Almost every musician looking for a new instrument or bow has a different way of auditioning instruments. Whilst it is clear that there is no standard technique that musicians learn as a student, some received wisdom can be rather indifferent and sometimes counter-productive. In looking for a way of thinking about violin sound, Ruggiero Ricci’s “The Glory of Cremona” comes to the rescue. So thinks Benjamin Hebbert.
It is surprisingly rare in the life of most musicians to come to a violin shop and seriously try out different violins, and as a result even in conservatoire education very little thought is put into how to audition an instrument and the types of consideration that need to be taken into account. As a result almost every customer has their own way of sampling instruments. Some come in playing brash excepts of virtuosic music, and others may analyse every note or bow stroke individually. It is common to record experiences to playback later, but with the advent of increasingly sophisticated mobile phone Apps, I’ve even had customers basing their choice on frequency response curves derived from the kind of acoustical analysis that once required a laboratory to see.
One of my total nightmares comes when a parent accompanies their child to buy a violin before the next grade examination. In they come to be plonked infront of music they barely know to play in an unfamiliar place in unfamiliar company on unfamiliar instruments in order to make the kind of decision that is unfamiliar to them to make. If they only played something simple – a familiar christmas carol by heart, they would be on firmer ground to make a decision.
Things don’t get very much better when you are dealing with grown-ups, and you would be simply amazed at the contorted exercises that people do in order to try an instrument. I’m not against these per-se, if they prove a useful point but often they don’t, and often they come from received wisdom from an older generation of players and teachers who had equally little experience at trying instruments for themselves. Precocious people often feel they have to play the most virtuosic music imaginable to try a new instrument – often music that they haven’t quite learned yet. Given that they are in an environment that never feels completely comfortable, this can lead to a kind of road crash.
Every bow has a weak spot around a quarter of the distance from the head, if you think about it from an engineering perspective it’s a scientific reality. There is a fad for testing bows incrementally along its length to find the weak spot, but that’s only of any importance if it relates to a particular technical challenge that you need to perform. These challenges are normally totally unrelated to the demands of repertoire, so if the imperfections of the bow are irrelevant to what you play, there is no reason to worry about them. Here the advice is clear – play repertoire and see how the bow reacts to it. Sometimes bows appear to have faults as a result of your own technique. As an example, the famously ‘whippy’ bows by James Tubbs can feel very unstable if you play with them at an angle to the string, but if your technique is more towards playing with the full ribbon of hair against the string, then the result is absolutely divine.
Similar things can also be said for the scientific inevitability of wolf-notes. Dear cellists, if your instrument doesn’t have a wolf note, it isn’t resonating properly and there are good wolf-notes and bad. Obviously the kind that sounds like you are driving down the road dragging your exhaust pipe on the ground is not to be tolerated, but most of the time when a cellist detects a wolf-note, it is simply an acoustically more active spot on the scale that makes a warmer sound. The question is how you are able to work around it, how to modulate it, and the level of acceptability that it has. Ultimately there is an incredible amount of instinctive modulation that is possible through unconscious muscle memory, so changing the angle, pressure or speed of the bow, using a bit more of the fleshy part of the fingertip, or a subtle bit of portamento can all add to an instinctive way of suppressing a fruity note. It’s a bizarre fact, but sometimes when customers have come to discuss a wolf-note on an instrument that they own, by the time they have demonstrated it, sat down and had a discussion about what’s causing it, the subconscious psychotheraputic effect of intellectualising the problem means that the musician becomes incapable of finding the wolf. Here again, basing your trial around playing hide-and-seek with wolf notes may be totally tangential to the musical requirements that you are looking for from the instrument.
Jacqueline du Pré rather famously spent hours on end just with open strings and single notes. I really like this idea to get to know the instrument. There are thousands of ways you can attack the strings with bow speed, pressure and angle, and by searching for the richest palette of colour that the instrument can make is particularly satisfying on a cello, and really works across the board. Even though I don’t really play the cello, I find that a zen-like exploration of the open strings opens my ears up, and teaches me a lot about tone that I can transfer to the violin. I recommend it to anyone and it’s less sweaty than yoga.
Ultimately however, choosing an instrument comes down to an intangible sense of what I like to call a musician’s “core-tone”. This is the accumulated experience of a lifetime of teachers, favourite performers and recordings, the instrument they have played upon the most and experiences of others, imagination about how the instrument can sound and the temperament and nature of the musician themselves. All of these things mean that the ideal sound a musician is looking for is both as specific as a particular human voice, and to be found in as wide a pool of variations. Some people are looking for a soloist’s tone and others for something that will blend. Some people are looking for the bright and focussed tone that helps with virtuoso showmanship whilst others are looking for a rich breadth of sound. Then there is the question of whether the instrument is being bought to satisfy the requirements that the musician already has, or whether it is something that they can grow into as it promotes improvement – what we term “playing-in” is as much a case of the musician adapting to the instrument as anything changing in the nature of the instrument itself.
Every day that I have a customer, I learn a little bit more from them about approaches to auditioning instruments. Remember that even the biggest brain can get discombobulated by trying too many instruments, or doing too much. Museum curators claim that visitors only have concentration for about twenty minutes before the brain turns to mush and I think its the same with trying instruments. I have seen clients in shops who have been brought to tears by being left in a room with an ocean of cellos to pick through. Less is very often more, and I try to constrain the number of instruments to show someone to five at any time. Its better to start with minimal playing so you have the brain power to remember one instrument from another. Even then I think even playing for a minute on each is excessive and my horror is when a musician tries to play through a whole movement of a concerto on each one. When the shortlist is only two instruments it can be the time to crack out a concerto or two. I am also playing instruments every day, and have learned to balance my experiences with what I’ve learned from others. I am not saying that there is only one way of trialinig an instrument, but I’d like to make some pointers:
Whatever the instrument, start slowly. I think of the middle two strings as the core of the instrument’s character – the outer two strings may have different characters, so I warm up with slow scales and long notes within the ‘core’ strings, remembering that the octave above the lowest string (3rd finger on the second string) is the most resonant part of the instrument. How much can I warm that note up, and how easy is it to match the rest of the instrument to it’s tone? I tend to end up moving into a contrapuntal improvisation around an arpeggio, all in first position. I think of the top and bottom strings almost as different voices, so only when I am satisfied, I will progress up onto these. In my view that really simulates most music, and allows you to balance the instrument better. When you are comfortable in first position, you can go further, but bear in mind that in first position the strings are at their longest and most resonant. After that it’s worth playing familiar snippets, but don’t add stress to the situation by trying to perform unless it comes naturally to you.
So here’s my segue into praise for Ruggiero Ricci’s Glories of Cremona where he recorded on fifteen Cremonese instruments from Andrea Amati through to Nicolo Bergonzi. Here we have a consumate musician with extraordinary breadth of experience across many old instruments finding the best way to showcase them. There are two records, one that has the kind of repertoire that Ricci judged to highlight a violin’s quality. It is not showy or fast but has more to do with the elegance and profundity of tone production. The other record in the set is for geeks and is the same opening excerpt from the Bruch violin concerto played successively on all the different instruments. It is brilliant for the ranges of pitch and tone, effectively sweeping across the entire multi-dimensional spectrum of violin sound. I think it perfectly encapsulates what you are looking for in any violin in just a 25 second sound sample. As a way to test a violin, I think the first page of the Bruch concerto is unrivalled. I would go a little further than that, because I think that one of the tests of a violin is what I bemusingly call a cadenza on the opening note of the Bruch. That sensuous open G is a constant transformation of pressure and speed to create a single note of infinite complexity. Working around it, warming it with vibrato an octave above, and wallowing in it’s beauty is just a lovely thing to do – go crazy! Think of playing a kind of cadenza on that one single opening note! Below are two excerpts from The Glory of Cremona, the Kurtz Andrea Amati from the 1560s that I have had the absolute pleasure to play at length, and a Guarneri del Gésu from 1739, the Vieuxtemps (he had several).
Ricci’s playlist below really forms the ideal of works to try instruments with. Those of us in the trade get sick and tired of macho loud fireworks of Tchaikovsky and Sarasate being shot off like a machine gun, because there isn’t enough time within each note to form a sense of sound and get an idea of the instrument. Frankly rapid fire Sarasate can work extremely well on a bright and loud instrument with monotone colour, so what have you proven? For less virtuosic players, its simply a matter of playing those things that are familiar and under your fingers. If you are a learner, play your last grade pieces rather than the things you are working on at the moment, that you can’t quite play. Christmas carols work well too, or excerpts of tunes that you are particularly confident with. Remember that if everything else is unfamiliar to you, the last thing you want to do is struggle with the notes in front of you. Of course if you are lucky enough to be able to improvise, thats cool, if not, see if you can train yourself to improvise around a simple arpeggio so you are playing more of a tune than an exercise.
Here’s the playlist. I recommend it to anyone as a primer before trying instruments themselves, whatever the budget you are looking at, because it demonstrates the range of tone that exists within different violins. Most of all, enjoy!
1. Veracini, Largo Gasparo da Salo, c. 1570-80
2. Paradis, Siciliana Carlo Bergonzi – The “Constable”, 1731
3. Hubay, Des Geigenbauer von Cremona Joseph Guarneri de Gesù – The “De Beriot”, 1744
4. Handel, Larghetto Antonio Stradivari – The “Madrileño”, 1720
5. Romanze A-Dur Joseph Guarneri de Gesù – The “Ex-Vieuxtemps”, 1739
6. Brahms, Ungarischer Tanz n°20 E-Moll Antonio Stradivari – The “Joachim”, 1714
7. Brahms, Ungarischer Tanz n°17 Fis-Moll Joseph Guarneri de Gesù – The “Gibson”, 1734
8. Lied ohne worte Op.62, n°1: Andante Espressivo Antonio Stradivari – The “Ernst”, 1709
9. Desplanes, Intrada Andrea Amati, c. 1560-70
10. Nardini, Larghetto Antonio Stradivari – The “Rode”, 1733
11. Vivaldi, Praeludium Nicolo Amati, 1656
12. Paganini, Cantabile und walzer Antonio Stradivari – The “Monasterio”, 1719
13. Mozart, Adagio Joseph Guarneri de Gesù – The “Plowden”, 1735
14. Kabalevsky, Improvisation, Op.21, n°1 Antonio Stradivari – The “Spanish”, 1677
15. Tchaikovsky, Melodie Op.42, n°3 Joseph Guarneri de Gesù – The “Lafont”, 1735
In 1998 Elmar Olivera produced an updated recording along these lines which had the advantage of stereo recording, a digital medium (CD) and a selection of instruments with setup that reflected newer innovation in string technology and an altogether more modern sound. For the sound sample he used the beginning of the Sibelius concerto.
To be perfectly honest, although it is an extraordinary demonstration piece – and a credit to Olivera’s virtuosity, unless you have studied this work, I wouldn’t bother putting it in your trial repertoire – not inside the violin shop at least, though there is nothing better for understanding the control that the violin gives in pianissimos. It’s just surprising how often it gets fluffed. Keep it for when you are back at home. Until you are totally at ease with it, it says far more about bow quality and control than the violin, so even if you are an accomplished player, you may be testing the wrong piece of apparatus when you trial violins with it. Still, if you still have an appetite for glorious sounds, it is well worth the investment. Bein & Fushi in Chicago sell it, and it’s still firmly in copyright, so you can’t go to You Tube to enjoy it yet … some pleasures have to be bought.
