While browsing around just now, I came across an excellent article in Plus magazine called "Why is the violin so hard to play?" It describes, in a scientific way, why a note played on a violin can sound scratchy, and what happens when a non-scratchy note is played. It's quite interesting.

So, if someone says your playing is scratchy, you could just respond with "No, I'm just not achieving Helmholtz motion" and leave them totally baffled.

I did see this article a while ago, thanks for pointing it out.

Brilliant

Interestingly, the music below the violin in the picture with the caption, "But will I get Helmholtz motion?" is the grade 7 piece Kujawiak by Wienawski.

Interesting! ...

...But i didn't read it all...

In simple terms, it's all about achieving the right balance between hand/arm weight and position of the bow in the space between bridge and fingerboard. Near bridge = loud (at best) or scratchy (if accompanied with too much hand/arm weight). Near or on fingerboard = soft or flautato (at best) or whistly and faint (if accompanied with too little weight.

Good teaching accompanied with masses of practise will gradually refine your bowing arm until you can achieve the effects you're after without needing to think too much about it. Interesting to see the science though!

Violinia

Bow speed comes into it, too, I think.

Not strictly true. It's possible to bow very slowly, or very fast and still get a good tone. As violinia has pointed out, it's about controlling the pressure of the bow. In essence, very good muscle control in the right arm and hand is what dictates the sound quality.

You're right, Amanda. I think what happens in the end is that you develop a connection between your expressive brain and your arm; in other words you can get your arm/bow to express exactly what you want to express. A lot of the frustration felt by beginning violinists is the inabilty to co-ordinate expressive brain and arm - as if you were unable somehow to get your voice to express what you wanted it to, even though the feelings and intent were right there and ready to go.

You have to get to the point where you are totally at one with your bow - like a dancer is at one with his/her limbs.

I think it's funny when you see violinists on television; the camera always wants to focus on the left hand, as if that's where it's all happening - when in fact the real magic is in the bowing arm, and what happens with the left hand is far more technical, and in a way easier.

A fixation that the left hand fingers are working very fast so that must indicate the place where all the work is being done.

I guess the TV camera view has to appeal to the lay-person/spectator point of view - the left hand looks far more impressive doing its 'stuff' than the right hand.

This might sound a bit of a militant idea, but I think everybody should be made to have some sort of musical instrument lessons at some point in their life, who knows they might enjoy it and keep it up, even appreciate music they didn't think they liked, but most of all, just so they know that being able to play an instrument well isn't a breeze, or an easy option and that it definitely takes more than a couple of years to achieve....

Yes you're right about the left hand looking more impressive for the lay spectator.

I also agree with you about compulsory instrumental lessons for everyone. After all, everyone's taught to read and write, so why not at least one musical instrument as well?

I visited a primary school in Vienna last week and was surprised to find no instrumental tuition at all is offered (only in specialist music schools) - not even recorder, although there's a lot of singing.

I think things are best in Scandinavia where there's been an enormous drive to get the playing of music onto the curriculum in recent decades. The results are already apparent with the enormous upsurge in Scandinavian music we are seeing today, especially jazz, folk and rock - and I imagine classical too. All very exciting and it just shows what can be achieved with some forward thinking and focussed financial investment. What a shame that in 10 years of Tony Blair we are no further ahead here on this one.

It's the same in France. No instrumental tuition is offered at all in primary schools. The specialist music schools are subsidised but it is quite a heavy time commitment with one hour's theory (on top of the 30 minute instrumental lesson) being compulsory from the very beginning. And remember that French primary schools don't finish until 4.30.

Recorder is systematically taught in secondary schools but in pretty awful conditions. The whole class learns at once and at the same speed, (in other words 30+ pupils, some of whom can already read music and play another instrument (or even the recorder) and some who have never seen an instrument in their life). They are taught by the class music teacher who is almost never a recorder specialist (and probably doesn't play any other wind instrument either).

I'm not sure this sort of method does anyone any good whatsoever. Puts off those who may not be able to keep up, while those who are more advanced get bored very quickly. Surrey County Arts have tried this one-size-fits-all classroom approach with woodwind and brass instruments. A peri goes into the class and is assisted by the classroom teacher during a 30 minute lesson. SCA rave about it in all their newsletters, but I've not actually heard any feedback from the recipients or the teachers, so I get the impression they aren't exactly impressed by the affair.

This European music specialist music school model probably has this effect: no music for most, but a sizeable proportion get excellent school musical instrumental tuition. You certainly couldn't say no decent musicians are coming out of Europe (I'm leaving Scandinavia out of this because they're do things differently again) so they must be doing something right.

I took on a pupil a while back who had been educated in a French school. She'd been learning violin and told me she'd had a weekly 45-minute individual lesson at school with an excellent teacher followed by compulsory orchestra every Saturday. She played extremely well, far better than anyone I've taken on from the Engish peri system where you get a half hour individual lesson in a broom cupboard at best and for an arm and a leg!

The stunning quality of her playing to me spoke reams. Happily I'm still teaching her.

The Scandinavian model sounds best though because it gives so much opportunity for so many.

It's so rare that anyone reaches the top musically in this country without having attended either Chethams, the Purcell School or the Menuhin School at some point in their career. See Nicola Benedetti, Chloe Hanslip et virtually al. My heart sort of sinks every time I read the bio of a new star - it's nearly always the same, and it needn't be this way. Because of our lack of serious investment in children's music, so many are being denied opportunties that could draw out so much untapped potential.

There wasn't any investment in music when I was at school, so in many ways things haven't changed and regrettably they are unlikely to.

To digress slightly, but perhaps highlight just where the crux of the problem might lay, we have to face the additional fact that the UK lacks culture when it comes to music. In continental Europe music is considered an important part of peoples lives and they attend live performances on a regular basis. We have some excellent orchestras in this country and conservatoires that students from across the world come to study at and yet, many orchestras often struggle to get a decent sized audience. I think the cost of tickets plays a big part, a decent seat will set an average punter back a sizeable chunk of their weekly income and to do that on a weekly basis would not be feasible for many, but, when you consider how many people will freely shell out £50 for a single football match ticket or go on booze cruises and not even whince at the fact that they have spends hundreds of pounds in one hit, then one also needs to question whether the Brits are just a crass and generally uncultered bunch anyway.

It is not a "sizeable proportion" but a very small number who get instrumental tuition. Probably, I would say, fewer than in the UK simply because everything takes place outside school and (at the risk of being boring) the school day in France is far longer than in the UK. In the bigger towns music schools are not open to everyone. Some have aptitude tests, others make would-be pupils do a year's theory first and weed pupils out that way. Cnce they have got in pupils are all expected to progress at the same speed.


This is not the English Peri system. I am hoping my daughter will go into a class like this when she starts secondary school. It is a class with a music option and the school has an arrangement with the local Conservatory teachers. Again these places are highly competitive in the big towns but not where I live.



If a pupil really wants to progress then they need to go to at least a Regional Conservatory. When I used to teach in a secondary school there was a girl who was an excellent pianist. From age 11 her mother took her to Paris once a week for a piano lesson at the top Paris Conservatory. Paris is over 500km from where I live - so just imagine what she was paying in train fares every week, not to mention the time needed to get there and back.


Take out the booze cruises and things are not really that different in France. In the medium-sized town in which I live there are two orchestral concerts a year which do sell out but the tickets are bought mainly by people who are not particularly interested in music but see it as an occasion to be "seen."

June 21st is the "Fete de la musique" and in big towns there are all sorts of free concerts. In my town it is mostly just DJs (ie amplified CDs).

Now that's touched a raw nerve with me. I can be a grumpy old woman when it comes to people who want to be seen in the right places. Corporate days out, where the attendees aren't there for the event, they're there to eat the expensive lunch and knock back the Champers - while the majority of the seats allocated to them are left empty. Meanwhile, the people who WANT to go to the event itself are cornered in an area where they can barely see anything

(Soapbox safely back under the table)

I'm afraid this is the English peri system in most state primaries and comprehensives today. I teach in two state primaries and two state secondaries and the only school of the four where I have decent conditions to teach in is the one that has 'performing arts status', meaning they receive extra money for music. From these funds they have built a wonderful music block with state of the art equipment and lovely teaching rooms, and consequently theyhave a busy, thriving enthusiastic music department. Some of the children's instrumental lessons are wholly subsidised by the school and they put on lots of concerts etc etc. I love working there.

In the other schools, however, the parents have to cough up every penny with no exceptions, and the lessons aren't cheap. Most families can't afford the individual lessons so group lessons are the norm, usually in cramped, cold or airless conditions. Music stands often have screws missing or are tangled beyond the repair and the schools can't afford to replace them. School instruments are the cheapest, scratchiest available, and teachers are often reluctant to let pupils leave their lessons to go to their music lesson. Heads of Music are harrassed and not in a position to give the peris much support. I'm afraid this is the state of most peri music education in British schools today from what I hear from the numerous peris I know.

I think the dumbing down so prevalent in British culture today is shameful, and getting worse. Yes there are pockets where culture is thriving - I went to a Norwegian jazz concert last night and the place was packed, but there's a tangible feeling of celebrity culture/booziness gone mad in Britain today and I am personally getting really fed up with it.

I'll never forget a radio programme I once heard about a philosophical lecture in Hungary. Afterwards the audience stayed well into the night debating and discussing; an English participant wryly commented that at similar events in England he had never witnessed anything afterwards except a mad rush to the bar and a digression to talk about anything but philosophy.

I think it's endemic in our culture and always has been. The royal family and their disdain of cultural pursuits (except in the case of Prince Charles, up to a point, although he's regularly ridiculed for it and anyway he tends to 'get it wrong') are symptomatic of our intellectual malaise. The use of the word 'clever' - 'ooh, he's a bit 'clever' isn't he?' as an insult rather than a mark of praise. The sneering of the upper middle classes at serious discussion ('such a bore' - 'oh god aren't they earnest') or the lampooning of 'Guardian readers' as 'lentil-munching, sandal-wearing PC bores'...

I picked up a Daily Mail the other day and was struck by how utterly cynical it is; clever writers with their fingers very much on the pulse of 'middle England' pandering to all their shallow, narrow-minded, inward looking prejudices. Phrases like 'I'm not being funny but..', 'don't get me wrong...' and 'at the end of the day..'

Of course it isn't perfect in Europe - there the racism can be even more extreme, especially in France and former East Germany, but in many parts of Europe you can still feel a more civillised atmosphere. Binge drinking is unknown (except when the Brits turn up for their stag nights, cringe) and you can have a philosophical discussion where people are actually eager to join in rather than raise their eyes to heaven.

I've just returned from Vienna where binge drinking amongst the young is virtually unknown. I travelled by train and shared the compartment on the way down with a Turkish businessman and a Canadian Euro-railing student. Philosphical/political/cultural discussion ensued for hours....

On the way back I shared the compartment with a Russian accountant and a French primary school teacher - more of the same. OK you could say this was the result of travelling, but if they had been English almost inevitably the conversation would have been less weighty almost by default.

Oh and all the above spoke several languages. Who in Britain can be bothered to do that these days? I even went into a cafe in Paris on the way back and encountered two English women addressing the waiter in English. How crass was that?!?

Violinia, Grumpy Old Women Club member

Sorry, I wasn't very clear. What I meant to say was that you can't compare the two systems because in England it is a peri system but in France it is not a peri system, even though the lessons take place in school time. In these classes with a music option, time is specifically set aside for music lessons in the timetable. (The other classes get an extra hour of sport in their first year and I'm not sure what else, further up the school children who opt to do music can't do Latin etc.). There is only one class (maximum 24 pupils) in one secondary school in the whole town (and no primary schools) which offer this option and the teachers are those employed on a permanent contract by the local music school. In fact, in my town the pupils are actually bused down to the music school two afternoons a week for the music activities.

Another G O W nodding her head here. I can't think of anything to add as you've covered the subject very succinctly. I confess to being appalling at foreign languages though. I gave up French and eventually got thrown out of my German class at school because I was so useless. If learning a foreign language had been introduced while at nursery school, then I'd have grown up with it. I was 9 years old before I even had the chance to begin learning French.

Another reason I think the Brits have a foreign language problem is because English is a mish-mash of Germanic and the Romance tongues. English grammar and correct punctuation is rarely taught in schools because very few teachers actually understand it themselves. Then people wonder why the Brits can't get their heads around foreign languages, which are usually taught from a grammar point of view. If we can't understand how our own language fits together, how on earth can we begin to learn another?

Anyone who's read the book 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' will know exactly where I'm coming from......

I had a headstart with languages as my mother is from Vienna so I was listening to German from the word go, so I do appreciate it's not so easy for most English people when in most cases they don't really encounter a foreign language before the age of 11.

English grammar and correct punctuation has sadly gone out of fashion in English schools because of a well-intentioned but disasterous move back in the 70's to make the subject of 'English' more attractive to children. Out went grammar and the former importance attached to spelling and punctuation and in came a more 'fun' method of learning but the baby went right out with the bathwater. Now we have a generation of school teachers who can barely spell and punctuate themselves.

When my son was at primary school I recall seeing a notice on the board saying ' their' where it should have been 'there'. I couldn't help myself and pointed it out to a teacher who put me firmly in my place telling me she'd 'had a long day' when she made that mistake. Well excuse me but it's not the kind of mistake we pre-70's educated people would ever make, even after a lengthy period of sleep deprivation! We were drilled in grammar, spelling and punctuation to within an inch of our lives and yes I know some people found it tiresome but so what? It set them up for life. I personally loved the study of grammar, and it slotted nicely into the learning of foreign languages a bit later on.

Another thing - the learning of foreign languages these days - no grammar at first! They go straight into learning phrases which is all very well but if you can't conjugate a verb.....? I despair. Surely the immersion method only works with daily lessons and preferably with the very young? But from age 11? No grammar? No conjugation?

My German lessons involved the drilling of cases: der, die, das, die; den, die, das, die; des, der, des, der; dem, der, dem, den! It's all still in there after nearly 40 years! Was it really so painful? Hardly.

They could teach every child in the land to read music and sight-sing if they really had the will for it.

That's actually quite young in the UK though I think they are trying to improve things these days. I didn't get to start a language till secondary school, when I was actually 12 because I was old in my year.


It can actually be very effective, BUT the teacher needs to know what they are doing (IMO). Immersion is quite different from "learning phrases". It is in the same category as learning a music sound before learning the symbol, or learning a musical phrase before knowing the theory (grammar) behind it, concepts Kodaly and the like would've thoroughly approved I think? Learning phrases parrot fashion isn't, in my experience, a particularly good way of learning a language - musical or otherwise - but then, it isn't immersion either. Much TEFL teaching, especially within the UK, is based on immersion, as a good many TEFL classes are multilingual and a fair number of TEFL teachers don't speak another language, BUT it can be remarkably effective for those wanting to get proficient in English in a short time. Grammar is covered, but in the target language, not the native tongue.

My German teacher for one year in secondary school didn't speak any English in front of us, let alone TO us, for well over a month (2 lessons a week only). We learned a lot that year, and many of us got marks in the high 90%s in the end of year exams. We also enjoyed ourselves, got a thorough grounding, and were confident in our use of the language we had learned. During the year she also used plenty of English in lessons, but her use of German forced us to use it, and to understand it, even in a very basic way, very quickly.

(Unfortunately we had a rubbish teacher the year after and most of us dropped German as a consequence - he was a German teacher on exchange and spent a lot of his time telling us how rubbish we were compared to how good his German students back home were at English, conveniently forgetting we'd been learning 9 months as compared to their 5 years... bah!)

Best of all is motivated students and a combination, IMnotveryexpertO . I started Russian at 19, and after 4 years was pretty much fluent - not native speaker level, clearly, but there were few situations in which I couldn't get by, and a great many more in which I could understand, converse, fluently, confidently, and correctly. Learning languages later in life is far from impossible, but it does take teachers who know what they are doing. We basically attacked the learning process from all angles: immersion oral classes, intensive listening classes, reading, translation (starting very simple but starting right from week one) backed up by grammar. Dry grammar on its own need context for most learners though, it can be just as useless as parrot-learned phrases. After 3 years we had a literature course in which the hourly lectures were in Russian. No way could I have coped with that without prior experience of immersion in the language, not just my time spent IN Russia, but in coping with Russian being the medium of teaching, rather than forever approaching it at one remove through the medium of English.

All my best (and largely also most effective) language learning situations (from Russian as my degree subject, to a subsid in Croatian, to my year of German in secondary school and courses I took for fun in Japanese and BSL at uni) involved, to some extent, immersion, being forced to use the language, however little one knew. Whether it would be a satisfactory method in its own right for adults, I don't know, but it's honestly a world away from just learning phrases parrot fashion, and it can be tremendously effective. Having experienced both kinds of lessons, it's very much the scarier and more challenging, but also infinitely more exciting and interesting, and it constantly provides context, meaning, and immediate USE for what you're learning.

It sounds as though your Russian experience was very positive Sarah I wish I had the time to go back to the Russian I was learning, but it needs daily application (as you have mentioned) and I just can't commit that time at the moment.

I think the mothod of learning you mention worked for you and your fellow students, because you wanted to be there and wanted to learn. If we consider the average teenager, how many of them want to learn anything at all? There seem to be an increasingly growing number of those who consider it 'cool' to be ignorant. 70,000 years ago that type of human would have been wiped out because they would have either been trodden on by a woolly mammoth or eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. The Darwin Principle doesn't tend to dominate in our modern Western world because we don't have to fend for ourselves as such, we just go to the supermarket, pick it off the shelf, take it home and eat it.

I digress.........

Yes, it does indeed. I'm sure you'll get back into it one day. I was very lucky in my experience, it says a lot for the quality of teaching that we reached such a high level of fluency in a short time and without the advantage of the language sponges young children seem to have for brains


True, but then again, learning lots of random grammar won't get them learning a foreign language either

I was thinking about this after I went to bed that night, and basically I'd liken the learning of grammar tables etc to mnemonics like "pineapple" for a triplet, or FACEs in the spaces/every good boy deserves football for learning the note names on the treble clef. They can be very useful, but they are only crutches. The idea is to use the language enough so that the right case or conjugation trips merrily off the tongue (IMO).

Conscientious language students WILL learn those things, yes, but as a crutch and as reassurance that if they suddenly go blank, the conscious "der die das" knowledge is there to be referred to. I learned all the grammar tables! I used to be able to recite all the 24 possible endings of a Russian verb forwards, backwards, or even diagonally , but what got them into my brain and fluent was using them. Just for another example that occurred to me, the word for "square" in Russian is ploshad', which has an ending that is not obviously feminine or masculine, but few Russian students will have a problem remembering that it is feminine, NOT because they have repeated to themselves "square is feminine" a million times, BUT because the first time you're likely to come across the word is in "Red Square", krasnaya ploshad'; knowing instinctively that such and such a word goes with such and such an adjective ending means it'd be hard to forget the gender of the word - learned so early, the two words roll off the tongue together.

But on its own, dry grammar tables are as close to being fluent in a language as a theory exercise is to playing a piece beautifully. It's useful, and it's underpinning it, but it won't make a person able to use that language or play that piece without actually doing the listening, playing, etc. I don't know if that's a perfect analogy but hopefully it puts across what I mean! You don't stop mid concerto and go "every good boy... ahh, it must be a B!" - you use the musical language till it becomes instinctive.

Immersion is not easy for the student, it's being thrown in at the deep end, BUT it can be immensely effective, and real immersion teaching is in quite a different league from being taught a few phrases parrot fashion... which unfortunately is what a lot of folks get or got at school for some years before they really started learning to speak the language and which is what I think Violinia is really railing about (and I don't blame her... boring/bad/pointless language lessons are surely one of the reasons for Britain's dreadful monoglottery )

Anyway, yes, - sorry

Absolutely Fantastic