Books › Modern Violin-playing, 1920 › scan 14
Scan 14
Modern Violin-playing, 1920
14 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1the instructions are, in the main, false and misleading. This is a hard but true statement. And the ease with which its truth can be proved is an astonishing commentary on the readiness of the human mind to accept as proved that which requires some mental effort to disprove.
3The authors of these recognized Violin Schools were undoubtedly great as players. But it does not follow that they were great, or even competent, as educators. Their impulse—the artistic impulse—was always to attach more importance to the end than to the means. This involved the ignoring of the one great factor in violin-playing, the mechanism of the human hand. And that factor, once ignored, left the art of violin-playing an intangible thing, scarcely capable of adequate treatment. Let us add that the writers of these books were all busy practical men, and that they certainly had neither the leisure nor the training to analyze sensation, or to define its physiological origin.
5The Violin Schools which they strung together are primarily collections of musical matter arranged in order of increasing complexity and difficulty. The literary text, containing the instructions, is an afterthought, a mere record of the most obvious methods of dealing with the musical text.
7These Violin Schools produced no fine players. The fine players produced themselves after a certain point. And as soon as they had sensed and put into practice the right method, they followed the example of their masters, and promptly consigned it to the limbo of incommunicable sensation.
9Against these few fine players let us set the hundreds whose existence we have already hinted at, the hundreds who never get anywhere; but grind their very souls out, doomed to struggle along eternally in the dark. It is poor consolation to them to ascribe their failure to stupidity. And still poorer is the consolation if we tell them that success in playing is a "divine gift." That sort of thing is all very well when used by the local vicar who is introducing the soloist at a Penny Reading. On the lips of a serious violin-teacher it is—or rather, it should be—unpardonable.
11In this connection we must not forget that, since the days when these Violin Schools were written, a considerable change has come over the material with which the violinist has to work, and also over his aims as an artist.
13The finger-board was originally a good deal shorter; and very thick strings were usually fitted to the violin. For, though the player of Stradivarius's time was seldom required to go beyond the third posi-
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