On Beginnings of a Sort

Everybody would like to play a musical instrument, but not everybody likes to practice. Or, more precisely, not everybody likes to practice enough to do it. It's like physical health, in a way; everybody would like to be healthier but not everybody likes to exercise.

I have a few advantages in this regard. One of them is that I do not have children, which I want to acknowledge up front is a big advantage in terms of available free time and energy.

Another advantage, one that is especially useful for my instrument, is that I played for a number of years as a child, though I put it down for many years afterward. In my school district, fifth grade was when "Orchestra" became an option. Early that school year the orchestra teacher, a very sweet and patient lady, came into our class and talked about the orchestra and gave us a quick primer on the violin, viola, and cello.

I do not remember that, exactly, nor do I remember this next part although my mother assures me that it is true. Apparently little Arthur got home that day and loudly announced "Mom, I'm going to play the viola." Mom was surprised, but not displeased, and in short order I had a beginner viola from the local music shop, with the standard hard plastic case. I do remember which were the first songs I ever learned, being Mary Had a Little Lamb and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, basically the classic first songs for beginner stringed instrument players.

Not that original case, but functionally identical.

The reason why it is especially useful to have played as a child, with bowed stringed instruments, is that when you are starting out you sound truly horrible. All the jokes about screeching cats are true, as anyone who has been forced to sit in a room with a beginner will tell you.

The main reason for this is that the bow hand, the right hand that holds the bow, has to do three things before you can make a decent sound:

1. Provide steady but gentle pressure down. Too little and you get the sad cat noise, too much and you get the infamous nails on the chalkboard screech that is the bane of parents and siblings everywhere.

 

This is too little pressure, and the noise it made just now was not pleasant.

2. Move at a more or less steady pace back and forth. Again, too slow or too fast produces sounds akin to distressed animals and ill-used classroom equipment. If you move too slowly and push down too hard, you make really terrible noises.

3. Prevent the bow from sliding up the string. What happens is that your thumb acts as a pivot when you're holding the bow. 

Only the thumb is on the near side of the bow, which makes it a pivot. Especially when drawing down, the pinky and ring fingers tend to pull in.

If you pull in too much with your pinky and ring finger down there at the bottom of the bow, the top of the bow goes flying up the string towards the top of the instrument. Pretty much everybody does this at least a few times while they are drunk learning, and it doesn't make a godawful noise really, it's just embarrassing.

This is basically correct and/or sober.

This is how it slides if you pull with your pinky and ring finger too much.

That's a lot of motor control to deal with before you can consistently play non-painful notes. Consider, by contrast, the piano. You hit a key, it makes a note. It doesn't matter if you hit it softer or harder or whatever. Unless you're doing something truly insane, you will never get a piano to make the cat-on-a-blackboard noise that I can still very easily produce on the viola. This, I think, is one reason why little children all love the piano so much. The notes may be in cacophony with one another, but they are still good, clear notes, and little kids love that.

In any case, when you learn an instrument with a steep initial learning curve as a child, you usually can't tell just how bad you sound, or at the very least you don't really care. And even though I put the viola down for many years, when I picked it back up again I still had enough in me to avoid the cats and chalkboards and make something that sounded vaguely like music. This meant that, as an adult, the act of practicing was already at least moderately pleasant right from the start.

Coda

The only people I know of who, as beginners, may have it worse than the bowed string instrument folks are oboe players, which instrument has always seemed to me like blowing into the narrow end of an angry tentacle. It requires some combination of mouth formation, jaw tension, air pressure, and using your own lips to shield the reed from your teeth so you don't literally destroy the thing while playing it, in order to get a decent note. If you mess up, it sounds like a duck being tortured. Comparatively, I think my parents lucked out with their little viola player