What’s the best age to start learning the fiddle?
Cooper’s Fiddle Corner - 22
When would-be fiddle players of various ages, from teenagers to sixty-year-olds, ask me, ‘Am I too old to learn the fiddle?’ my answer is always, ‘No, if you fancy it, give it a go.’ Nor is this, as the cynical may assume, because private music teachers will always cheerfully relieve a potential student of a fee, however slender the prospect of their success. No, it’s because, in addition to the taxi-rank principle of taking whoever’s next in the queue, I do actually believe in ‘lifelong learning’. I mean, what kind of person is seriously going to announce, ‘Since leaving full-time education I am proud to say I have learned nothing’? Learning a musical skill can open up a new and different chapter in your life. OK, being realistic, even the most diligent and talented forty-five-year-old beginning fiddler won’t pose a major career threat to Bruce Molsky, John McCusker, Liz Doherty or Seth Lakeman. But experience shows that any ordinarily bright and responsive person (most of us on a good day) can learn to play the fiddle, or banjo, flute, melodeon, piano or other instrument, at least to a basic, and probably to a higher level, regardless of what age we start. It does require the sacrifice of much time, money and effort, of course, and possibly the sanity of those around us, but if you fancy it, and can make the space in your life, give it a go.
Is there an optimum age to start violin? I’m not sure. I had my first lessons when I was nine, from a peripatetic classical teacher called Alan D’Agorne who rode out to our village on his moped once a week to teach a group of us at school. Some teachers, like Shin’iki Suzuki, inventor of the Suzuki Method (which he called the ‘Mother Tongue’ method), would have considered nine rather late to start. He believed that a child exposed to music from infancy, and encouraged to take ‘small steps’ on the instrument from as young as three, can learn to play the violin as naturally as to speak. Interestingly, from a ‘folk’ point-of-view (though the method itself is primarily about classical violin), Suzuki children also learn by ear, adding music-reading skills later. I was hugely impressed, years ago, hearing a couple of dozen nine or ten-year-olds playing Bach’s Double Concerto (from memory) with great gusto and considerable finesse. The Suzuki method undoubtedly ‘works’, though it makes great demands on the parents, themselves encouraged to learn fiddle to assist their child’s progress. For a youngster to reach the heights of virtuosity in later life an early start, Suzuki-style or not, is probably essential. On the other hand, given a child’s normal development of motor co-ordination and concentration, pieces that a six or seven-year-old will take months to pick up, a nine-year-old can often master in weeks.
Perhaps age, anyway, isn’t the only, or most important, factor in all this. Florida-born Chubby Wise, the great Swing and Bluegrass fiddler who worked for years with Bill Monroe, and who started fiddle at fifteen, was inspired by a local player called ‘Fiddlin’ Purcell’.‘I went to his home, to this dance,’ he told Pickin’ magazine in 1977, ‘and I went over in a corner, sat down, and he had me just in a trance. I just couldn’t take my eyes off him or that fiddle. The next week I heard nothing but that fiddle in my ears, and I just love him so much. I made up my mind right then that someday I’m gonna play the fiddle just like Fiddlin’ Purcell. So that had to do with my inspiration, and I believe that everybody’s got an inspiration that they first hear and learn to love so much.’
I agree with Chubby. Personally, I fell in love with the sound of the violin when I was three, specifically a Yehudi Menhuin recording of Beethoven’s 1806 Violin Concerto. (The slow movement, at the end of the A-side of a 33 rpm disc - remember those? - always sent me to sleep in a state of trance-like bliss, curled up on the sofa, and it was only much later that I even heard the final Rondo on the B-side.) This initial falling in love with the fiddle, be it classical, Irish traditional, bluegrass, morris, or whatever style, provides a deep source of motivation, sustaining us during the long, and often frustrating, process of acquiring a decent level of technique.
Most people, while learning their first few tunes, experience a tremendous buzz at actually being able to play something recognisable. Sooner or later, however, when the thrill of novelty has faded, you reach a plateau point - the first of many, probably, in the course of your playing career - when, however hard you try, you just don’t seem to get any better. It’s important, at such times, not to give up. Part of the difficulty, I think, is that when you hear someone else playing a tune it can sound really exciting and beautiful, but by the time you’ve worked at it yourself, maybe taking it apart phrase by phrase, and finally put it all together, this work of transcendent beauty has entered the realm of, well, the ordinary. I’ve sometimes been moved to tears by a song, only to experience a sense of disillusionment as soon as I’ve figured out how to sing it it myself. ‘God, is that all it amounts to?’ There’s a twist in the tale, however. You may be concerned during your performance with remembering the third line of the second verse, or getting the bowing right for that triplet run on the second-time ending of the B-part, but other people hear your performance without such distractions, they experience the piece as a whole, and are filled with exactly the emotion that inspired you to learn it in the first place. It’s tough, but that’s how it is. When you’re driving the bus you don’t always get to enjoy the view. One of my favourite musicians was the black Creole fiddler Canray Fontenot, whom I had the pleasure of hearing shortly before his death in 1995. In an interview with Ann Allen Savoy, in ‘Cajun Music, a Reflection of a People’, he said, ‘I wish I could have been more like my uncle. He would play the fiddle and enjoy that and he liked that. He was something like Dennis McGee was. I was never like that. I just play ‘cause I can play.’
Many classical players are helped on the route to proficiency by studying for the Associated Board, or similar, examinations. These provide a progressive series of challenges for the learner to meet, and thus a structure within which to measure your progress. Given the gradual professionalisation of folk and traditional music in recent years it probably won’t be long before such exams become available to all kinds of ‘folk’, as to classical, players. In fact, I believe Scottish fiddle examinations are already in the offing. Is this a good thing? For me it was precisely the absence of damagingly judgemental, competitive attitudes created by such ‘objective’ assessments (‘I’m Grade 7, what grade are you?’) that led me to the freer world of traditional fiddle music in the first place. Having said that, fiddle contests like those initiated during the twentieth century by Anders Zorn in Sweden, or Henry Ford in America, or the Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann in Ireland have, historically, played an important role in stimulating the revival of endangered traditions. What really matters perhaps is to receive the kind, but critical, appreciation that will encourage you to continue though a ‘down’ phase, until finally, with persistence and luck, you discover your own musical voice.
- Pete Cooper © 2007
Rhythm and Bowing
Cooper’s Fiddle Corner 16
Rhythm’s arguably the most basic ingredient of fiddle music, certainly of dance tunes. A ‘wrong’ melody note here or there won’t matter much, but a tune that feels rushed, hesitant, or lacking in pulse, is hard to listen to. The bowing arm is obviously what generates the rhythm, so good posture and an effective bow-hold are important.
We talk of Down-bows and Up-bows to describe what are all in fact more or less horizontal movements across the strings. Conveying the pulse of a fiddle tune requires that we also develop an awareness of the force of gravity, of ‘vertical’ weight and lightness in the bow. Beginning fiddlers are often shy of allowing arm-weight to bear down on the strings, as though it’ll snap them, but the effort of holding the weight back only makes the arm stiff, and produces jerky movements. Making the arm lax and floppy, however, doesn’t work either. We need to experience the arm, not as dead weight, but as live, fluid weight. As a simple exercise, let your right arm hang freely from the shoulder, then lift the wrist and forearm. Very, very slowly turn your hand over from side to side, and focus on the sensation inside the forearm. It feels like the movement of a heavy fluid inside your arm, as if you’re pouring weight from one side to another. The work of developing this kind of ‘kinaesthetic awareness’ requires patience, but helps your sensitivity and bow control.
The bow-hold itself needs to be both relaxed and firm enough to transmit subtle and varying pulses of weight to the strings. I wrap my fingers well around the stick, a little spread apart, from the second joint of the index finger at the leading end, to the tip of the little finger at the back, and with a slight turn of the wrist ensuring that all the fingers slope back towards the frog. This hold maximises the area of skin contact with the wood, reducing the need to grip. I also like to keep my thumb bent, the top right of the thumb-nail pressing into the leather collar known as the thumb-grip, the bottom left up against the bow-hair. The thumb-nail’s point of contact with the stick is in fact a fulcrum around which the whole hand turns. (Press down with the little finger and the tip of the bow rises.) Whatever bow-hold you use should allow freedom of movement at the wrist, both up and down and, to a more limited extent, sideways.
Being able to locate, feel and convey the beat or pulse is essential. Remember that most tunes, including reels, jigs and hornpipes, have a two-to-a-bar beat, while slip-jigs (in 9/8) and triple hornpipes (3/2) have a three-to-a-bar, and strathspeys four. Even the irregular rhythms of Balkan music break down into combinations of twos and threes, and verbal phrases (like ‘eight-een pints-of lag-er’ for the kopanitsa in 11/8) can make them easy to remember. Often it’s worth practicing rhythms on open strings, so that bowing can develop independently of any particular configuration of notes in the left hand.
The basic beat is subdivided in the case of reels and hornpipes, for instance, into groups of four quavers, the accent, and arm-weight, falling on the first of each group. Practice on the open A-string, using one stroke per note and starting with a down-bow: A-a-a-a, A-a-a-a etc. Keeping the beat in mind is especially important where string-crossing is involved: A-d-d-a, A-d-d-a etc. Beginning fiddlers, for whom crossing from one string to another may feel like a big deal, tend to over-emphasise the note where the change of strings occurs (A-D-d-A, A-D-d-A), which obviously disturbs the pulse. In the case of a jig (A-a-a, A-a-a etc), the strong beat falls on Down- and Up-strokes alternately, and you’ll need to be able to accentuate a note as distinctly on an up-bow as on a down. Again, proceed from single-string practice to crossings like A-d-d, A-d-d, or A-d-a, A-d-a etc.
While inspired rhythmic playing is not reducible to the metronomically exact, even experienced players who confidently rattle out tunes in a session may find playing to the click of a metronome a salutary exercise from time to time. You can begin practicing a tune more slowly, then gradually move up to around 120 (two to a bar) for a reel or jig. You may however notice a strange phenomenon: in the difficult parts of a tune the click mysteriously speeds up, especially if complex ornamentation is involved, and then, just as weirdly, tries to catch you out by slowing down on the easy bits!
Pete Cooper © 2005
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