No Strings Attached

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.