop (or whatever it's called--the name has changed over time). It's about 2.5 hours from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and it turns out to be a little out in the sticks. This is probably because Sea-Tac itself is sort of in the sticks, and then you have to cross a bunch of salt water to get here.

Fort Worden is one of a triangle of Army bases built to make naval attacks on Puget Sound a fruitless suicide mission. Then we invented airplanes, won World War II, and it eventually became a state park, with an arts organization to take up residence. I didn't grow up around military bases back East, so maybe they all look like this, but the architecture here is the same as the former bases I've seen in California: tall, blocky, gratuitously unattractive. Unlike the Presidio, these all need paint, but there's a lot of moisture in the air, and the money is better spent giving kids music lessons.

The trip out was a little rough in spots. I discovered that I hadn't gotten the helpful email about which shuttle I should be on, because the paperwork didn't go through and I wasn't on the list. There was space much sooner than I expected, which was great! It was a little airporter kind of shuttle, with the ceiling racks full of instruments. I put my seatbelt on, but said to my seatmate, "For all the good a seatbelt will do us, given all these instrument cases waiting to be flung into us."

You can guess who was the only person to have an instrument fall on their head. I didn't see it coming, so there was no chance to dodge, and very loud reflexive profanity. I'm grateful it was a lightweight foam case: a banjo, or the kind of fiberglass or carbon fiber cases you use for really nice violins, would have given me a nice concussion, instead of just ringing my bell a bit.

Day 1 went really well! I'm surprisingly better than I assumed I was. Day 2 was harder, as I'm still tired and I also went on an epic walk into town last night. But I'm on vacation! It's been a while. Maybe I've forgotten how to be on vacation.

there's an idea.

Yo-Yo Ma did this great NPR Tiny Desk Concert where he plays the first movement of Bach's Cello Suites, and explains that was the first thing he learned on the cello.

"Well," I think. "That's interesting."

I've been learning Swedish using the Duolingo iPhone app.

(Why Swedish, when I'm a quarter Norwegian? It was a Swedish neo-folk song that sent me off learning the violin. Norwegian music has too much accordion. Also, the food is better.)

It's goofy to learn a language without practicing conversation, but for what it is, it seems to be decent. It has you translate stuff back and forth in different ways, and ramps up to listening and vocabulary-building. It's an incremental process. I guess I'll start in on French, to help us emigrate to Canada when the time comes.

(Swedish is awesome, by the way. It helps that I know enough about languages to understand what I'm looking at: instead of a definite article, like English "the" or Spanish la, the noun inflects, so en kvinna is "a woman," but kvinnan is "the woman." Old hat to you poor sods who took Latin, of course, which does this in spades.)

It got me thinking, though, that if 4-year old Yo-Yo Ma could learn Cello Suite #1 a measure at a time, maybe I could too. Bach has always been a favorite of transcriptionists everywhere, and it's not like transposing across the violin family is at all difficult. And those first few lines, if you take some deep breaths, aren't super hard.

One measure at a time.

musicking.

I just passed my 1-year mark on the violin! No signs of stopping, and I'm pleased with where I'm at, considering. I don't practice as much as I might, for a couple reasons:

1. The violin feels, and may be, loud, and playing quietly is this whole side project.
2. The violin sound is (for the poor devils like myself who didn't start at age 5) heavily dependent on good posture and full attention.
3. The mandolin is familiar, easy to play quietly, and tolerates being played while slouched on the couch.

I have limited emotional bandwidth, and the mandolin really wants to help you make music, while the violin is the opposite of that.

I've been working on the same two violin pieces for many months, on the theory that as I've still been learning a lot of skills that strike me as basic, like "playing in tune" and "playing from one string to the next without producing a mysterious dissonant harmonic a couple octaves higher," I might as well learn those things on music I'm already familiar with. "Learning lots of songs" is a necessary step, though, and I'm about there.

I did return this week to a song listed in The Nordic Fiddler as "Swan Polska," which even six months ago was just a bit too hard. I applied a tool I picked up from my teacher a month or two ago:

"...and this note is held just a bit longer."
"This is where we discover I have no innate sense of rhythm."
"...?"
"I just fake it everywhere, that's why I'm not playing notes for the same duration every time."
"Oh! ...do you know about subdivision?"
"Nope, never heard of it."
"Ah ha! It will solve your rhythm problem. In fact it's the only thing that will solve your rhythm problem."

 I'm not sure why nobody ever told me this, but subdivision is just identifying the note duration that you're going to count: quarter note or eighth note or whatever. This came up for this song:

My trouble was (is) tracking the beat during all those offbeat ties and that half note, so one helpful way to count this is to count or tap eighth notes, and behold, immediate improvement. I took this back to the troublesome song, which is actually called "Polska efter Pelle Fors"...

...yes, much like Irish folk songs, which are often named things like "Garrett Barry's Jig" in the pattern of "[person]'s [dance type]," Swedish folk songs are often named "[dance type] after/in the style of [musician]." And, no, they're not unique.

...which I'm too lazy to scan the music for, but take my word that I'm counting the sixteenth notes and now I can practice it. Very slowly.

escalation.

Europe: "I made a violin!".

Norway: "I will see your violin, and raise you an alternate tuning, five sympathetic understrings, and enough gratuitous inlay to make Liberace envious."



Sweden: [pounds a shot of akvavit] "Call."
 

Iceland? Denmark? Finland? No?

frets are for chumps.

I'm still learning the violin! It's great. It's an absurd instrument, but as long as I'm willing to spend 10 minutes trying to get the same 6 notes right, gratification is near-instant. My teacher says that's the great thing about teaching adults: we understand that repetition is not exciting, but that's how you learn stuff.

(Years ago a guy taught a first-aid class at the dojo, and he had this defensive/defusing banter down about how we were all going to hate him by the end because of the repetition. I went up to him at the break and said, "I see why you need that elsewhere, but you should understand that you're teaching a roomful of people who have quite literally spent decades doing the same movements over and over, and we get it. You can relax a bit." Which he didn't, very much, but I tried.)

I have a 5-day work conference in San Diego in May, and I don't really want to go a week without playing, so I'll bring the violin along and hope the practice mute and the normal hotel soundproofing work well enough that I can practice without complaints.

I'm at the point in Volume 1 of the Suzuki Method where the music gets more interesting, because "It's by Bach, instead of Suzuki." In this case it's Minuet #1, and YouTube is full of people playing it who clearly had it under their belts quite some time ago, if you're interested. I just play it over and over, mostly in bits and pieces, doggedly trying again and again until I get it better.

My fingers have a memory of their own. I'll play a passage, make an identifiable new mistake, decide to fix it on the next run-through, only to have my fingers make the same mistake. This is where I hit a wall performing as a classical guitarist, not just that I didn't practice enough (which was certainly true) but that my fingers just...didn't do what I told them to do, and it was worse with performance nerves.

Some years back, Anna read or saw a story from someone with autism, who said that they would tell their body to do something, like "raise my right hand," and instead their body just came out with some randomized action. Anna asked J if he ever felt that way, and without looking up, said "Yeah. All the time."

So it happens that trying to play an actual instrument with fine motor control might be my only analogue to his physical experience. (I can definitely be sensorily overwhelmed, but not in quite the same way, and I can power through it if that's what's needed.)

Did I mention I actually went to physical therapy for my left thumb? My thumbs took some heavy hurting from aikido, and then I fell on my left hand a while back walking the dog, which didn't matter much until I tried keeping my left thumb from clamping onto the violin neck. One of many differences about the violin is that you are not using the left thumb to press on the neck to counteract the force of pushing your fingers down on the string. This is the opposite of the guitar, so I was trying to keep my thumb away from the neck, at the same time as these accumulated injuries pulled in the opposite direction, and then that really hurt. PT's been so helpful, I forgot to make more appointments.

I was doing some reading this weekend and learned that:

• Aaron Copland's Rodeo was actually a ballet score;
• he was kind of in a hurry, so "Hoe-Down" (known to earlier generations as "the music from 'Beef. It's What's For Dinner.'") is a pretty direct orchestration of a fiddle tune called "Bonaparte's Retreat";
• actually, it's an orchestration of the 1941ish transcription of a single 1937 recording of one guy's way of playing a song he called "Bonaparte's Retreat."
• (It kind of keeps going, but I'll spare you.)

I did eventually track down some sheet music for it, and it's...well beyond my level right now, even if I were willing to alter my violin tuning. For an exploration of the subject, I refer the reader to the Bluegrass Intelligencer article "Old-Time Music Permanently Revokes All Song Titles."

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.