“The violin is stupid! Nobody plays the violin anymore! I don’t want to play the violin! The violin is just not cool!”
The parent of every violin student has probably heard most, if not all, of those lines. I have heard . . . No, I have USED every one of those lines.
I walked into a Fort Worth high school auditorium and saw a man playing a vaguely familiar instrument on stage. The music was loud. The Led Zeppelin song playing made the kids shake their heads, clap their hands, and stomp their feet.
Mark Wood is a rock and roll violinist. He and his brothers toured the northeastern United States playing Beethoven string quartets when Mark was young. After high school, Mark attended the Juilliard School of Music to study viola. He left when his teacher didn’t teach him to “play like Jimi Hendrix”.
Mark preaches a gospel of good technique, diligent practice, knowledge of basic music theory, and fun. And I don’t know anyone who would accuse Mark of not being great. His group, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, has toured the world and regularly sells out 12,000-capacity venues.
Mark says that the violin is the “last frontier”. He points out that we have moved all instrument families into the popular music spotlight, except for orchestral strings. And his passion is to do for the violin what Leo Fender and his followers did for the guitar. And like Leo Fender, Mark has created his own instrument. The Viper is a radical self-contained violin that is capable of playing anything from classic Paganini to, well, Jimi Hendrix!
And Mark is not alone.
Regina Carter is a jazz musician. Influenced by Stephan Grappelli, she became so dedicated to jazz that she left the New England Conservatory (which had no jazz department) to study at Oakland University. She there she learned by sitting in the brass section of the band and listening. She would then transpose the saxophone parts she heard so she could play them on the violin.
Barrage is a group of young musicians based in Canada. His stage covers more variations of violin music than you can imagine. And they shake their bows they do! and sing and dance. And even wallow. And by the time they leave the stage, the audience applauds and stomps with them.
More than a quarter of a century after fiddler Charlie Daniels and his band recorded The Devil Went Down to Georgia, the song can still make the crowd whoop and whoop! And the band just keeps going strong with the showman/fiddler at the helm. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to tell a bunch of good old Southern guys that what their fans are so excited about just isn’t cool.
Rachel Barton Pine is a phenomenon! A classical violinist, she is also a fan of heavy metal music. She has even recorded a transposed rock album for string quartet. Far from the stereotype of the stuck-up classical violinist, she has overcome more obstacles in her twenty-plus years than most people in her entire life. Now her pet projects include cataloging classical music written by black composers and making sure, through her Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation, that talented young violinists don’t face the same financial challenges she does.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t find a human being who isn’t cool in the group! And each of them can give you a list of great violinists as long as their bow!
The problem is not the instrument. The problem is not pedagogy. As long as good technique is taught, it doesn’t really matter how we impart that set of knowledge and skills.
What matters is the directory. (A 14-year-old boy, when asked about Mark Wood’s music, told me: “Of course it’s great, it’s rock!”). What matters is the mindset with which we approach the instrument and the instruction: attitude, charisma and communication skills of the person promoting the instrument.
In short, the proposition (the myth if you will) is:
The violin is just not great.
As TV’s Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman would say, “MYTH DESTROYED.”
