3 reasons to take up violin.

1. Ciaccona comp. Maurizio Cazzati.




2. Forked Deer, trad. perf. by Tony Trischka (banjo) & Barbara Lamb (fiddle).

HOW CAN YOU NOT WANT TO PLAY LIKE THIS



3. Folkrotsvalsen comp. Ale Carr / Mitt i Juli comp. Jonas Olsson, perf. by Dreamers' Circus.

I've been listening to this on repeat for weeks now, because it's virtuosic Vikings, referring to a bunch of Scandinavian music things that I know are there but I can't really access. That weird-ass folk-fiddle on the right is a "träskofiol," made by--I swear I'm not making this up--taking a giant wooden shoe and gluing violin fittings on it.

This raises more questions than it answers: are actual real-life clogs that big? if not, someone must make them just to be made into instruments?

There's also the nyckelharpa, with keys that look unsettlingly like a rack of ribs. As my friend once said about her year living in Finland, "the long winter does funny things to people."

(The träskofiol player wrote the waltz-y first piece, before swapping the träskofiol for a cittern, member of a bizarrely diverse and widespread family of similarly-shaped instruments, including that great harbinger of globalization, the Irish bouzouki.)



I particularly want to play Mitt i Juli someday, which means I probably will, since the melody line is freely available, and its basic form is not rocket science. I can't find anything about the fiddle player who wrote it, though, except Dreamers' Circus saying he died fairly recently.

Funny story: I was playing this for my violin teacher:

"Wait... that guy in the middle..."
"Danish String Quartet?"
"Yes! Those guys are awesome!"

And of course she's met them, which hadn't occurred to me, but of course the world of professional string quartets would be small, and even more so for the under-40 crowd.

not entirely unlike music.

One unsurprising outcome in my violin lessons: given how much better I get when practicing 10 minutes every week, I would get quite a bit better if I practiced more than that. I'm sure I will, someday, but the important thing is that I'm doing it for fun, and if I don't have it in me to practice more, that's actually okay. In fact, it's important that it be okay. Fun things should be fun.

Did you know there's a whole, living body of Scandinavian fiddle music? And can you imagine a more Nordic trio of brilliant musicians playing it? I'm not finding a ton of information about this weird-ass thing on the right, but apparently "clog-fiddle" is the literal translation of träskofiol, and it's a violin made from a giant wooden shoe. (I have many questions about this instrument, viz. why would anyone make wooden shoes that big? If they started making fake shoes big enough to make it sound better, why keep the shoe shape? I found a video of a woman playing one with 8 strings instead of 4, and how does she do that?)

(The other weird-ass thing, played by the same Viking, is called a cittern. Wikipedia helpfully says they "generally have four courses of strings," and then of course the Viking's and most others I'm finding actually have five.)

I've noticed in the past that the dog is often soothed by my guitar-playing, which is, if repetitive, pretty competent. But! I was practicing violin this afternoon when the noisy, food-spilling Dungeons & Dragons kids were here, and she fell asleep--then woke up when I stopped playing. Even to me, my violin playing sounds like I'm getting to do more than just more reliably avoiding the screeching.

It's fun to see music with new eyes.

Hands? Ears?