Violin Weekend

I would not call myself a violinist. Years and years ago I received my grade 8 from the Royal Conservatory of Music but that was quite some time ago. I do however play the fiddle and a few weeks ago I was asked about my violin skills. The story is that in France there is a string quartet and they offer weekend workshops where other musicians come and stay on this little French farm and spend the weekend working on music. I was asked to fill in at the last minute because one of the first violinists couldn't make it and they needed someone. I had a peek at the music, choked out a 'yeah I can do it because you need me' and spent the last few weeks practicing like mad. I haven't done this many positions changes since that grade 8 all those years ago.

Anyway, the weekend turned out to be much better than expected. It was all in French so I followed as best I could and expanded on my French vocabulary. For example, in English our notes are named based on math (whole note, half note, quarter note, 32nd etc) but the French names are based on appearance (round, white, black = quarter and then the eighth is called croche which google translate tells me is quaver).

Many people were sick so the original quartet was expanded to a sextet with doubling on the first and second violins. Just as well, that music was hard (Mozart quartet in d - the minor one if you happen to read this blog and are big into classical string music). But I digress, it all turned out right in the end. My partner was a much better technical player than me, hitting the notes in tune being of chief advantage, and also she was playing without rehearsal (the handing out of music was a bit disorganized).

Even though my intonation sucked, I had the benefit of experience in bands faking it. As in - when the thing starts falling to pieces you keep going with the wrong notes but right rhythms and eventually you'll get back on track. Not quitting when you've made a mistake is actually a pretty good technique to have and surprisingly not that intuitive. My other badly needed advantage is my reasonable feel for syncopation coming from playing in a highschool swing band. Plus the hours of practice.

Anyway, enough of the music lesson, we played a mini concert at the end for friends and family who came to watch and we also played with the 'real' string quartet (as in they do this for a living). And for the first evening we even had a dance - they had some fiddle music for quartet which we played and I tried to remember some of the Ceilidh dances to teach.