Just fiddling around part one

​Just fiddling around 
1.    Fiddle dee dee 
Heather Lotherington
 
I took up the violin in my 60s. It was early summer, 2018, shortly after my daughter had taken me to task on a constant refrain that my next car would be a Porsche. On my birthday, she met me at a Porsche dealership and insisted the two of us test drive the car of my dreams. Midway out of the lot, the exquisite sports car’s battery went flat, and we drifted into traffic. It was horrifying—but a dramatic lesson. Life waits for no one. (I bought an Audi TT instead).
 
When my husband suggested a lovely gift idea for my birthday, I declined and asked for violin lessons. Soon after, I had a rental violin in hand, and a month’s lessons lined up with a local teacher, who I found online. And thus began my violin journey.
 
I remember my first lesson: I had no idea how to hold the violin or the bow or that I needed a shoulder stand to help position the violin more comfortably on my shoulder. I didn’t even know how to pick up my instrument. It was a very cold start.
 
I reckoned that playing the violin—an idea in the back of my mind for some time—might help stem my arthritis and encourage some flexibility in my increasingly knobby, stiff fingers. This wasn’t the primary motivation for learning, but it did help to spur me along. I had put off my dream of playing the fiddle for long enough. If I didn’t get going, my hands were going to become inflexible claws. Plus, how hard could it be? The fiddle is commonly played by countryfolk by ear, and you see even little children wailing away on violins.
 
Fast forward past the commitment of buying a violin and a sustained period of caterwauling that caught the attention of local tomcats, past the perpetual state of terror at lessons, a badly inflamed shoulder, unending frustration, and constant tweaking of violin, shoulder rest, chin rest, bow to find a position where my instrument felt even quasi-comfortable. It would be lovely to sugarcoat just how miserably trying this beginning period was. It was by sheer dogged determination that I survived. My bowing was crooked (it looked straight to me, but such is parallax), sliding towards the fingerboard, which created an awful tone. My bow (right) elbow was all over the map instead of steadily in position for the string being played, so I “string-crossed,” or hit more than one string at one time. This can be done by design; mine wasn’t. (Think donkey braying noises.) My bow bounced off the string when I lowered it to play. I could only reach the top two strings (E, A) with my left (violin) hand and I had absolutely no idea how violinists got all twisted around to reach much less play the D string and the bottom (G) string. My left shoulder and back ached to the point where I had to stop entirely for a few months and get physiotherapy to repair the tense, weak, underused muscles I needed to build. So, the first hurdles were painfully physical.
 
My teacher, Lucia, was understanding. “No one is born playing the violin,” she would say. There was a learning curve just to holding the instrument. But there was also a focus hurdle. I wanted to learn to play the instrument, and my teacher did her best to guide me. On her advice, I bought a learner book. But my agenda was vague and unhurried. I would practice the same songs again and again, and sound just as bad as the last time I played them. I was mystified how violinists found the exact notes on an unfretted instrument when there seemed to be so much room for error. Practice was demotivating to say the least. After several months, I could feel my teacher’s impatience as she tried to move me ahead in my learner book to attempt a simple jig. I crumbled. I couldn’t tell where those high notes were and jumping up two strings from the D, which I could finally reach, was taxing. I would practice and hate every moment.
 
And then Covid-19 hit and life came to a grinding halt. I stopped playing.
 
Looking back, I now see two glaring problems I faced during that first unproductive period:
 

• I lacked a systematic curricular program that had:
  • progressive technical exercises to build my strength and accuracy,
  • ear training, so I could hear the notes and distances between them on a scale,
  • basic music theory to understand how scales are organized on a violin, and
  • repertoire appropriate to my technical development. (At one point, I decided the first violin part of Pachelbel’s Canon in D would be easy enough to learn. Only now as I prepare for my grade four examination do I see that this piece requires at least grade five technical expertise to competently play seven and eight note slurs beautifully. You just don’t know what you don’t know!)
• I lacked the physical (and mental!) strength to play for more than a half hour, so my practice was not only unfocused but short.

 
I was horribly disillusioned. Monitoring my increasing disheartenment at plowing through my beginner book, my husband made a sensible, informed suggestion: sign up for an examinable music program. So I did.