Here’s a piece I wrote several years ago that got picked up by several places on the web and in print. I thought I’d re-post it here, since I’m getting back in my fiddling mode - and mood - as of late. The piece generated tons of feedback - I still get some today. The overwhelming majority were very positive, but there was some really negative stuff from a few string teachers and teacher/dealers who thought this and the related article were way off base. Of course, they were the ones I was writing about!
Judge for yourself.
(BTW, Google violin tone and see what comes up first)
Buying Violin Tone
December 2004
As a follow-up to my newsletter of July 10, 1994 “Notice Of a Common Scam in the Violin and String Teaching Industry”, here is another issue that has an effect on violinists and students when choosing instruments on which to learn the violin, or to pursue their private pleasures or careers. This is mostly with teachers in mind, because they have a responsibility to their students to be more informed, and to be useful in helping those students acquire suitable instruments.
There is a common myth that the primary criteria in selecting a violin is to look for a big tone.
I care much less about most amateur, semi-professional, and professional players that I encounter on a regular basis, who in any case, tend to be always looking for that one item, that magic fairy dust, which will elevate their playing to the highest level with the least amount of effort on their part — not through a passion and an ever-increasing, lifetime effort to learn and understand their art.
A longtime struggle I’ve had with fellow musicians and violin students has to do with the whole problem of choosing good instruments based on that great unknown criteria of what constitutes a good “sound”. My focus in this newsletter has nothing to do with technique, or the discussions about new vs. old violins, or strings or anything like that. It is to discuss the predominant myth - that number one factor, or quality sought when choosing a violin. That is: How “big” a sound does it make?
Seldom do players talk about color or texture when discussing the sound they wish to produce on the violin. I hear them talking even less about the techniques of sound production. Instead, they place the whole burden of tone production on the “big sounding” violin alone! I hear violinists talking forever about producing a big or a beautiful tone, but not about producing beautiful music.
In his 1947 book, With Strings Attached” the Hungarian Violinist, Joseph Szigeti talked about the “big tone”. Here he quotes the great pedagogue Carl Flesch regarding, as Flesch describes it, “the tone beautiful in itself”: “[There is] the danger of surprising and captivating one’s listeners during the first ten minutes only to bore them quite as intensely after a little time.”
I hear players constantly talking about this subject of violin “tone”. I hear violin teachers telling it to their students. There is the idea that the sound of a great violin should “soar over the orchestra” and should “fill the large concert hall”. That the violin should have a bell-like quality, or a trumpet-like sound. These are truly absurd expectations and desires about how a small, featherweight, wooden box, called a Violin, should physically perform.
I also smile at a little irony here. The reality is that most fiddlers rarely, if ever, play as a soloist with a full symphony orchestra — and even less seldom in the largest concert halls. Yet so many of us spend our careers searching for that perfect instrument to serve us in those imaginary venues!
I could, and have, endlessly argued with violinists that a violin – any violin – is severely limited in its capacity to provide the imaginary “big” sound that they are looking for. And yet these players know what they have heard. Or do they? The steady diet to most players’ ears is not gotten from live violin performances, but is gotten from recordings. Is this an accurate way to make any kind of judgment?
Today’s fiddlers always talk about the “ringing” tone of past great violinists’ fiddles, like Isaac Stern’s Stradivarius, or Jascha Heifetz’s Gurnarius del Gesu. This is despite the fact than almost none of today’s modern players have ever really, actually “heard” those (now dead) performers. What they have acquired from listening to recorded “performances” are myths – myths that they then pass along to their students, and perpetuate – to the glee of violin shops and dealers. (And too often to the delight of those same teachers as well. See the last newsletter I spoke of earlier.)
Jascha Heifetz actually had, what was thought by many who knew, a remarkably “small” sound. This was related to me often times by one of my violin teachers, Milton Preves, who as principal violist with the old Chicago Symphony during the Fritz Reiner years, performed on stage and in recordings with Heifetz many times. Frank Miller, principal cellist who, like Preves, sat only feet from Heifetz during numerous performances, related the same story.
Yet one listens, for example, to the absolutely phenomenal recordings of the Brahms and Tchaikovsky concertos by Heifetz with the CSO, and comes away with the idea of a huge and glorious sound of enormous intensity. What is this apparent contradiction all about?
It is simply about something called the microphone. Heifetz’s violin playing was indeed glorious and intense, but logic clearly tells us that one small violin, even in the hands of a great fiddler, cannot acoustically overpower a full symphony orchestra with 30 other violins, the rest of the string section, winds brass and percussion in a Brahms orchestration.
Heifetz, having died in 1986 (his last public performance was in 1972) can only be heard by today’s violinists on recordings…now on “re-mastered” CDs. In other words, we “hear” Heifetz as recorded, edited and amplified through a microphone.
The “magic of the recording” is just that. A recording gives the impression that it is a single live performance. It usually is not. It is almost always comprised of many parts called “takes”. As the affect of a single performance is manipulated, so are the sonic qualities of a recording including among other things; balance, equalization and even (artificial) reverberation. So much about a studio recording is artificial, and yet so many violinists set their standards by what they hear in recordings.
Heifetz also had other help. A great orchestra like the Chicago Symphony understands that despite the written dynamics in the score, the orchestra must always lower its dynamics to a level beneath the soloist. A great large orchestra can play a marvelous sotto voce, even while giving the impression it is playing the printed forte dynamic.
I will concede this fact though. Often, part-time soloists are confronted with performing situations where they are just not able to be heard, or to even hear themselves over the orchestral accompaniment. This experience so often leads them right over to the violin shop for an adjustment, new strings, or even a new fiddle. But their problem is actually their own inexperience. Being unseasoned, the majority of “jobbing” instrumentalists only have the opportunity to perform with inferior and unprofessional orchestras and conductors — if they are not just downright terrible! Bad orchestras only know how to accompany badly and loud, not soft. And bad conductors know nothing about accompanying soloists.
All the above can also be effectively said of the experience of a violinist playing with piano accompaniment. The difficulty of finding a willing and indulgent piano accompanist, who is at the same time a good player, with enough skill to handle the demanding parts of the violin-piano repertoire, is sometimes overwhelming. And the education of even those pianists who have talent is geared towards solo playing — and in their own realm of “producing a big sound”. When a piano accompanist plays with their own big sound, no violinist has a chance!
It is frustrating when fiddlers, myself included, endeavor to turn on a simple microphone and recorder during a performance, only to find a completely inadequate result when compared to a recording of their favorite artist, recorded professionally in a studio. What one notices at once are bare and unedited slips of technique and intonation, as well as a perfectly abysmal aural quality of sound.
Though this often may be due to the failings of the performer(s), and sometimes to the failings of the acoustics or the recording equipment, it is least often the failing of the violin itself.
I have a favorite story about Heifetz that I like to paraphrase. After one concert, a fan entered the dressing room to compliment the artist on his performance. She told Heifetz “what a beautiful tone” his violin had had that night. He turned around, bent over and put his ear close to the violin laying in the still open case and said, “I don’t hear anything”.
Finally, a characteristic quote on the subject from composer and critic, Virgil Thomson: “A ‘beautiful’ tone is not really beautiful. It is merely glamorized, monotonous, inexpressive. And it is about the least useful device in music for keeping an audience awake.”
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