The Devil's Instrument

Look at this terrible form! When playing the violin, you must make sure your violin is never touching a weird teenager.

Dear Diary,

The other students in my violin class don’t practice. They wait until the lesson to practice, especially Steve, which is great because I’ve always wanted to hear a grown man butcher Frère Jacques for six weeks.

Steve looks like a grammarschoolboy with shoulder length grey hair, and he is almost as impetuous. He will sit there and play his violin in his own time while our teacher is talking about what he did wrong. I know that Steve had never held a violin until six weeks ago, it is obvious, and I remind myself to cut him some slack, but I have never seen someone look so uncomfortable while they attempted to play music. He might as well be gnawing off his hand.

Playing the violin is not difficult. Playing it well is a different matter, but getting a clean and loud tone as a novice is no challenge at all. Assuming you already have a violin, you need only three things:

1. Your balance
2. The ability to draw you arm smoothly across your body
3. 20/50 vision

With few exceptions, we all possess these traits. So what I can’t figure out is which one(s) Steve is missing. At any given time it is perhaps all three.

I don’t mean to sound angry with Steve, but I admit that I am frustrated by his complete lack of discipline. I can plainly see that he is embarrassed by his poor performance, so much so that he often becomes defensive when he is corrected, and yet he will not so much as pick up his instrument during the week. He claims that he practices, but that just isn’t possible. Even if you only practice for five minutes a day you will begin to improve.* Even if you played only a single note—big full bowing, good arm angle, for five minutes straight—by the end of one week you would be an expert at that note. Which leads me to conclude that Steve practices less than five minutes a day… I wish him luck, but I don’t think he’s going to be a violin player.

I, on the other hand, was born to play the fiddle. I practice for hours every week, and I play in front of a mirror so that I won’t miss a moment of the delirium. So far, I have mastered the D scale, the D minor scale, the A minor scale, and Take Me Out to the Ballgame. I’m just waiting for the invitation to sit in during the seventh-inning stretch.** I will ask them to introduce me as ‘Conceptual Artist & Fiddler, John Photos.’

Apart from a few years of lessons as a boy, I have relatively little experience with the instrument. Still, the sounds my violin produces are nothing short of ecclesiastical. It is not so much the deftness with which my fingers dance across the strings, as it is the confidence with which I drive home the line, “Root, root, root for the home team…”

It is this confidence that has led me to the position of co-teacher.*** And while my teacher did not technically ask for my help, I can tell that he appreciates it when I tune the other students violins or when I count out the beat for the whole group. He hasn’t said ‘thank you’ either, so I imagine he is going to surprise me with something thoughtful when the course concludes. After all, he’s still getting full pay for doing less than half the work.


* This applies to anything. Get up off your ass.

** This has been a goal of mine, ever since September 11th.

*** Unoffically. I’m really just volunteering.