Amazing [screech] Grace

I am being held hostage by a violin. It’s a lovely instrument, so fine that it cringes in horror whenever I struggle through Old Macdonald or O Susanna. (Now, I’m working on Amazing Grace, hoping for divine intervention.)  It expresses its displeasure by wailing and squealing at random moments, making it difficult for me to appreciate the mellow resonance I’m told it has. Like that bottle of the finest wine someone gifted me, it knows it’s too good for me.

As I wrote a couple of months ago, I decided on a whim that I’d like to learn to play the violin. I’d been toying with the idea of taking up an instrument for a while, part of my approach to aging, or my resistance to it. Tackle something challenging. I have a good friend who teaches strings. She was willing. She even had a violin I could borrow. I used it for a few weeks before deciding I should have one of my own. Nothing fancy, just a beginner’s instrument. I live in a community with many virtues, but a supply of stringed instruments for sale isn’t one of them. When I mentioned this via Facebook to a good friend, telling him I was about to order an inexpensive beginner’s instrument, he made an offer I couldn’t resist. “I have a violin. I haven’t touched it in forty-five years. I’d be pleased if you had it.”

And so it transpired. The instrument arrived in perfect condition after its long rest. Only the bow seemed to have suffered from neglect. The violin itself, it turns out, is a very fine instrument made by Anton Schroetter, a well-known luthier in Germany, probably in the 1950s. Both my teacher-friend and the violin-maker who repaired the bow are impressed. I have lucked out. From the sound of it, I don’t think the violin feels the same way about me.

Frustrated at my ineptitude, a couple of weeks ago I googled “learning violin as an adult”. Or maybe I said “senior”. I was hoping for some reassurance. If knowing what you’re up against is reassuring, I guess I got it. Here was the standout: “It’s like a combination of kindergarten and physiotherapy.” Yup.

The kindergarten part is pretty obvious. Thank goodness I can read music. If I had to master that too, I’d be doomed. What amazes me is the physicality of it. I have to hold the bow with my fingers just so: thumb bent at the frog, middle finger holding the stick in opposition to the thumb, first and third fingers curled gently around, little finger balanced on the top. And it has to stay that way. Then there’s the neck-and-chin maneuver, in which the violin sits effortlessly against the shoulder, cupped by the chin, requiring the left hand to hold no weight, freeing its fingers to flit nimbly from one string to the next while the bow glides across them at a right angle, somewhere between the bridge and the neck. Did I mention I’m supposed to stay relaxed?

I am reminded of those childhood vacation days on the New Jersey shore, when we entered the surf right in front of our parents’ towels and umbrella and, within moments, had drifted a great distance down the beach only to be hauled back by our mom and told to stay within sight. And, once again, without any sense of it happening, we drifted.

I tryto keep the bow perpendicular, between the bridge and the neck. But somehow—while I’m working on keeping my right little finger balanced on the bow, my thumb bent, my chin in the chin cup, and my left hand fingers hovering above the d-string in anticipation of the next note—I find the bow has drifted somewhere well down the neck at a weird angle. Of course, the instrument screeches at me. “What the hell are you doing? Don’t you know I’m better than this? I was made for Beethoven.”

(Hey! The folk dance halfway down the page IS Beethoven. So there!)

Next time, I try to appease it by watching the bow’s path carefully, at which point my neck cranes to the left and loses contact with the violin. That’s when my thumb tenses up on the bow and my middle finger shoots up in the air in an unconscious gesture of rebellion. Also, I wake up the next morning with a stiff neck.

My teacher has instructed me to ignore the instrument’s protestations and press on through the squealing and screeching, not to give in to its ear-shattering insistence that I back up and play that note again, better. Just keep going, she says. One day I will discover that I’ve played an entire tune in the mellow tones the violin deserves. I guess that’s when I’ll graduate from kindergarten.

Maybe if I’d ordered a cheap beginner’s violin, as per my original plan, I’d be ready to give up. But thanks to the generosity of a good friend, I’m bound to prove myself to this instrument. I am, so far, a willing hostage.