Dorothy Barth

Many Strings - One Journey

My own violin learning path

CHAPTER 4: STRINGS THAT BIND - REDISCOVERY

My family traveled north to watch me graduate, no small trip for them, as my father didn't drive, and my mother had learned to drive only several years earlier. After a tour of San Francisco, I returned home to Pasadena to begin a series of prosaic office jobs. I decided to return to Pasadena City College for an entire year to learn office administration skills; school was still more appealing than the working world! I played in the chamber orchestra during lunchtime, finally trying out a viola which the school had lent me. Though I graduated that year with straight A's, the jobs didn't get any more interesting. For a while I carried around scores of one or another violin concerto--the Brahms comes to mind--to gaze at during break time and to remind myself of what I really wanted to.

Many who have studied classical music intensely during their early life and have had to come to terms with what would be and what would not be available to them in that world as adults may develop complicated feelings toward their instrument, feelings which may include no small measure of disappointment. This was true for me, and eventually I let my violin slip away.

One Christmas, my older brother, who has always been a muse, gave me a soprano recorder. Little did I know the recorder would become a musical companion for decades afterwards! I learned it in a leisurely way, vowing that I would not be subject to scrutiny or critique by demanding teachers. Because the amateur recorder movement had taken off in the U.S., there were many opportunities for musical growth at pleasant and stimulating workshops, musical weekends in the mountains, and monthly Recorder Society meetings, from which recorder players frequently branched off to form small ensembles. I developed a fondness for early music and became a decent recorder player.

I contacted a violin professor at Fresno State University and shared with him my musical history and my eagerness to "get my chops back." After assuring him that I would have  time to practice seriously (no corporate or academic life would interfere with my violin studies), he accepted me for lessons, and there commenced an enriching period of almost two and a half years, during which time I surveyed a lot of wonderful repertory.

Dr. David Margetts is a superb violinist and was an excellent teacher for me. As a  mature adult, I was also a better student--though my hands may have been less flexible, I was more methodical, more realistic, better able to communicate, and far less frightened. I kept diligent practice and lesson diaries, which makes it easy to reconstruct what territory I covered as an adult violin student. I have written about these diaries in an article entitled Da Capo, which was published in Stringendo, the journal of the Washington DC/Maryland Chapter of the American String Teachers Association (ASTA).

Sevçik made an encore appearance with the with the 40 Variations Opus 3, and since my teacher had a large library of supplementary materials, I was given some etudes by position etudes by Sitt as well as studies by Laoureux and Dont.

The first repertory piece I studied was Corelli's La Folia, a version of which Suzuki students will also spend time with Volume 6.

Next came the Mozart a B flat major Sonata. The few markings on my Mozart copy may have been entered at that time rather than at Stanford; in Fresno I worked mainly from the generously marked study copy given me by my teacher. I didn't finish the third movement of the sonata because my spiccato still needed loosening.

I then began a piece that I may not have been ready for technically, but I had just heard it for the first time ever on my car radio and was enchanted and thus very motivated to study it. It was The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams and spoke to the bird lover in me.

I also spent many months working on Mozart's Concerto No. 5 in A Major, which advanced Suzuki students will encounter in Volume 9. These studies began in May 2001, and my diary tells me that I worked on the Mozart Concerto off an on until early July 2002, even longer than on the Beethoven Concerto which would follow. 

While studying the longer works, I was given a generous sprinkling of the wonderful music of Fritz Kreisler. My teacher arranged the pieces in a suggested order of difficulty, and I studied the Chanson and Pavane, Liebesleid, Schön Rosmarin, Tango, Melodie from Orfeo, Rondino on a Theme from Beethoven, the Tchaikovsky theme Andante Cantabile, Song Without Words, Siciliano and Rigaudon and Liebesfreud. I still play some of these Kreisler pieces at weddings. 

In the fall, I began study of unaccompanied Bach with the Preludio and the Chaconne. It was suggested that I study the Chaconne at the rate of eight measures per week.

My teacher  had a wonderful way of allowing me to preview works that we would not have time to study in depth, such as the Sammartini Concerto, the Tartini Concerti, and the Corelli Sonatas.

Thus ended ended the most musically enriching period of my life. I will always be grateful for that period--to the teacher who took a chance on an adult re-entry student and to my husband who allowed me the freedom to pursue such study.

We consider the  half hour of prelude music before each wedding a mini-recital, given in a beautiful settings amidst flowers and happy people!

To those of you who have read these chapters, I wish you well with your own musical travels and discoveries, wherever they may take you!

These pages were created between January 21 and January 27, 2008.

Key words: learning violin, violin learning path, violin learning journey, Many Strings, One Journey, Dorothy Barth, traditional violin study, violin performance, violin pedagogy, violin teachers