Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner do you wish you were a violinist?

Yes, I have read that . Also during Mahler's short tenure in NY, he conducted Beethoven's Emperor with Busoni at the piano.

Oh to have been there for that! The concert reportedly generated quite a bit of controversy.

Walter was, of course, a Mahler protege. That's not to say that his observation is wrong.

It's been a while since I read the pertinent volume of the de la Grange biography, and I hope to look at it again this weekend. I have no doubt that Mahler was very good at the piano, but I'm sure you're right -- his more compelling interests were conducting and composing.

Oh no, not violin. The violin is too extroverted for me. Plus the piano is my favorite instrument. I did learn some cello, though, and it is a close second. Piano is just so much more versatile.

Stores,

I can appreciate your choice of the Cello. So soulful and avoids the sometimes "screechiness" of the violin. I've never understood why the Viola was not more popular.

Vibrato on the stringed instruments is a wonderful thing.

Bech

I picked up violin last summer and have been taking group strings classes here at school. Am also involved in a chamber music ensemble. While finding time to practice as a CS/mathematics double major is difficult at best, it's a fantastic stress reliever.

I wanted to play every instrument when I was a kid. Luckily, I was able to borrow and mess around with a lot of unused instruments sitting around the high school band room, but unfortunately the school had no orchestra program and the only stringed instruments available were a couple of basses. I did borrow one of those and learned to play eventually well enough to play in the college orchestra a bit, and ultimately working part-time as a freelance jazz player for about 20 years.

Back to the violin, though: while still in high school I spied a new, full-size violin in a music store: $35. (No, I didn't leave off a zero.) I bought it immediately, along with a method book, and spent a while trying to learn it on my own -- mostly unsuccessfully. As someone said above, it can take a long time to learn how to produce a sound that's not absolutely horrifying (and that particular violin might not have even been capable of sounding good). That had not been my experience with most other instruments I tried, and I lost interest after a while.

After I lost interest, a friend who also liked to experiment with whatever instrument he could borrowed my violin for a while. When he returned it, he handed the case to me with a proud look on his face, thanked me, and said "I took good care of it -- I even polished it for you." I must have looked as confused as I was feeling, because he added "you know, with that block of yellow stuff in the case." Yep -- he had rubbed rosin all over the body! The violin may have been a clunker, but that memory alone is worth the $35!

My friend, a violinist, has fabulous phrasing and I really try to achieve that same sort of rhythmic freedom in my own playing. But the rhythmic constraints with the two hands...is sort of something that I think ground so many pianists (like myself).

I wish I could play:

1. Piano
2. Organ
3. Violin
4. Cello
5. Bandoneon

No. The die is cast.

I so love every instrument, that if I had it to do over I'd be a composer.

Most if not all composers EVER have played at least one instrument semi-well. No?

No. While the violin has a lot of beautiful things going for it, and portability!, the piano is unmatched in creating multiple voices at the same time. All the crazy literature and transcriptions for solo piano make sense when your instrument constantly makes you feel like you could do anything (if only you were good enough :P).

Besides, the piano has the most obsessed composers in history behind it: Chopin is the ultimate pianists' pianist, never forgetting the instrument in his compositions; Rachmaninoff had extreme attention to detail and wrote heavy piano works that reflected a lifetime of learning; Liszt, Busoni, and Godowsky wrote mind-bendingly difficult, huge works that show just how obsessed we can be. (I think it's a quality that men tend to have more than women - to become absorbed by ONE interest and mastering that ONE thing, especially cumulative endeavors like the piano and math, instead of being good at several things.)

I adore how on-the-edge of possibility things like La Campanella, Rach 3, Prok 2, Prok 3, Rach's first sonata, Feux Follets, Busoni's concerto, literally anything by Godowsky, Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's SYMPHONIES for piano, and so many other things for the piano seem.

We're addicted to a disregard of the impossible.

Absolutely not.

definitely. but if i had to choose a single instrument today to spend hours & hours practicing, i'm not sure i could do so easily, except if i knew for sure that in doing so ii wouldn't be closing off my other options. as a composer one can temporarily 'get inside' any instrument or combination one chooses.