The Music
Thoughts on the Violin
Menuhin playing
the violin in the
lotus position
Photo: © Malcolm Crowthers
"The performing violinist continually reviews the hours, days and weeks preceding a performance, charting the many elements that will release his potential ... he knows that when his body is exercised, his blood circulating, his stomach light, his mind clear, the music ringing in his heart, his violin clean and polished, its strings in good order, the bow hair full and evenly spread, then - but only then - he is in command ...
His stance must be erect yet supple so that like a graceful reed he may weave with the breeze and yet remain aligned from head through spine to feet. He is a living structure stretched between the magnets of sun and earth. Just as only a stretched string can vibrate, so before a violinist's body vibrates he must feel drawn upward, his head delicately poised on the vertebrae, his diaphragm raising him on a cushion of air, while the working parts of his anatomy - shoulders, hands and fingers - float and balance at different levels."
The violinist remains "... the supreme solo instrument, subjective enough to have meaning, anonymous enough to be universal, mobile as the man who cradled it from settlement to settlement, from concert to Opera house. The piano speaks with many voices, the violin is the individual voice, proved throughout history to speak to and for the multitude more effectively than any number of majority decisions, however harmoniously arrived at..."
"I could recount my entire life in terms of a dialectical argument between the Stradivarius and the Guarnerius del Gesu..."
"...One must rise to a Strad. before it will speak from its craftsman's soul. It spurns the man who lets his hand exert too much pressure or his finger fall ever so slightly wide of its mark. As master, there is no pleasing him except be faultless workmanship for he shines upon one's blemishes.
As mistress, there is no winning her except by incessant victories over oneself, by demonstrations of perfect control ... The Guarnerius ... a phenomenon of coherent asymmetries, a fellow human mercifully absolving the player of his gaffes ... whose earthier voice belies the fact that it is often slightly smaller than most Strads, sings through its pores and sings de profundis. One need not rise above oneself, for it appeals to the natural man..."
The violinist "... the servant of another man's vision"
"The violinist seems to live and move in the empty spaces between notes and transform and fashion them in accordance with his own and the listener's sensibilities"
"Technique is really the elimination of the unneccessary ... it is a constant effort to avoid any personal impediment or obstacle to acheive the smooth flow of energy and intent"
"The same magic recurs in the action of the bow caressing the strings, in the motion of the fingers on the fingerboard. The same voice is summoned up as if in a dream ... what you hear in yourself harmonises with the perceptions with the perceptions that come form outside"
"Assuming as I do that beautiful sound has a visual co-efficient ... I would make myself its form or statue, I would cut a finger ... intrinsically capable of hitting a note exactly as I please, with percussive effect or with vibrancy, leaping to it or sliding, sliding quickly or slowly, like the Zen archer so self-aware he will hit his target blindfold."
"The interpreter's duty is threefold. First he must master the numberless muscular pressures which in every position on every string will produce every quality of sound, then. having learned the phonetics of his language, he must put them together to convey a message, and to do this must have a fullness in himself to express before the composer's fullness finds a response.
Lastly he needs an understanding of the composer's style, a corrective to the urge to express himself rather than the music. Thus he puts all his equipment, his skill, the raw material of his whole life at the service of another man's vision - a vision which has become his own without, at the moment of performance, the need for thinking about it. Technical mastery consists of automatic responses to impulse, gathered over many years and fed into the instinctive computer of one's brain..."