This piece - about my complicated relationship with a difficult instrument - was first published 12 years ago. Today, I still wouldn't change a word.
We’ve always had a bittersweet relationship, my violin and I. When there was chaos in my family, it sang songs of happiness. When my father was crazily threatening or catatonically depressed, it gave me succour.
From the age of six, I learned how to contort my arms in a fiddler’s hug. The right arm sinuously stroked the strings, while the left was co-ordinated, from skittering fingers to anchored shoulder.
I gradually spent less time with childhood buddies and more with my violin, which helped me sing my emotions into clarity. It was involved in every big event in my life.
It was there on the sixth floor of The Alfred Hospital when my nana had her second stroke. Although unconscious, they promised she could hear when I played Yiddish tunes to her dying form.
It was there at my end of year assessment for music college. I listen to the tape of the Mozart A Major concerto and still feel proud, if a little incredulous.
It came with me to Israel, where everyone had a guttural accent and always seemed to be angry. My violin gave me entrée to amateur orchestras and pleasant social encounters I still remember wistfully.
The first boy I pashed was a fellow violinist. We snuck around and nearly lost our virginity together. Today, he is a professional musician and a lovely player.
A German named Louis Otto made my violin in 1912. It was bought when my playing deserved something better than an imitation Old Italian. The sounds it made were like silk compared with sackcloth.
But then my father died and everything changed.
I couldn’t play. I experienced neck pain and shoulder stiffness. A kindly teacher tried to help but I couldn’t get comfortable. I literally couldn’t hold my violin up.
In exasperation, he demanded, “If someone handed you a million dollars, would you give it away?”
I did indeed give it away.
Later, I played electrified violin in a band. We played gigs for the beer rider and the after-party, and I felt a power from my instrument utterly different to the orchestras I had joined.
I was used to being in a string section, where the violins play en masse. In our band, every note and scratch was louder than life. It was intoxicating.
Then it ended and many years passed. I had my own mental health troubles, just like my father. I rarely listened to music and never played.
This year, one of my old music pals, now a successful conductor, did a couple of concerts in Melbourne. Through tears of joy and longing, I listened to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6. Afterwards, I sought him out.
When I related my series of breakdowns, he said what many fiddle players know. “Yes, the violin will do that to you.”
The loveliness of modern string instruments has never been portrayed so humourously as in Man Ray’s photo of a woman’s naked back with “f-holes” drawn at her waist (“Ingres’ Violin”).
The perfect hourglass of a woman’s body and the perfect curves of a violin have proportions that satisfy our longing for symmetry and grace, and their shapeliness appeals to our need for sensuality.
But most people can’t describe why they like the violin. They revere it abstractly because it’s beautiful or because its sound is close to the human voice.
An old school friend told me he was sorry I didn’t play any more. “Why should I play if it’s so hard for me, so conflicted?” I asked him.
“But it’s the violin”, he said. “It’s special.”
And now my niece Hannah, 7, has taken it up. I feel like a parent whose child is learning to drive. That violin – it may be special but it can be dangerous, too.
Will she love it? Hate it? Feel pressured? Feel joy? Already a performer, she tells me what’s best about class. “My violin concert, because we only have it once a year.”
On Sunday, 29 June, the stately strains of Go Tell Aunt Rhody commenced in a small school hall. Hannah stood up straight, her arms in a strong “U”, and I burst with pride, and crossed my fingers for luck.
First published as Music with emotional strings attached, The Age 7 July 2008
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