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Eastman Studies in Music
The Violin
With a colorful history that spans 450 years, the violin has proven to be one of the world's most important and versatile instruments. Addressed to performing musicians, serious concertgoers, and collectors of recordings, The Violin offers insightful, up-to-date essays on a wide range of topics. Essays discuss beloved masterpieces from the violin's solo repertoire, with individual chapters on the Italian Baroque, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the violin concerto in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the evolution of performance styles and interpretation as documented in recordings. The volume also illustrates the broad cultural and geographic reach of the instrument, offering readers a taste of the traditional music of Argentina, Mexico, Norway, and India, in which the violin's participation is an essential and characteristic element. Other chapters are devoted to American fiddling and to the violin and violinists as metaphors in literature and the visual arts. CONTRIBUTORS: Chris Goertzen, Eitan Ornoy, Robert Riggs, Peter Walls, Peter Wollny. Musicologist and violinist Robert Riggs (PhD, Harvard University) chairs the Department of Music at the University of Mississippi and is the author of articles on Mozart as well as the monograph Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher (URP 2010).
326 pages, Hardcover
Published November 15, 2016
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 12, 2017
Rather than a history of the violin, this is ten essays on various subjects, some a lot more fun than others.
Starts right off with how the violin was widely considered an instrument of the devil; now we know where Charlie Daniels got that idea. Another chapter talks about the violin in fiction—Sherlock Holmes made the list!—but probably because I was looking forward to it so much it didn’t live up to expectations.
Then the real problems start, with chapter 4. To understand anything that’s been said here you need a ton of knowledge about violin playing, or even music in general, particularly notation. Is this really intended for a general audience? Because I’d say there are a lot more people interested in music who don’t know anything about playing it than those who do. Because of this, entire chapters are of absolutely no interest at all. I’d just seen one of Mozart’s concertos the day before I read about it, and still had no idea what this was talking about. What should have been informative became only boring.
So there’s some interesting tidbits here, but so much of it talks in musical terms that leave us non-musicians in the metaphorical dust.
2.5 pushed up to 3/5
Starts right off with how the violin was widely considered an instrument of the devil; now we know where Charlie Daniels got that idea. Another chapter talks about the violin in fiction—Sherlock Holmes made the list!—but probably because I was looking forward to it so much it didn’t live up to expectations.
Then the real problems start, with chapter 4. To understand anything that’s been said here you need a ton of knowledge about violin playing, or even music in general, particularly notation. Is this really intended for a general audience? Because I’d say there are a lot more people interested in music who don’t know anything about playing it than those who do. Because of this, entire chapters are of absolutely no interest at all. I’d just seen one of Mozart’s concertos the day before I read about it, and still had no idea what this was talking about. What should have been informative became only boring.
So there’s some interesting tidbits here, but so much of it talks in musical terms that leave us non-musicians in the metaphorical dust.
2.5 pushed up to 3/5
Displaying 1 of 1 review