Books › Modern violin-playing, 1920 › scan 12
Scan 12
Modern violin-playing, 1920
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 2. See the scan on archive.org.
1About once in a hundred thousand times it happens that a player hits on the correct mechanical procedure by accident, just as about once in a hundred thousand times an engineer might guess the tensions of his steel bridge correctly. The engineer can only repeat his success by the miracle of a second lucky guess. In that respect the violinist has the advantage over him. When once he has hit on the right method, he recognizes its value by its artistic results. He tests it; and finds that, with him, it always works. That gives him the one thing for which he is searching—personal security on his instrument. The physical "why and wherefore" of the matter never crosses his mind.
3But observe the vast difference between the two cases from the teacher's point of view! No one, out of a lunatic asylum, would appoint the guessing engineer to a university chair of engineering. The violinist, on the other hand, though he is certain to have all the artist's distaste for definition and all the artist's confusion as between means and sensation, is immediately labelled "genius."
5Now, so long as he remains in the genius-business, there is not one word to be said against him. But as soon as that cap is stuck on his head, he becomes a potent money-drawing attraction as a teacher. And there the trouble begins.
7He collects a great many expensive pupils, who come to learn "the mysteries of his art." In the class-room they all stand round him, open-mouthed with the words "How is it done?" And he has not the remotest idea of any satisfactory answer to these terribly searching words. He may "show them how," of course. He may play the actual passage under discussion. If it "comes off" the first time, all he can answer to their question is, "Like that." If it doesn't come off the first or second time, he has to try again, blaming his bow or perhaps the weather for his earlier failures. And even if he plays the passage finally—nay, even if he plays it finally with the most perfect and consummate art—his pupils have learned nothing technically. After the exhibition, one can only say that he differs from them in that he can play the passage sometimes, and they can not.
9When this position is established as between teacher and pupil, the former's friends have to re-establish the balance with a good deal of clever window-dressing, all designed to cover up deficiencies in the stock-room behind. Out comes all the old rubbish and hocus-pocus about "genius" and "the divine mystery of the violin" and "the God-given faculty of expression"—all the old skimble-skamble stuff that
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