Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodges

Author:Natalie Hodges
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Here’s the thing—what happens when one isn’t the greatest violinist around but wants more than just to listen to it in one’s mind, or even to someone else’s really good recording? I think most violinists feel some instinctive claim to the Chaconne, or at least a deep longing to play it and make it their own. After all, it’s the pinnacle of our repertoire: It requires almost every traditional technique known to violinists; it consists not of one melodic line, but as many as four independent voices at one time, whose lines you can trace more or less from beginning to end. Sometimes it sounds as though the voices of an entire choir—soprano, alto, tenor, bass—are pouring in counterpoint out of the violin’s f-holes. Within the Chaconne, a universe of feeling is bounded in a nutshell: many voices conflated into one, a lifetime of “deepest thoughts and powerful feelings” condensed into fifteen fleeting yet interminable minutes. I know of no piece more beautiful or more full of suffering.

It’s just so damn hard. The primary technical difficulty, at least for me, lies in the execution of those contrapuntal (multivoiced) chords: the need to make each voice within the chord speak, to give each chord its proper weight while still maintaining a sense of horizontal flow, of keeping in time. But the technical difficulty is nothing compared to the emotional and physical stamina required just to get through those fifteen unrelenting minutes. You’re alone, exposed, without respite; there’s no stopping while another instrument plays, no relief until the end. You can practice it every day of your life and never express everything that it is capable of expressing. Still, practicing the Chaconne teaches you more about violin playing—and who you are as a violinist—than almost any other piece because of that very difficulty. It is a lifelong nemesis and bosom friend, the holy grail and the quest itself. For me, it was the last of the Bach violin solos: the only one I hadn’t played, the missing piece.

I had tried learning the Chaconne once before, briefly, several years earlier, until a teacher told me I should stop playing it. It was the summer I was sixteen, and all I wanted was to be a violin soloist. I’d played most of the big pieces written for violin, the showpieces and concertos, tearing through them with a fierce and insatiable hunger, and I wanted to learn the Chaconne. That summer, I was attending the Meadowmount School of Music, an eight-week practice camp for classical-music students in rural upstate New York. All the best violinists, the ones I knew of, anyway, had gone there at some point, including my teacher Mr. Maurer; it was founded in 1944 by the legendary pedagogue Ivan Galamian, one of the primary figures (along with Menuhin) of the golden age of violinists. He is credited with developing a method of teaching—a system of scales and exercises in every key, an order in which pieces should be taught, his own editions

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