indessed roscivs

Last weekend, my wife bamboozled me into going to a fiddle performance. “Highland, Heath, and Holler, it’s called,” she said. “Celtic music.” It wasn’t until we were on the road halfway to the concert that she revealed that the particular performer she was most interested in hearing was a world-famous fiddler.

“Ah well,” said I. “I’ll comfort myself with the harp music.”
“Um …” she squirmed.
“There will be harps, won’t there?” I asked.
“Ah … no,” she replied.
“Gah! I want my money back!” I exclaimed.
“Too late now,” she cackled with glee.

Turns out there wasn’t just one fiddle, but three—a cello and a guitar for accompaniment, but the primary music of the evening was all fiddle. My one moment of respite was when one of the fiddle players put down his catgut and horsehair and picked up a banjo instead. Much better.

Now, I don’t mind fiddle music as much as I do other forms of violin playing. If you’re going to play a warbly, whispery-scratchy instrument, you might as well embrace it rather than trying to hide it, in my opinion. But the performance still reminded me of several reasons I missed previously as to why I dislike the violin.

First of all, the violin is a supremely uncomfortable instrument. There’s simply no good way to hold the thing that won’t give you either neck, wrist, or shoulder aches—and many ways that will give you all three. The trio of fiddlers exemplified this in their wildly different postures. One hardly rested the violin on his shoulder at all, propping it up nearly entirely with his wrist. The third was more traditional in his stance, and the second was somewhere in between.

Second, seeing the black fingerboards glittering with heavy white dust, I recalled—the violin is really quite a dirty instrument. In order to improve the scratchy sound of the horsehair being dragged across those strings, the bow requires copious amounts of rosin. This rosin then is released as a cloud of white dust as you play, getting everything in the vicinity sticky—from the bow to your hands to the surface of the violin itself.

The required ritual of cleaning all affected surfaces with a dry cloth typically only results in smearing the stickiness around. But that’s better than the alternative—if you fail to clean up at all, you end up with a sticky mess of tar-like substance covering the face of the violin which is nearly impossible to remove, and ugly to look at. I’m the kind of person who hates to get anything on their hands—a compulsive hand-washer—so this feature of the violin was always particularly distressing to me.

All-in-all, the evening wasn’t a total loss. I’d say it was a better use of my time than spending a couple of hours reading Slashdot, and probably more enriching as well (which, I am sorry to say, cannot be said about every musical event I have attended in my life). And it certainly gave me something to write about!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.