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Book Review by Lionel Rolfe: Connie's Violin Page

 
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techfiddle
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Joined: 17 Jun 2009
Posts: 122

PostPosted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 5:27 pm    Post subject: Book Review by Lionel Rolfe: Connie's Violin Page Reply with quote

Book Review by Lionel Rolfe: Connie's Violin Page: Internet resources for string players, teachers, parents and students; available in paperback, Kindle and Mobipocket.

Connie Sunday's "Connie's Violin Page" is wonderful not only for its exhaustive compilation of Internet resources for string players, teachers, parents and students, but also for its wonderful and pithy commentary on the instrument and its practitioners.

I had always wondered about what the difference between a fiddle and a violin was.

I watched my uncle, Yehudi Menuhin, play a mean fiddle with the best of them, from Ravi Shankar to Stephane Grappelli to Gypsy fiddlers in Rumania and country fiddlers in America. They were all great fiddlers. Yet when Yehudi played the Beethoven Violin Concerto or the solo Bach partitas, he was called a violinist, not a fiddler, even though there was still much of the "fiddler" in his interpretations. Which, by the way, were the best ever done.

What Connie tells us is that there isn't much difference between a fiddle and a violin.

There were string instruments that were bowed for a long long time, but the instrument known as the violin, or the fiddle, didn't really exist before 1600, she tells us. The best moment of the book comes when she introduces a '60s Counter Culture take on the instrument, but I won't give it away.

You got to read it.

* * *

Lionel Rolfe is the author of "The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey," "The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather" and other books, available on www.boryanabooks.com.
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Dave Chandler
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Joined: 31 Oct 2007
Posts: 691
Location: Mt Mitchell in North Carolina

PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 3:42 pm    Post subject: Violin or Fiddle Reply with quote

I've heard, the difference between a violin and a fiddle is attitude.
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Dave in the Blue Ridge
Southern Violin Association

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm" Winston Churchill

"I took the road less travelled, and now I don't know where I am." Marco Polo
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