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Scan 13
Modern Violin-playing, 1920
12 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1has done so much harm to the simple honest dignity of the violin for the past three hundred years.
3It is easy to see the result of this system of "teaching." One has only to go through one's list of fiddle-playing friends to find a dozen victims. They are all men whose student-days have been devoted solely to imitating the personal peculiarities of their masters. The mechanical laws under which they have to work have never been explained to them. Nor have they ever been taught that the application of these laws must differ as between man and man, because no two arms and hands are exactly the same. Technique has always been held up to them as an artistic mystery, to be solved by guess-work and trick-work and "hard practice."
5The consequence is that, when they cease paying for this mystical instruction and begin their careers as players, they are soon startled by the sound of a cog-and-ratchet working in their musical mechanisms. They get so far, and there they stick. Nothing helps them. They may increase their daily allowance of practising to an amount that would be almost criminal in any other profession. But it takes them nowhere. And the bedrock reason at the bottom of all this sea of difficulties is that they are attempting to substitute knack and guess-work for a knowledge of mechanics and their application through the human anatomy.
7The last two paragraphs have been written in no spirit of carping criticism and certainly in no spirit of levity, but with a profound consciousness of the actual state of affairs in the violin-world of to-day. It is only during our own generation that the reproach has been lifted from the piano-world, and the technique of that instrument placed upon a solid scientific basis. No less is due to the older and more beautiful instrument, the violin. And it is earnestly hoped that this book may help many errant members of the string-brotherhood, whose wheels have stopped on strange unfriendly roads, by directing their attention back to the first principles of mechanism and of safe artistic travel.
9So far for the living teacher and his pupil. There is, however, another large body of teaching-doctrine lying entombed in the various Violin Schools and Violin Methods that have already been published. A few of these are important works, written by the great players of the past. The great majority are timid recapitulations and adaptations of these few works. They have no importance at all.
11But even in the best-known and most commonly used Violin Schools
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