I’ve always been amazed at how some string players can be
both attached and detached from their instruments. They may love their fiddles
and bows as if they were family members. Sometimes I think of Nicodemus’s cello
as his wooden wife. But on the other hand, the same players will casually hand
over a valuable violin or cello or bow to another player, saying “Try it for a
while.”
Case in point: N has made about 15 cello bows. Materials are
expensive; the pernambuco wood alone costs about $300 a pop, and the hours he
spends planing, sanding, polishing and bending are uncountable. He doesn’t do
the hair, so he has to pay someone to put that in. He has sold a few of these
bows, has kept a couple, and the rest he has just given away.
We had a nice violin on which I had a few lessons before I
gave up. Someone had almost ruined it with polyurethane and gave it to N in a
fit of pique. He refinished it and sent it up to Carlos to fit it out with
bridge, sound post, tail piece and new strings. Then he handed it over to one
of the Coastside Community Orchestra scholars, saying “Use this for a while.”
So that scholar gave his own violin to a younger player, who returned his
loaner.
Another orchestra member had an extra violin. Still another
violinist saw it at our house and traded it for his old Sears violin. The Sears
violin—intended to be “my” violin if I ever get back to Go Tell Aunt
Rhody—sits, partly sanded, in a battered wooden case left over from when N
assembled the Frankenfiddle for yet another young player.
This is small-time trading. In the big-time string world,
there are few major orchestras which don’t have players using borrowed
instruments, instruments often valued in the millions of dollars. Jascha
Heifetz’s priceless Guarneri violin has been regularly played by concertmasters
of the San Francisco Symphony. In the off-season, you can see the beautiful
“David” in its glass case at the Legion of Honor Museum and listen to a
recording of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, which had its premiere on that same
violin in the nineteenth century.
I only know of one instance where someone took advantage of
the no-strings-attached trust. Eventually, Interpol was called in and the
instrument was found and returned to the person who had lent it. The owner was
so disgusted by the theft that he said he didn’t even want to look at the
violin.
The yogi Subramunya used to urge his students to practice
affectionate detachment, and string players, I think, are past masters in
detachment of a high order. But I am no string player, and I was attached to
that violin N gave away, even if I couldn’t play it.
