On the other hand, the experience was very stressful for her, and she didn’t feel terribly confident in her audition.  Thus, I was not at all surprised when, at her lesson the following week, she was ready to move on to the next piece for an upcoming recital.  She said that playing the audition movement again would be like “beating a dead horse.”  She was ready to forget about the stress of the past two weeks, check the piece off her repertoire list, and play something new.   I know this feeling well!

My response, though, was, “not so fast!”

At that lesson, I asked her how she imagined pop singers kept singing the same songs, over and over again, in each new city they visited.

“I’m sure they get sick of it!” she said.

That wasn’t quite the direction I wanted to go, so I moved into our classical frame of reference.

“The best way I’ve found to learn and play a piece of music well is to find a story in the piece, something with a deep, personal meaning to me.  Then, when I play, it’s not the technical aspects I focus on, because I know those.  Instead, I can draw out the music.  To this day, as soon as I begin playing the first movement of Bach’s first solo sonata, I’m immersed in the story and emotions that I attached to it 10 years ago when I was preparing it for auditions and a recital.  And I love re-telling that ‘story,’ because it’s alive to me, changing and developing, you see?”

“Uh…”

I think she started to understand when I played her “dead horse” concerto movement alongside her, showing her how much more excitement she could add to the piece with some time spent considering it as more than three pages of technique to be mastered.

As I browsed the internet later that week, I came across a lovely statement that perfectly conveys what I was trying to tell my student.

“The Brentano String Quartet is returning to ‘Death and the Maiden’ having not performed it in quite a while. ‘We do play it differently now, and I think there are discoveries in every performance, in every rehearsal…'”

For those discoveries, I believe it is definitely worth “beating a dead horse!”

“Lonely?  That sounds sad!”

But it isn’t, really.

Originally, it was just the file name of an image.  I traced it from a picture of a Strad for the flyer advertising my senior recital.  I meant to trace the whole thing, but I liked the minimalist look so much that I just stopped.  A few months later, the image made an appearance (in white out!) on the top of my black graduation cap, and soon after that, on flyers advertising lessons when I first moved to Boise for grad school.  Lo’ and behold, I had a logo!

“But it’s not sad, because… why?”

I like to imagine that the violin is a living creature that has grown as much of an attachment to me as I have to it.  It follows, then, that if I am not playing my fiddle, it gets lonely.  An instrument that is not played is simply a silent, though beautiful, mechanical wonder.  It needs love to come to life.  And that is what I intend to do; and I hope I can help others do the same.

Is that a little silly?  Perhaps.  Sappy?  Probably.  But sad?  Definitely not!