Holly Redshaw:
I’ll start by saying that this interview is particularly exciting for me, because I’ve not interviewed any string players yet! So first off – does your instrument have a history or biography? How did you get it, did it have any previous owners, and what led to you choosing your particular violin?
Sarah Wagner:
So my violin was actually brand new when I got it, I’m the only person who’s ever owned it. I think I got it in 2008, because I graduated high school in 2010, and so I think before then I had a sort of student model, full-size violin. I’ll also just add in for anybody who doesn’t know, that violins come in multiple different sizes – as it’s an instrument that’s so popular for really young children, you can’t have a five year old playing on an adult-size violin! I think the smallest size generally is like a 1/16 (1/16 as in the fraction size) and then you’ll get your full-size violin (though it depends a bit on your physical size and everything) probably around age 15 or 16, that kind of end-of-high-school, end- of-secondary-school age. So I had an instrument that was a full-size, but was sort of a student instrument. I then bought this one when I knew I wanted to study music with the advice of my teacher, who was like, ‘You’ll want a slightly better instrument to really improve your playing and the different tones and sounds that you can get.’ I think it’s quite fun that this violin has only ever been my instrument.
HR:
Where did you get your violin from? Did you go somewhere near to where you were living in the States, or was this at RCS (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), as you finished high school when you were about to go to music college?
SW:
I was actually quite lucky that being from the Ann Arbor, Michigan area, there’s quite a well known string shop there, Shar Music, that, to me at least, has always just been sort of the standard ‘local music shop’. But I’ve since learned that it’s actually got a national reputation, and even to some extent an international reputation. I think now they’ve changed their business model slightly so that they do mostly student level instruments, but they used to have a pretty good stock of more fine instruments when I was there, so I was able to go in and try a couple of different violins. The other thing that was really great is that the salespeople worked with us (during purchase) – there was a sales guy who brought about three or four different instruments to my lesson, so that my teacher was able to play all of them. I remember doing a test where my teacher would play pieces he knew I was working on and that I really liked, and would have me sit in the corner with my eyes closed so I couldn’t tell which violin was which, and I had to just listen to them. It was really great to get an idea of what the instrument would eventually be capable of, beyond what I could do at the age of 16.
HR:
My other question is about your bow, because I know that some string players will perhaps change bows multiple times after selecting an instrument, or might not even own outright, not only their own instrument, but their own bow. Do you own your bow? Did it come with the instrument, and have you changed it at all?
SW:
I think I bought this bow around the same time as I bought the violin. This one doesn’t have quite as good of a story with it – I don’t even know if I have the maker written down! But that’s actually the one thing about my instrument that I’ve been potentially thinking, ‘I’m really happy with my violin, but I might in the next, say, 10 years or so, look at upgrading the bow’. It’s interesting how as you get more advanced, you start to notice what a difference the sort of bow you have makes – that it’s not just functional, which was kind of more how it seemed when I was a younger student. You get a stronger sense of how many different tones and sounds and the extreme variety you can get out of an instrument with a different bow.
HR:
I’m intrigued to know how string players think of, or perceive their bow. Do you think of it as just a functional thing, an add-on that facilitates the actual instrument itself, or is the bow part of the whole package?
SW:
There’s definitely many teachers and coaches who will describe the ways that the bow is really so much more in control of the type of sound and the quality of sound than anything your left hand is doing. So in terms of the physical technique, what we do with our right hand is maybe more important than our left hand, even though oftentimes, because the left-hand is what controls the notes, it maybe gets more of the focussed practice. The analogy I was just thinking of is maybe like a really good set of speakers; whether you have a CD player or vinyl record player, that vinyl record is going to be the same physical thing no matter what set of speakers you put it in. If you put it through a tiny Bluetooth speaker or something, it will still be your favourite vinyl, it will still be a great record, but if you put it through a really nice stereo sound system, suddenly there’s all these different aspects you never heard before. I think that’s kind of what the bow is like.
HR:
So when you found your bow, did it change your relationship to the violin at all?
SW:
I think it didn’t at the time, because I still had so much technique to learn that I sort of couldn’t notice the differences it made right then. When I got my violin I was still at a very functional point of my technique, whereas now I’m at that point where the bow is the aspect I would upgrade sooner than, say, the violin itself. Now that my technique has grown, I can start to hear what other possibilities there could be that I’m not getting from the bow I currently have.
HR:
Can you tell me about your instrumental performing history in relation to this violin – the sort of things you’ve played with it, or the things you’ve developed since you got it?
SW:
Since this was the first proper (non-student) full-size, adult instrument of mine, everything from my undergraduate auditions to my early professional life has all been with this instrument. I don’t know if this is true of other wooden instruments or other styles of instruments, but I remember a comment that always stuck with me from my teacher in undergrad, saying that there’s something with string instruments and the wood that they’re made of, the instrument can really adapt to the player. So the idea is that you could have, say, a good, maybe lower-end fine instrument, but if you have a really amazing player working on it, then the instrument can gradually get better over time and can kind of grow with the player. On the flip side of that, if you take a Stradivarius that’s been in a museum and you give it to your average secondary school or high school player, or somebody who just doesn’t quite know how to use it, it can actually make the instrument worse. That was just such a cool, magical comment. So when I was about 20 and really developing all of this advanced technique, I felt like I could hear this instrument move with me and get a fuller, brighter sound, and develop all these different colours that I couldn’t get out of it when I first got the instrument. Basically any kind of major performance, any audition, graduate recital or anything has all been with this instrument. I think as my playing has got better, the instrument has shifted with that as well.
HR:
Thinking about your violin’s history – can you describe three key or memorable moments with your instrument?
SW:
One of my all time favourite, top performances I’ve ever done with it was this big project I worked on during the pandemic, that sort of started as like a video project during lockdown. We filmed the first one in June of 2020 when in Scotland, and in all of the UK, there were still a lot of people who were very much on their own, inside, and not really doing any kind of group projects. I got working with this local advocacy organisation that was focussed on art support, and particularly climate change and community engagement. We had this idea to take ‘Summer’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and start with it as just a solo violin part. Then as we came out of lockdown, we gradually added more musicians to it, so iit became this really cool project that started as just a small idea of, ‘Let’s just go up somewhere and film this.’ Of course, the other key aspect of this was there weren’t any symphony halls we could use – I didn’t even really want it to be in a symphony hall. We used this really amazing space in Glasgow underneath the Kingston Bridge, which is like a huge highway bridge, so it had this almost cathedral-like, cavernous space under it, but was really urban and essentially just a parking lot. The goal of this project was to say ‘how could we have artists and community members reinvigorate some of these spaces that are not being used in a way that’s currently going to benefit our communities?’ This little film of all the movements started with just me, and then turned into sort of a string octet by the end. We also brought in a graffiti artist to spray paint one of his iconic characters under the bridge where we recorded it. The final like piece of that project was when the UN COP conference was in Glasgow, in 2021. Our final performance was in Glasgow cathedral with all Four Seasons movements, and this really interesting sort of chamber orchestra ‘arrangement’ that I’ve done of the piece – I use this term loosely as we had to weigh the amount of players we had, because COVID only let me have three people. So there were parts of the piece that were very stripped down, and then there were other parts where I brought in some Scottish traditional musicians to add a really different sound, and kind of to show that this kind of classical music can still have a meaning and can still say something important. I’d never done a concerto before, or certainly never played something that was soloistic in this old, Glasgow gothic cathedral, so it was a really, really cool experience.
I think another memorable moment would actually be my round of Master’s auditions. I was so nervous for all of them, because I graduated undergrad and then sort of took three years off to do some teaching and freelancing, and just take my time to plan where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do, and to really think about what I wanted to get out of a master’s degree. But then because I hadn’t been in a school setting and I hadn’t been under the pressure of an audition in a while, I was that much more nervous. But the thing that I sort of loved about that experience, and why I definitely chose to come to Scotland for my Master’s, was that the panel was as interested in me as a player as they were in my sound and technique. They were really interested in, what do you want to study? What do you want to play? What are you interested in doing with music? Beyond just like, ‘Oh, yes, she can tick all of the correct interpretive Bach boxes’, or something. Something I’ve always been really interested in is not just being a ‘cookie-cutter’ type of musician that could just get a job, but wanting to do something a little bit different or interesting, too.
One more memory… I’m actually going to go with what we id yesterday with the Benedetti Foundation sessions in Glasgow, because teaching is something that I really love and enjoy. I think it’s so important to inspire and work with young people, and to just show them that they have a right to this music, they have something to say with this music, and that it’s not just a skill to put on your college application – it’s something that can really be yours. One of my favourite moments was from our sharing concert yesterday, because I was mostly working with the beginner orchestra who have all been playing for just a couple of years. The handful of pieces that we played with them were written by Joelle Broad, who worked with Sistema Scotland and the Big Noise program in Raploch. One of the things she does that I think is just so great as a teacher, is she’ll write a relatively simple melody for a beginner string ensemble, but then will write an even simpler part that is maybe just open strings, or open strings using one finger, so then everybody can find success with it. She’ll also write an advanced part or a teacher part to help beef up the sound and give it more character, and add more extended techniques that the kids aren’t ready to play yet – but just by that part being in that sound, it makes the whole piece more exciting for them. In this concert yesterday, it was me and a few of the other ambassadors and Nicky Benedetti playing those teacher parts. It’s really just quite fun to be able to say, “Hey, I played in this little teacher quartet ensemble with Nicky Benedetti playing a piece for children!” But the fact that everyone, all of the tutors and all of the ambassadors, took so much care with that music is amazing. It’d be so easy for these top professional musicians to say, ‘It’s just kids music, I can just honk away at it and it’ll be fine. They won’t notice.’ But everybody took so much care, thinking about things like, how should I use my bow? What sound should we create? What character are we making with this music? I think that really has a big impact on the young people, and to have this big group experience where everyone is so invested in it and isn’t downgrading it because you’re young or because you’ve only been playing for a short time.
HR:
I think you’re so right. I also think that something I’ve seen from the Benedetti Foundation, even just from an outsider’s perspective, is that it’s not an ego project. It’s not a case of just slapping her (Nicola Benedetti’s) name on it and then other people are doing the groundwork while she just flounces in once every so often – even as someone who has nothing to do with the Foundation, but has friends who are involved with it, you see that she’s really in there and that’s probably why it’s been such a success. So many of these sorts of things can pop up and then sink away, for so many reasons, but I think the Benedetti Foundation definitely strikes me as something I could see still being a thing in 20, 30 years, even if Nicola Bendetti did ever step away, for whatever reason, which I think is really amazing.
Staying on the subject of performing with your instrument, can you pinpoint a moment where you felt fully connected to your instrument for the first time?
SW:
I’m going to go for another slightly niche project that I’ve been working on for a while now, that is something that I’ve never seen another instrumental musician do. It started in my final year of undergrad when I had this amazing musicology professor, and she would do all these fantastic courses that maybe weren’t what you would necessarily expect from musicology. The first course I did with her was called ‘Music and Fairy Tale’, and it was about connecting all of these different themes from fairy tales and the way that a story like Cinderella, for example, has been adapted, retold, and changed to fit whatever the culture wants or needs from it at a certain point in time, and then connecting that to classical music. We looked at a lot of films, a handful of the iconic Disney princess movies, and a lot of opera or other classical pieces that are written about and inspired by various different fairy tales. The final project for that course – she called it an ownership project – was based around the idea that she wanted us to use all of these different themes we’d been talking about and find some way of taking ownership over them, and of making it into something that had value for us. I chose to take that project to the place I did because I’ve always really loved Bach’s music, even from when I was a little kid. I think one of the first CDs I remember getting was Hilary Hahn’s first solo Bach set (probably meant Bach set here haha) of CDs, which I think she made when she was like 19 or something; I remember getting that CD when she was still sort of an ‘up and coming artist’ and it was one of the first CDs she’d made. People sort of knew of her because she had famous teachers, but weren’t really sure where she was ultimately going to go or anything. From that moment I’ve always loved Bach’s music, and especially all of his work for solo violin. The really famous Chaconne at the end of the D minor partita has always felt like the epitome of violin music to me. I think there was maybe a quote or line from Hilary Hahn in the liner notes from that CD, about the way that this Chaconne is this kind of massive set of ‘Theme and Variations’ – that basically any emotion you could feel, you can find a Variation somewhere in that piece that fits that emotion and that character. I thought that was such an amazing idea, to have so much of the human experience condensed into this one piece of music for my instrument. So taking that and the things I’d learned from this musicology course was when I started the idea of writing poems to fit the music that I was performing. I wrote what ended up being a very, very long poem that was essentially two lines of text for each Variation in the piece. I wanted to tie in everything, from the physicality of how I was moving my bow to the emotions that I was feeling and different things that were happening in my life at that time, to tell this story through this piece. The first time I did that was in my graduate recital for undergrad. Since then, I’ve continued both rewriting that poem and writing new poems for that same movement, and then also writing poems for other pieces that I’ve put on for other recitals. I think it’s a really great way to make a theme for your concert, and to create a theme that feels a little bit more like there’s something to get your hands into. We’ve all seen those posters for symphony concerts that will have some theme of like, ‘Resolution’ or something, and you’re like, what does that mean?
HR:
They always have titles like, ‘The Age of Innovation’, and then often you look at the programme and find it’s just some Beethoven overture with a Sibelius symphony and you think…this is tenuous at best. It’s not even always a theme like ‘The Sea’, for example, where they can do La Mer and then just add something else. Those weird titles always make me laugh so much. It’s always something so vague like, ‘New Roads to Bravery’ and I think, ‘But what does that even mean?!’
I was actually going to ask you a different question next, but you’re already talking about your poetry, which I’m so interested in. I’ve seen that you’ve been doing all these concerts with more spoken word stuff, and some of them have been more of a concerts or recital set-up, and some of them you’ve been running more as poetry workshops, is that right?
SW:
I haven’t done the poetry workshops yet but I’m really excited because I have them coming up next year. I’m working with another poet on one, and that one will be all inclusive, it’s for all ages, but I’m anticipating it’ll probably end up having an older, more adult audience. But then I’m also going to adapt that workshop to some work with the Benedetti Foundation, so working on how to adapt it to, say, a classroom of primary kids.
HR:
Can you tell me what these concerts have been like so far?
SW:
It all started with me just writing all of the material and poetry, and presenting it either written down and in a programme that people can read, or projecting it on a screen on PowerPoint, or reading it out loud to the audience.
A lot of it was trying to find the right way to combine them together, where both pieces have enough (both pieces meaning the music and the poetry) and are able to speak and stand for themselves. I wanted to try and think of some way to overlap them, but then the issue is that the music is so dense that if you have text going at the same time, it could get sort of jumbled up. For now I’ve settled on reading the poem and then playing a movement, then reading another poem and playing the next movement. So where these workshops are coming in, is that the next stage I really want to experiment with is audience involvement. The biggest thing I’ve been hoping to do with this project is to show that, whether it’s me as the performer, or the composer as the creator, there’s not one person that’s in charge of saying what a piece of music means. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the literary essay ‘Death of the Author’, but I was kind of pulling from that concept or idea that when we read a book, it’s our own unique experience with that book. It’s not just about going ‘Oh, I bet he made this character do this thing because of whatever happened in the author’s personal life’, yet I feel like we do that with classical music so much; we’ll go, ‘Beethoven wrote this piece about blah, blah, blah, because he was living here, and this happened in his life, and so that must have influenced this movement of this symphony.’ And I do think that stuff is valuable information and I think it can be interesting, but I also think sometimes it comes at the cost of what we as performers and listeners feel about the music. So where I want to push this poetry concept is that I can present these poems as a way to show that this is how I feel about this music – this is how I’m responding from my own lens and my own perspective. But I really want to inspire the audience to have their own experience, and even to write their own poems and create their own story and narrative and perspective on what this music means to them. It’s not just about me as the one on stage getting to say, “This piece is happy, and this one is about love,” but how we all have a say in that.
HR:
How has doing these concerts in this way changed your relationship with your violin? Do you interact differently with it in this environment than you would, say, in a standard string quartet scenario?
SW:
I think it’s helped me realise and grow more confident in what it is I want to play. How I think I as a violinist can best contribute to society is (moving away from) that idea that when we’re in a larger ensemble it’s not just us who’s in control – it’s often someone like a conductor dictating or saying or holding together what needs to happen, whereas I lean more towards these solo chamber pieces, whether that’s solo Bach or sonatas or quartets, but also things like musical theatre and opera that have a really clear story there already. I think taking that inspiration from the idea of, ‘This line that I have in an opera score goes with a specific text and this harmony goes with a specific word, and so that is going to impact how I’ll shape the phrase or how I’ll colour that harmony’, has definitely influenced how I’ve written text to go alongside these Bach concerts. I’ve recognised how for me the performances I’ve felt most confident about and at home with are ones that have this narrative story aspect.
HR:
Going back more to just your violin – I should have asked earlier, does it have a name?
SW:
It doesn’t have a name. I usually think of it as having a male gender, but it does flip-flop a little bit depending on what I’m playing!
HR:
Interesting!
Can you think of three words to describe your violin in particular?
SW:
I’m now staring at it across the room! Fiery is definitely one that comes to mind – fiery or bright. I think I’ll actually put those separately – fiery, bright and… confident. Because I feel like sometimes my instrument will be more confident than me, and then it can help inspire my own personal confidence.
HR:
And how would you describe your instrument if it was a person or a character?
SW:
I would think of it as that best friend that you might get into some troublesome scenarios with; that friend that will tell you to just go for it and just do it, maybe without thinking through all the possible negative endings, but you know at the end of the day they’re going to be there with you and you’re going to get through it.
Going back to that brightness again, I think that comes from listening to all of this Bach and lots of Baroque music when I was a child. I feel like the warmer tones of stringed instruments come in more in the later Classical or Romantic era. Obviously, there’s loads of music from those time periods that I also love, but I think the fact that what initially captured my fascination and made me feel, “I have to play the violin,” were things like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Bach and Handel, all of this Baroque music which I feel tends to be a bit more on the brighter side of timbres. I guess it’s something we haven’t really talked about much yet, but of course there’s so many different companies and different varieties of strings out there for stringed instruments. The strings that I use, the evah pirazzis , are known for being one of the brightest strings on the market. I’ve tried strings that are listed as being warmer or having a darker tone, but for me they feel like they go dead faster and then I’ll get a damper sound. I always want that really bright, ringy, almost zingy kind of resonance to it.
HR:
Do you feel like that’s something that matches your personality? Or is it something that perhaps you maybe want more of in yourself, so you seek it out in the sound you make?
SW:
I think there’s an aspect of that. I love astrological, horoscope stuff and so I think there’s definitely an aspect – because I’m an Aries – of that fiery confidence, that kind of ‘leaping-before-you-look’ type personality. I think that’s something I definitely associate with my violin and with my instrument.
HR:
Moving away from performance, is your relationship to your violin different in the practice room than it is in performance?
SW:
Oh, that’s a really interesting question. I’m not sure if this is exactly where you’re going with this question, but how I practise, and especially the space that I need to practise in, is something I’ve thought about a lot the last few years, especially from the pandemic. In undergrad, I always practised in the practice rooms at school, and then when I left undergrad, I was just practising at home. But then for my Master’s, I never went back to the practice rooms at school, I always continued to stay at home in my flat. The reason for that was I realised that practising around so many other people who were also practising made me really stressed out and hyper anxious in a way that didn’t make my practising any better. I would be hyper aware of anything that was out of tune and think, “Did someone walking down the hallway hear me play that scale badly? And now they’re going to judge me forever!” So that’s why I really made the move to practise at home, because then I could look out the window, I could just sit with my own sound and I became a lot more self-reflective in my practice. With the lockdowns, of course it was a terrible time, but I feel like all of us now have one or two things that weren’t so bad that came out of it – for me, this was one kind of nice thing about it. I spent a lot of time really working on intonation and scales, and just having all the time in the world. It felt like a time to just sit with the sound of my instrument. I felt like that was when I really learned about what it means, or what it sounds like, to play ‘in tune’, having spent so many years staring at a red light-green light digital tuner, or having every teacher try to explain their method of how you need to think about intonation, and it how needs to be a harmonic thing, or it needs to have a theory behind it – everyone in the string world has their own method for how they practise and teach intonation. I felt like for years I was going, “I just can’t do it, I just don’t understand what’s wrong with me.” So finally having that really calming, very homey space where I could just sit with these sounds and find the exact resonance of it was really special. What I learned with that, and this is another thing where I don’t know if it’s unique to stringed instruments, or if it’s true of other wooden instruments too, is that because of how the strings are set up in fifths, and with the open strings, there are ways that if a fingered note is really, really in tune, you’ll get other strings from the harmonic series to start vibrating. So say if we play a D on the A string with our third finger and it’s really smack in tune, you’ll get the open D string to start vibrating, and then the whole instrument will start vibrating and resonating a little bit more. Whereas if you’re even a fraction or two flat, it’ll just sound completely dead. I think that was something I had just never truly noticed before, and I don’t know if that was due to being stressed or if it was the space, or if it was just being able to really find that subtle difference, that now it feels so obvious to me when I play if something is in tune; I’ll hear that dampness and lack of ringing in the sound. Now, going back to your original question of practising versus performing, I guess the practice side has now become very meditative, and that’s really important to me. My own practice is an opportunity to have the time and space to really listen to the quality of sound.
HR:
It sounds like you’ve found a very intimate space and relationship with your instrument in the practice room. Have you been able to carry that new intimacy into performance?
SW:
I’ve definitely been trying. Even though I finished my Master’s studies in 2021, in terms of the pandemic we’re still kind of coming into more regular performance opportunities, and alongside doing so much teaching my performance opportunities aren’t always as regular, so sometimes it will be a little bit more sporadic. But I think the way that things are clicking differently in my brain, and how it feels and how it sounds to play and perform is different. I think if you asked me that question again in five years, it would be a definite yes, but we’re still kind of on the pathway to getting there.
HR:
Do you primarily perceive your instrument as an expansion to your musical self, or as a challenge?
SW
I definitely think an expansion. One of the things I’ve thought about a lot, because I do so much work with singers between opera and musical theatre, is that they always talk about the way that as a singer, your instrument is physically inside your body. So there’s all these different metaphors and such that you’ll use as a singer to try and understand what’s physically happening. Even for a woodwind or a brass instrument, there’s still so much happening inside your mouth and inside your breathing apparatus that you can’t see like you can with stringed instruments. I think strings are one of the most external instruments, outside of maybe piano and percussion – I can see everything my left hand or my right hand is doing, or I can just stand in front of a mirror and watch every angle. But at the same time, in practice the physicality of playing feels much more like a limb extension, which comes back to what we were saying earlier with the bow – it doesn’t feel like a stick in my hand so much as an extension of my arm and an extension of those fingers.
HR:
I am really interested about this aspect of playing a string instrument because I think this is where I always get slightly baffled by string players; as a wind player it feels completely wrong to me to connect to an instrument only through touch. Similar to singers, we’re always taught to think like we’re vocalists and that your bassoon or your flute, whatever you play, is basically an amplifier for your voice and air. So how does approaching an instrument only through touch affect your relationship to it?
SW:
Putting the education hat on a wee bit here, I think one of the things that I’ve reflected on myself, and within my own experience, is that I know I have a tendency to be quite a visual learner, or quite an analytical learner. So in some ways, the violin is very good for that, and I can just stand in front of a mirror and see clearly, “That angle is wrong, let me just change it.” I remember as part of my music education degree, I had to do a term of voice lessons in undergrad. That was the first time I had a teacher using all of these different metaphors and the phrase she kept telling me was, “You need to sing out of the top of your head.” I think it was about trying to lift the soft palate or something! But I was just like, “I don’t have a mouth on top of my head, what is she talking about?” I didn’t understand what she was trying to get me to do at all because I was coming at it from the violin, and I was so used to being able to see exactly everything that was happening, or see a photo in a book and think, “That’s what it needs to look like.” But over the last couple of years, and especially with the teacher I worked with for my Masters, I started thinking more from a physical perspective. So not just thinking about how does it look, does it match the diagram in the book etc, but how does it feel? Do you feel relaxed when you’re playing, and are your hands soft and flexible? That was very much the way that my Master’s Professor coached me and taught me, because she recognised that the logical understanding was all there but I was so stressed about getting it right that my hands were really, really tight. So take something like intonation; I wasn’t blowing a shift because I hadn’t practised it or because I couldn’t hear it, I was blowing a shift because my hand was lock-jaw tight. It was just too tense to make it happen the way I wanted it to. Combined with this, I got really into practising yoga, and one of the things with that, too, is this idea of how it’s less important that your body matches the picture in the Yoga Book, and more about – how does it feel? Are your muscles expanding and contracting in the way that this pose is supposed to benefit your body? I think that aspect encouraged me to think more physically about everything that I’m doing and how I’m playing. Realising that this was the aspect holding my playing back the most was something that I had sort of been able to get away with for so long, this aspect of being able to just see the instrument and logically think through it. I finally realised the kinesthetic knowledge needed to catch up with everything else.
HR:
What you said about being able to be quite analytical with the violin, because it’s so external, is fascinating. When I was researching for my dissertation, this sort of came out of the history of instruments, particularly strings and winds, and how they’re perceived. For the Ancient Greeks, for example, stringed instruments were very much associated with the god Apollo, and they were associated with being restrained and mathematical, and being very logical, intellectual and sophisticated. Whereas wind instruments were associated with Pan and Dionysus, so they were ecstatic and basically associated with images of being drunk, and just using loads of air and dancing around manically, that sort of thing. It’s so fascinating that we still carry those images today and that they’re kind of embodied in how you literally play the instrument. With wind instruments, I suspect lots of people think, “You just move your fingers, surely”, but the important stuff is all going on inside your body and the instrument, which you can’t see.
SW:
And I think that’s something that definitely from an education perspective, and I think eventually from a performance perspective, people are starting to talk about more openly, is the way that the physicality of playing an instrument is so important, not only for our sound and our performance, but just for our own health. Something I’ve always thought was interesting with stringed instruments is that we’re one of the only instruments that doesn’t require breath to make a sound. Yet obviously, you can’t actually play your instrument without breathing, because you would pass out and fall over! But thinking about how to use that breath in a way that’s beneficial and beyond just, say, cueing your string quartet. I felt for years, even as a child, that (chamber music) was the only time we would talk about breath as string players – you’d just give that kind of sniffed cue, and that’s all you need! But recognising how much the breath affects our motions, and our fluidity and our ease, all of those things link up to confidence and comfortability. You can’t play well from a tense and stressful point.
HR:
Do any of the qualities or characteristics you associate with your instrument aid you or become present during performance?
SW:
I think some of it depends on the specific type of music I want to play, because one of the things that I think is so exciting and is a privilege of playing an instrument like the violin, is that I can pretty much Google any composer or pick a name out of the hat and be like, did they write anything for violin? Yep, sure did. There’ll be a sonata, or a string quartet or a trio. Whereas some of the other maybe more modern instruments, there’s a much narrower amount of music to pick from. So when there’s just a plethora of sounds and styles and eras to choose from, I think we can be a little bit more particular about which one’s the best fit for our voice and our aesthetic and sound as a player. And so with this brightness and roominess, and even a little bit of analytical personality (in my sound), I definitely see a connection between that and all this Baroque music, and especially Bach, whose pieces are like little puzzle boxes. It’s a joy for my brain to try and figure out how it all sticks together. At the same time, I also know my instrument so well that it’s able to really make use of all of this resonance and all of the use of open strings in Bach. There’s a reason why when you look at that collection of the six solo works for violin that they’re in keys like G minor, D minor, and E major, where both the tonic and the dominant are usually an open string. You’ll get this really resonant sound from the instrument, and so I definitely gravitate towards that kind of brightness over, say, something more classical that’s in something like D-flat major, or a very dark, more sombre key that doesn’t have that kind of bright, zinginess I really love.
HR:
Finally, and it fits together really well with just what you’ve said, does playing different types of music, or music in different settings, change your relationship to your instrument? You seem to have such a varied career playing different types of music – does that change your relationship to your violin?
SW:
I have definitely found that there are settings where I’ll feel more or less confident. I remember talking to my professor in Masters (study) about feeling like I could walk into a musical theatre show or an opera, and not get shaky, not get nervous, even if my part in that was seemingly way more exposed than my recital, or a competition. One of my favourite gigs I ever did was a really stripped down, black-box theatre arrangement of West Side Story – so West Side Story with a six piece band, rather than a full orchestra. That’s actually quite a stressful book to play when your whole string section is one violinist and one cellist, but I was never nervous, I never got that shaky bow feeling of, “Is this going to go right?”. In comparison, there could be a competition that I had practised hours and hours and hours for, or an audition, and I would get so nervous. I remember trying to work with my professor on how I could take that confidence that I have in one setting, and bring it over to this other one. Because it’s still me, it’s still the same instrument, it’s not necessarily that much harder or anything. The aspect of what is fun to you, what is going to bring you the most joy and the most confidence, has helped guide me towards thinking, ‘What do I want to do with the rest of my life?’ That’s also where some of the poetry came in, this question of how can I make a recital feel more like a show or a cabaret setting. I always love talking to audiences because I find that relaxes me, whereas I know so many other instrumentalists who will be like, ‘I just want to walk on stage and play the piano, take a bow and leave, and I don’t want to have to say anything, because it’s going to make me nervous.’ Whereas for me, if I can just be a person and know that the audience is also just a bunch of people who want to listen and have a good time and want everything to go well, you can then share this really unique and special story together. That makes me feel better and more confident with what I’m going to play.
