Amateur Bard

I realized the other day that I had totally missed my one year anniversary of returning to violin.

I felt that I should have some profound words of wisdom about the experience. After thinking about it for a bit, I came up with a very simple summary, and I think there’s profundity to be found in simplicity so:

I’m enjoying music again.

Okay, backstory on myself: After a childhood of wanting to play violin, I got my chance in fifth grade when my school offered a Strings class. The next year, my middle school orchestra teacher recommended that I take lessons–I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it was a humorous “Yikes, get this kid some lessons, stat!” or a more profound “This kid is so much more interested in violin than the average student, you’ll flourish!” (It was probably just a “I recommend all students pursue private lessons outside of school because there’s not enough time for individual instruction,” but that doesn’t make for a good legend.)

So I took private lessons throughout middle school and high school. I really wanted to be a teacher and an orchestral violinist. Unfortunately, when I got to college, I completely burnt out–not just on violin but on music in general. For the next seventeen years, I didn’t do anything serious with music or violin… I didn’t really do anything unserious with ’em, either.

Jumping forward to fall 2023: My friends have been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and trying to get me to play it too. I’m very much a ~Casual~; Animal Crossing is more my speed. But, because Reasons, I suddenly found myself looking for something to distract myself. I figured that even if I only played ten hours before bouncing, why not?

At some point around the 70 hour mark in my first play through, I texted my friend, “This is part of my personality now.” I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed the game, the characters, the writing, the music.

The music.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has a great soundtrack, but what really made me geek out was the bards. First of all, I love Alfira, interacting with her in the Emerald Grove was one of those early game moments where I got a bit giddy. When I started a new play through, I made my character a bard. As a bard, your character starts out with a lute and has a ‘Perform’ skill, which lets you play a couple of instrumentations of songs and themes from the soundtrack rather than ‘midi version of theme song.’

So I was cautiously optimistic when I found a violin for my bard. I’m used to violins in video games being a guitar or piano line run through a violin plug-in with the most synthetic vibrato and reverb cranked to 11. Instead, the bard plays a part that makes sense for an instrument in the violin family. It’s so good! Here’s this detail that most people will just shrug off, but the composer and developers went the extra mile anyway. I just love it.

Then, of course, I’d got these catchy little earworms stuck in my brain and I started noodling around on my violin to get the melodies–and I realized I wanted to play them. I wanted to perform these songs, I wanted to execute them at a certain technical standard that I was a little too rusty to achieve. I dragged out my violin books and pedagogy books and started digging in.

I’ll take a moment to acknowledge that in returning to violin after a very long hiatus without working with a teacher is Not A Good Idea. It’s hard mode all the way down–or should I say Tactician Mode?? (I won’t explode if I mess up, so it’s not Honour Mode…) Seeking out a teacher is something that I gave serious thought to, but ultimately decided against because I’m an overly confident buffoon.

Genuinely though: when I was in high school, I shadowed my teacher during lessons, I taught younger students under her supervision, and we worked through some of her pedagogical resources. Combining that with the fact that I’m not trying to regain or surpass my previous skill level and the fact that I understand my progress on my own is much slower compared to working with a teacher, I still feel comfortable going it alone for now.

And I’ve enjoyed working on my own! To be a little immature about it: I enjoy doing whatever I want forever. If I don’t feel like practicing for an hour, I don’t–and I don’t stress over it. If I don’t want to do intervals or arpeggios on a given day, I don’t–and I don’t stress over it. If I plan to work on articulation but feel more like doing shifting exercises, I just do that and don’t worry about sparking conflict at my weekly lesson.

It’s very refreshing to be self-directed. I’ve found a lot of benefit to casting my nets widely when I want to refresh my understanding of particular technical or musical aspects: The classic pedagogs, the modern pedagogs, blogs, forums, books.

As an aside: I’ve discovered several violin manuals from the 1700s and 1800s in digital archives and I love reading those as a history nerd. There was one book I was reading from the mid-1800s where the author was talking about this little contraption he made that allows a violinist to more securely hold the violin with their jaw and chin to free up their left hand. And I thought it was pretty cute that this guy is promoting his version of the chin rest–then I thought about the date of the book and realized that this author *was* at the cutting edge of technology because I knew that chin rests were developed some time in the 1800s. To satisfy my curiosity, I looked up when exactly the chin rest was developed or adopted–around 1820, according to Wikipedia, by this guy Louis Spohr… who wrote the book I was reading! It’s rewarding to learn violin history and music history in depth, to learn these contexts, to learn the causes that have lead to the effects that we see now.

I’ve also been branching out from classical music resources–I’ve been dipping into a couple different fiddle channels. I’m never going to be a super authentic fiddler but fiddling is so lively and vibrant, and there’s a lot of great knowledge to be gained from the various traditions. I really admire how fiddlers can create a driving, regular pulse to the music without becoming too metronomical. That’s something that I want to introduce to to my own playing.

So, I guess in essence I’m really enjoying being able to explore music on my own terms. My teacher, bless her heart, had a strict regamine for the studio, which–at a distance, as an adult with all kinds of life experiences now–I recognize as an approach that just did not jive with who I am as a person, musician, or teacher. Exploration and experimentation are aspects that appeal to me in every hobby and endeavor and I can already see the benefits for my growth as a musician.

And it’s all thanks to a game about brainworms!