I'm Bloody Brilliant, I Am

About three months ago a young acquaintance of mine who knew that during my conservatory days I studied fiddle with a couple famous teachers, asked me whether I would make an assessment of her youngster's potential as a fiddler. The kid is 14, crazy for the fiddle, and studies with a member of the first fiddle section of a major orchestra who says the kid's a real talent but has some problems that need to be worked out before she can make the progress he feels her capable of making. In particular, said the teacher, she seems to have a problem with her bow arm that's keeping her back, and that's what he's mainly working on with her.

I tried getting out of getting involved, but the mother was gently insistent, and I got the impression she didn't quite trust her kid's teacher's capabilities as a teacher, major-orchestra member though he is, and so, with more than a little reluctance, I agreed to give the kid a listen.

Turns out the kid really is a talent — not prodigy-type talent, certainly, but a talent nevertheless — and she did indeed seem to have a problem with her bow arm. It seemed on first listen to be "weak and ill-disciplined" (her teacher's description of the problem), and therefore incapable of expressing the music the way the kid felt it and knew it should go. Her teacher had given her exercises to both strengthen and discipline her bow arm which she followed assiduously, but this had been going on for more than a year now with no meaningful improvement in terms of her problem.

But as I watched and listened, and the more the kid played, the more I became convinced that the problem was something other than what her teacher had diagnosed it to be. Structurally, her grasp of the bow was, if not ideal, just fine: well-controlled and well-behaved, as was her bow stroke, no doubt products of the excellent and intense exercises assigned her by her teacher. Yet she couldn't quite get the music to sound as it should, and as she knew it should. Clearly, something was getting in the way, but what that something might be eluded her and, as I became more and more convinced, her teacher as well.

And then, after almost a half-hour and a number of examples played through, I saw it. The problem was exquisitely subtle, but its consequences technically (as in technique) and musically crippling. The kid was, in effect, attempting to make music with the fingers of her left hand(!).

Well, with the fiddle, as with the other instruments of the same family, one can't make music with the fingers of the left hand. Essentially, and special effects such as vibrato excepted, their only job is to stop the strings at the precise location and at the correct time intervals to produce notes of the correct pitch as called for by the score. It's, of course, the bow and the right hand and arm that control the bow that produce the music. The left hand is but a mechanic, the right hand and arm, the poet, as one of my teachers so eloquently put it.

Once diagnosed, the problem would seem a relatively easy one to correct. No such thing with this particular problem as it has its roots in normal right-brain/left-brain function itself, and in order to correct it, one would have to, in effect, "retrain" the brain's circuitry to work as it should for this particular purpose. I of course had no idea how to go about doing that, the only thing I could offer being my diagnosis of the problem, and the suggestion that even when practicing scales the kid be constantly aware of the problem's cause and of its consequences.

Last night I got a call from the mother. Seems the kid told her teacher of my diagnosis, and after a while he saw it too. He devised some new exercises for her, and devised some "thought exercises" as well, and in just a few months, and little by little, the problem was brought under control to the point where the kid not only was now able to make music the way she felt it, but was able to do so effortlessly.

I'm bloody brilliant, I am.