June 2018 Fiddletter

In the movie, ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ there was a scene where a lord is talking to his son.  ‘They said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp.  But I did it anyway.  It sank into the swamp.  So I built a second one.  It sank into the swamp.  The third one caught fire, fell over and then sank into the swamp but the fourth, the fourth stood up’.  It is a guy’s thinking like this that can only explain why I agreed to do a solo performance.  Again.  Even after the disasters of the third and the meltdown of the fourth previous performances.

But I had a plan.  The location was a major factor in the decision because it would be in a church.  I envisioned an audience of grandmother type women all saying, bless his heart, no matter how poorly I played.  Secondly, I decided to play, ‘Amazing Grace’.  Not only a great church song but, a song contained in one octave.  Only two strings of the violin are used to play it.  And I memorized it.  The only (please note the simplistic thinking of the pre-performance view of the recital) challenge would be bow control making sure each note sounded clean.  Get up, play the song, bow and Bob’s your uncle.  It was a done deal.

Hard to believe but I didn’t even think about the recital during the day.  When work ended I had an hour or so before leaving to get in some last minute practice and since I have the keys to the electrical lab I also had a private place to play with some great acoustics.  After a few short strokes to get limbered up I played all three pieces I would be performing; one solo and two others with the group.  I managed to play as I expected.  Not as good as at home but for a strange place and just before the recital not bad.  I was ready to go.  I pulled into the church parking lot and it was packed.  There weren’t supposed to be hundreds of grandmother type people in the audience saying bless his heart, there were only supposed to be twenty of them.  Maybe ten.  Five if things were going my way.  Full blown panic set in.  Wait, wait, wait.  My mistake, we were in the church next door.  Who builds churches side by side?  I walked inside this church and there were maybe twenty people milling about.  I didn’t see the grandmothers yet.  I still hadn’t shaken that feeling of panic inside.  It should have been gone by now.  Deep breaths.  I just need to take a few deep breaths.  Envision a small church, bless his heart grandmothers, both of them.

I wander down the rows of pews until I found one way in the back to take out my violin.  I barely had time to take it out of the case when my teacher asked if she could tune it.  I’m in the remedial group where she still tunes my violin.  I think the only other violin she tunes is for the first grader.  Some people might consider this embarrassing whereas I look at it as a perk for her special students.  No time to think about it as she hustled us to the front for a group practice.  Here I am paired with the only other adult student which is good because he can actually count music so I just have to listen to him as we play and I will be good to go.  We rip off a rousing rendition of ‘Twinkle Twinkle’, which with all the different parts sounds surprisingly great in the church.  While I slipped up in a couple of places (I know, I know how could I mess up Twinkle) I felt pretty good.  We then played the second piece which is a fast pace fiddle song.  I kept up for the first half before realizing I just wasn’t going to make it.  No big deal because I had the option to skip out on this one, so one solo and one group piece to play.  At this point it was time for me to have a private practice session with our piano accompanist for my solo piece.  As we set up in a side chamber he asked what kind of intro did I want?  I said any kind as long as it was loud.  I not only came in at the right time of the intro but I wasn’t half bad.  In front of a stranger.  In the church.  I was shocked.  I might actually pull this off.  No, I meant this was going just like I expected.  No surprise there.  Now it is just a matter of time waiting for the show to begin.  I noticed my wife and son were sitting in the back so I went to join them.

The first performer was the little first grade girl, maybe three feet short.  If you were to Google the word ‘adorable’ the first thousand hits would be of her.  The next nine thousand would be of her with her teeny tiny violin.  My only amazing grace was I didn’t immediately follow her.  This was followed by other small children playing songs far more difficult than ‘Amazing Grace’ and doing amazing jobs.  One of the young ladies played a song almost completely of double stops.  A double stop means playing on two strings at the same time.  It is difficult and while I do that on occasion it is because I have slipped off the string I am supposed to be playing.

And now it was my turn.  I strode, literally strode to the front.  I expected to be more nervous but except for some pre-performance butterflies, the kind where you do projectile vomiting, I was doing a-okay.  As I reached the front I stepped confidently up the steps taking my place behind the music stand.  I tried to raise it but it wasn’t designed for someone of my height or anyone’s height over four feet.  No matter, I had the music memorized.  I raised my violin.  Set my bow.  Turned my head to the pianist and waited for the magic to begin.

I nailed the intro.  I came in right where I was supposed to come in and who could screw up the first note?  It was an open string no fingering required.  The second note was a half note which all I had to do was keep the trembling out of the bow.  I managed to put the trembling in the bow.  On my next fingering I felt two strings.    In all humans, especially guys, there is something called the reptilian brain that is crucial for self-preservation.  Mine just went, “Uh oh”.  Uh oh?  I’m never, ever supposed to be on two strings in this song.  I snap my head around to look at the strings but my glasses are for distance not close up and my fingers are a blur.  Blur as in fuzzy not blur as in playing all sorts of fantastic notes at a rapid clip.  I look back to the sheet music but here’s a funny thing about panic.  Your body goes into this fight or flight mode and starts shutting down all sorts of unnecessary things like remembering memorized music, how to read music or even how to breathe.  My bow arm continued moving from muscle memory which would have been awesome if I was on the same strings my fingers were playing.  Well actually no, since my fingers were on the wrong strings.  I managed to play the entire piece to the refrain completely on wrong strings.

Amazing Grace – (not so much)
How sweet the sound – (not even close)
That saved a wretch like me – (well we got the wretch part right)
I once was lost but now I’m found – (nope, still lost)
Was blind but now I see – (no it’s all one big blurr)

The music repeats back to the beginning and it had to have been God who put my fingers back on the correct strings.  I actually managed to play the music correctly, well correctly for me, the second time through.  Lots of trembling and scratchy sounds but at least this time I was playing something that if you squinted and turned your head just right you might have recognize the tune.

I finished with a flourish four days after starting.  I bowed.  I turned to the pianist to acknowledge him.  I grabbed my music and headed to my seat.  I passed my teacher and she was giving me an emphatic thumb’s up.  The cynic in me was thinking she had to do that but then I realized she was giving me a thumb’s up for my deciding to sit down.

Now up pops a trio of little girls who played ‘The William Tell Overture’.  If I didn’t have such a pathetic performance I would have pointed out that the name was wrong and it really was the ‘Theme to the Lone Ranger’.  Hard to believe people trained in classical music could get that wrong.  Oh and to rub salt in the wound after they played the piece – perfectly.  They played it a second time at twice the speed.  And now we get to the meat of the line up as each performer is playing more and more complicated pieces.  This is capped with my teacher’s oldest daughter playing something that had to be fifty-seven pages long with the first measure having more notes than my entire song and it was outstanding.  I probably could have appreciated this more if I wasn’t in shock which meant I still had to go through denial, anger, depression before I accepted what happened.  There was a group play in there somewhere but I am fuzzy on the details.  On the way home I asked my son how I played.  He didn’t even think about it as he said, ‘You sucked’.  ‘You sucked big time’.  I’m glad he threw in the qualifier.  I mean you sucked is so undefined whereas you sucked big time leaves little doubt where you stood.

I know, I know.  You say I am exaggerating what happened.  Well that’s the wonderful thing about videos, they don’t lie.  The entire experience was ‘cringeworthy’.  That’s one word.  My own invention.  I am the son of an English teacher and I can do that and it captures the whole post-traumatic-stress-syndrome experience.  The easy solution would be to accept I am not cut out for public performances just as some people aren’t made for yoga stretch pants.  But I can fix this.  I’m a guy and we fix things.  I’m an engineer where we fix things that don’t need to be fixed.  I just made a few mistakes.  First thing – glasses.  I need to buy a pair of really cool glasses with a focal length of my violin neck.  The cool part will make me look like I belong up on stage.  The short focal length will not only allow me to see my fingering but make the audience fuzzy so I won’t know they’re there.  Next thing is to change the music.  What was I thinking in playing a slow piece with long controlled bow strokes?  I have no fine motor control.  I pick up rocks for a hobby.  Jazz.  I am going to play jazz.  It has short choppy strokes and the best, the best part is the music repeats itself at different scales, octaves or some musical term that I can’t remember.  So if hypothetically someone, not me but someone, were to get their fingers messed up on the strings it would appear they were changing keys in the music.  And if they did it randomly the performer would be improvising which is completely different than playing the wrong notes and they would be considered a gifted performer.  I am so not going to suck next time.  I’m going to have those bless his heart grandmothers dancing in their seats.