Customer Reviews

Connie's Violin Page: Internet resources for string players, teachers, parents and students

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By LIONEL ROLFE

Connie Sunday's "Connie's Violin Page" is wonderful not only for its exhaustive compilation of Internet resources for string players, teachers, parents and students, but also for its wonderful and pithy commentary on the instrument and its practitioners.

I had always wondered about what the difference between a fiddle and a violin was.

I watched my uncle, Yehudi Menuhin, play a mean fiddle with the best of them, from Ravi Shankar to Stephane Grappelli to Gypsy fiddlers in Rumania and country fiddlers in America. They were all great fiddlers. Yet when Yehudi played the Beethoven Violin Concerto or the solo Bach partitas, he was called a violinist, not a fiddler, even though there was still much of the "fiddler" in his interpretations. Which, by the way, were the best ever done.

What Connie tells us is that there isn't much difference between a fiddle and a violin.

There were string instruments that were bowed for a long long time, but the instrument known as the violin, or the fiddle, didn't really exist before 1600, she tells us.
The best moment of the book comes when she introduces a `60s Counter Culture take on the instrument, but I won't give it away.

You got to read it.

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Lionel Rolfe is the author of "The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey," "The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather" and other books, available on [...].