One day in 2003, it occurred to me that playing music had gone out of my life, and I couldn’t remember why.
When I was a child, my mother taught me to play the piano, and in school I learned a little bit of the flute and clarinet. In high school and college I dabbled in the guitar. In graduate school, I returned to the piano and studied it seriously for about three years.
Sometimes things pass out of your life, and you have to work a little to get them back: playing music was an absence I wanted to fix.
I didn’t want to return to an instrument as cumbersome as a piano (if you saw the house I live in, you would understand). I wanted something I could carry. I considered the mandolin and banjo, but settled on the fiddle--without having any idea what I was getting into.
For good reason, almost no one takes up the fiddle as an adult, and few of those who do stick with it. I beat those odds.
Several teachers refused to take me. Maybe they didn’t want to risk taking on a dilettante. Luckily, I discovered early on that I live about six miles from one of the greatest living fiddle players, and he was willing to take on a beginning student.
Sometimes I go to fiddle camps, week-long summer events where people attend various fiddle workshops during the day and jam into the night.
Notice that one of the pictures to the left is the neck of my unusual nine-string fiddle. Also, below you can view videos of me and of my teacher.
YouTube video:
Usually when I go to my lessons, the student coming out from the studio is a little six year-old genius, and the one coming in after me is a 12-year-old festival champion. In between, there I am, scratching away.
Here’s an imaginary conversation I imagine having with my teacher: “Yes, I know that they are prodigies. But can they program complex applications in SAS? Can they hold their own in a lively discussion of world politics? I don’t think so.”
My accomplishments on the fiddle are modest by the standards of Richard Greene’s other students, but I doubt that any of them has enjoyed it as much as I have. I can now competently play basic tunes in the styles of Old-Time, Bluegrass, Irish and Scottish.
Early into the venture I decided that one of the few advantages of taking up a difficult instrument like the fiddle so late in life is having an income to support it. I decided that waiting for an instrument I loved until my skill level merited it was unnecessary.
So I commissioned a custom-made violin from James Wimmer in Santa Barbara, and got to watch it being made, from a couple of rough pieces of wood to a beautiful instrument.
A few years later, I bought a second, highly unusual fiddle from the same luthier. Instead of the standard four strings, this one has nine: there are five sympathetic strings running beneath the standard set. The sound is beautiful, and works especially well for Scottish tunes.
YouTube video:
