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lwl

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Posts posted by lwl

  1. Here is an interesting article on old vs. new violins:

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    I don't think I'd take my good violin to a fiddle jam or anything else where I'd be worried about its safety -- if I were doing that kind of thing a lot, I'd buy a cheap instrument for the purpose.

    I like Violinflu's comment about malleability a lot -- I think that's a wonderful word to describe what changes as you get into better and better instruments. Ultimately what you're buying is range of expressive capability.

    It's entirely possible that as a relative beginner, somebody could put a Strad in your hands and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and an inexpensive workshop instrument -- I don't know. Perhaps you might even initially find the Strad much harder to play. But the difference between "decent" and "great" is definitely there for those who seek it out.

    I think there are certainly modern instruments that compare favorably with older ones -- but not with the very top tier of violins, or more folks would be using them to record with.

  4. The right to criticize

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    I agree with Cedar.

    I will note, though, that an inexperienced or uninformed listener may know that he doesn't like how something sounds, but can't explain why or how.

    I certainly think it's also possible and perfectly reasonable to enumerate faults without making constructive suggestions; a non-violinist might be able to say, for instance, "it's out of tune" or "the notes are unclear" or "your tone is scratchy" but not be able to explain how to make it better.

  6. Went to a Music Fair/School of Music...Where did ya'll go to school?

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    Cyrus Forough is an outstanding teacher. If you ask the best teenage players in the Chicago area who they study with, the answer is almost certainly going to be the Vamoses or Forough. Ten years ago, his reputation in the Chicago area was on par with the Vamoses, but since the Vamoses headed to Oberlin, and taught more students through to the college level, the number of current Vamos students winning major international competitions has skyrocketed. Forough was a Gingold pupil; his students play very soloistically and with a lot of dramatic force, as I recall. (He must also be very effective at teaching efficient use of practice time; part of his popularity as a teacher amongst the pre-teen crowd was, as I remember, the fact that he was good for students who were also loaded with academics and sports, and thus had highly limited practice time.)

    Speaking of the Chicago area and DeLay pupils: Lee Joiner, the head violin prof at Wheaton College, out in the Chicago suburbs, is also a former DeLay pupil.

  7. Went to a Music Fair/School of Music...Where did ya'll go to school?

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    Ten years ago, Rice was full of very smart but insanely overworked undergraduates -- over-achievers who decided they wanted to double or triple major and were killing themselves with incredible regimes. Some of those folks were music performance students for one of their majors. Lots of interesting people with exactly zero time to do anything but study. Still like that these days?

  8. Went to a Music Fair/School of Music...Where did ya'll go to school?

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    paganiniboy,

    You might want to start by looking at the required repertoire for auditions at whatever school it is that you plan to attend.

    If you have the reaction, "I can't play that," then you know you're not going to be applying there. wink.gif

    Typical repertoire for a major conservatory such as Juilliard includes a major concerto, a virtuosic work, solo Bach, and a Paganini Caprice, or some variation on this. The program usually has to be memorized.

    If by "mediocre" you mean "not students on the level of Gil Shaham when he was eighteen", then yes, such students do attend Juilliard, but if by "mediocre" you mean "not as good as the top half-dozen or so players in all-state orchestra (or a big city's youth symphony), then no. "Best of the best" applies at the top conservatories -- from my youth symphony days I remember there wasn't anyone, no matter how good, who treated their Juilliard audition like a sure thing.

  9. H. W. Ernst

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    Does your college library have it? It's in the same book, published by Sikorski, that contains the six polyphonic etudes.

    Alternatively, if your college library has back issues of the Strad, you should be able to get it that way.

  10. She's young, modern, and uses a shoulder rest . . .

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    quote:
    Originally posted by bethr:

    What, may I ask, is elliptical bowing?

    Galamian taught his students a figure-8 pattern of the bow that practically all of them discarded later in life, as the actual motion is overly elaborate and not especially practical, and the tonal results aren't great, either.

    A more subtle version of that exists in most of today's modern players, though, who have a Galamian heritage of some sort; it's a tendency to allow the tone to taper at the ends of the bow as a result of the attempt to get a smooth change, resulting in a sound which swells in the middle. Some modern teachers with a Galamian influence also teach a 'bite' at the beginning of the stroke, which doesn't help that sound, either.

  11. What would a fine, expensive violin sound like under my ear?

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    I would agree with HKV that good instruments really do shape the player, and that they can definitely help develop a player not quite ready for them -- but give a beginner a Strad, say, and the end result is likely to be frustration (as many amateur player collectors have found to their great disappointment).

    My principal instrument is a "modern" Italian (i.e., made at the last turn-of-the-century, not present-day contemporary), by Marchetti. "Cost a lot more than my car" is a good guideline to its value (email me if you're really curious). It's probably not the last violin I'll ever own, but it's mine right now. smile.gif (When I was shopping for it, I made the mistake of playing violins up to double the price range I was looking at, and had to whack myself over the head repeatedly with the "You do NOT need to spend that much on an instrument" stick...)

    That violin is paired with a bow by Claude Thomassin; this particular one is a soft, lightweight stick, but I neither bear down particularly heavily nor force. (Modern players tend to prefer bows by makers like Sartory, which stand up better to the rigors of today's more forceful technique, whereas a century ago, makers like Thomassin were preferred. This is good for folks like me, since relative appreciation values and thus current prices depend on the popularity of certain types of sticks.)

    Best instrument I've ever played was a late-17th-century Strad. Used to be the instrument of a concertmaster of an overseas symphony -- addictively fun to play.

    [This message has been edited by lwl (edited 10-22-2001).]

  12. Maestronet Gallery

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    Thanks, plateau -- I've fixed it. (Forgot I used a table to make the border layout work right, and it looked fine in IE 4.)

    Got to add my compliments to the previous ones on oldgeezer. He made some extremely self-deprecating remarks at the beginning of this thread, which were entirely unwarranted. Nice guitar playing, too.

    I suspect most of the sound clips are taken using the line-in or microphone recording capability of a computer, which often produces less than good tonal results. Also, MP3 conversion, even at this high sound quality, still does some odd things to the tone of some violins; I have yet, for instance, to make an MP3 of a track from a Milstein CD where the sound quality of his violin doesn't have an oddly glassy quality. (I hate the copy protection mechanisms that minidiscs were burdened with in order to prevent piracy; for my clips, for instance, minidisc digital stereo is being converted down to analog mono at a much lower sampling rate, and the further conversion to MP3 does not seem to help the already very dry sound from the acoustics of the hall.)

    Anyway, the idea of having this archive is not really criticism, though the Y/N is there so people can feel free (or not) to make remarks about others in public. Conceptually, it's just about sharing -- fixing sound signatures to names, so to speak.

    Consequently, no matter what your current level of playing, you shouldn't be afraid to submit something. It doesn't need to be your best playing, or even playing you're particularly proud of, or heck, playing that doesn't make you cringe when you hear yourself. wink.gif

    [This message has been edited by lwl (edited 10-22-2001).]

  15. What would a fine, expensive violin sound like under my ear?

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    It's both sound and feel -- the way the instrument reacts to you.

    My opinion is that the better an instrument gets, the more the following qualities improve. In no particular order:

    First, responsiveness. Not just easy to play in the sense that there's sound when the bow touches the string, but in the quickness and precision with which the instrument responds to small changes.

    Second, clarity. The tone has to resonate freely while individual notes still pop out at you. I personally feel that the ideal sound is almost bell-like in the initial edges to the notes, which then ring openly.

    Third, color. The variety of sounds that you can pull from the instrument and the ease you can achieve that variety, both in general and at two particular dynamic levels -- very soft, and when striving for soloistic projection.

    Fourth, the properties of the tone itself. Ideally you want complexity and naturally strong, focused projection. You also want sufficient volume under the ear that you can hear yourself in an orchestral situation. You also want the particular "voice" that you're seeking -- what you think you ought to sound like, which is different for every player.

    The better the instrument, the more it also demands from the player, in my opinion.

  25. She's young, modern, and uses a shoulder rest . . .

    in The Fingerboard

    Posted

    I don't hear any forcing in her sound at all -- either in the concert hall or on record. She seems to have a tone that she can alter for the venue, as well -- I've heard her both in an intimate recital hall, and in a good-sized concert hall where the orchestra (including the soloists in the concerto grosso that opened the work) sounded rather distant, but Hahn was clear and immediate, even above the gigantic orchestral forces of the Elgar concerto.

    She does have a huge tone, though, but it is one of great beauty and purity.

    Hahn is one of the few modern players without training from DeLay or another Galamian disciple. Her initial training was from a Russian teacher, and then she was taught by Brodsky, Ysaye's last pupil. I would classify her tone production as pure Franco-Belgian. The Ysaye heritage is quite clear, in my opinion.

    Hahn does not play as close to the bridge as most of the other modern soloists (or as Kang or Josefowicz, also former Brodsky students, though a significant amount of their training came from others). She also has the single smoothest legato that I have ever heard out of a player -- if your eyes were closed (or you hear her on record), you cannot tell that for many long notes, she simply changes bow mid-note, so smoothly that it is literally inaudible. Therefore, she is able to get power simply by using a ton of bow -- taking two or three bows where another player would take one. Even Milstein or Ysaye himself, who both have a liquid legato, can't do this. Definitely no elliptical bowing for Hahn -- it's not her sound production technique at all.

    Interpretively, of course, she's a modern player, and she's fairly generous in her use of vibrato, but she's not one of those with the on/off vibrato habits (at least not so much that it's bothersome; Oistrakh does that somewhat too, after all, and it doesn't bug me). She's actually relatively cool -- more of a classicist, in the mold of Grumiaux and of Milstein.

    A fine player, modern or not -- and she's still young.

    Personally, I would love to know how the heck, technically, that extraordinary legato is produced. Clearly it can be taught (Kang and Josefowicz both have it to a certain extent, where it is noticeable and good but not jawdropping).

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