Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers by Frederick H. Martens
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page 13 of 204 (06%)
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inclined to mistrust the value of my own creations rather than fall into
the same error. We have the scale of Debussy and his successors to draw upon, their new chords and successions of fourths and fifths--for new technical formulas are always evolved out of and follow after new harmonic discoveries--though there is as yet no violin method which gives a fingering for the whole-tone scale. Perhaps we will have to wait until Kreisler or I will have written one which makes plain the new flowering of technical beauty and esthetic development which it brings the violin. "As to teaching violin, I have never taught violin in the generally accepted sense of the phrase. But at Godinne, where I usually spent my summers when in Europe, I gave a kind of traditional course in the works of Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski and other masters to some forty or fifty artist-students who would gather there--the same course I look forward to giving in Cincinnati, to a master class of very advanced pupils. This was and will be a labor of love, for the compositions of Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski especially are so inspiring and yet, as a rule, they are so badly played--without grandeur or beauty, with no thought of the traditional interpretation--that they seem the piecework of technic factories! VIOLIN MASTERY "When I take the whole history of the violin into account I feel that the true inwardness of 'Violin Mastery' is best expressed by a kind of threefold group of great artists. First, in the order of romantic expression, we have a trinity made up of Corelli, Viotti and Vieuxtemps. Then there is a trinity of mechanical perfection, composed of Locatelli, |
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