Books › The Violin: How to Master It, 1880 › scan 8
Scan 8
The Violin: How to Master It, 1880
10 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1as long as possible to place fees in their hands; and one can hardly blame them for dealing out the precious knowledge in homoeopathic doses.
3The Pernicious Teacher.
5Then, again, there is what I may call the pernicious teacher—the man who has formed a theory of his own in regard to the position of the instrument or the handling of the bow; the man to whom all the great masters, such as Spohr, Baillot, David, Campagnoli, Kreutzer, Henning, Maza, and the rest, are as nobody; and who deforms his pupils for life by drilling them into his own style, till they may actually be picked out without prompting in a crowd. A student is better without teaching at all than with lessons from such a master. One such blind leader of the blind I have in my mind's eye, whose peculiar cat's-paw-like style of holding the bow I can recognize at a glance in any pupil who has had the misfortune to study under him. One of these pupils I met a year or two ago, fifty miles from the town in which this teacher lives, noted the position at once, and said curiously, "Who taught you?" and then was not at all surprised to hear named the teacher I have described. Another teacher I have before me—a lady this time—who holds her bow about two inches from the nut, as if these two inches of hair were a superfluous incumbrance; and a third who thinks nothing of expending an hour of the pupil's time in teaching him to rosin his bow, and who always wastes at least half of the hour in "blethering" about himself and the feats he has done. Another I remember whose bow described a half-moon curve in crossing the strings; and how such a player could turn out a pupil with flexible wrist I am at a loss to understand.
7The Choice of a Teacher.
9My own advice to the student is to be sparing in the number of lessons he takes, but to be certain that they are taken from a teacher with a position in the musical world, and one having that unmistakable grace of style by which a good player may be picked out by a deaf man. All that is technical I shall endeavor to put practically before him, giving in so doing the hard-won experience of a lifetime; steady application and unremitting toil, with such observation and help as I have indicated, must do the rest.
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