Music Is Medicine

Introduction

My Fascination with Violins

How many objects are 450 years old and in use every day at work? I can only think of one. The Violin……ok, ok, cellos, violas, and double bases as well of course but let’s just stick to the violin.

There is something pleasing to the eye i n the beautiful curves of a stringed instrument. Perhaps in the subconscious, it is the female form, certainly from a man’s perspective. It’s interesting that not all violins are feminine in character. Certainly, some are petite and have a femaleness about them, but others are masculine in character.

Each handmade instrument has its own personality and is unique. Amongst the more famous, Luthiers, Amati, Stradivarius, Guarneri, Guadagnini had their own ideas about design and form. The lengths of violins are fairly standard, but their shapes are quite different. Violas, Cellos and Double Basses have varying sizes and many different shapes. You will hear modern makers say things like, ‘It’s a Guarneri model’. What they mean is that they used Guarneri’s templates for their modern creations. Newly made instruments can rival old instruments in sound as shown in many double-blind listening trials.

I love holding old violins looking at their battle scars, scratches, dents, and chipped edges. The patina on an old violin speaks to me of its journey. Modern instrument makers ask their clients, ‘Would you like your instruments antiqued?’ Which means making the instrument look older than it is. They achieve this by denting, scratching, and beating the instruments ever so gently, to achieve the desired effect.

My viola was made in Chicago, by master maker Kiernoziak in 2006, it’s a beautiful instrument both in appearance and sound, it has been gently antiqued, in very good taste, not overdone. My violin on the other hand is thought to be Italian, made around 1850, it has no label inside, and it has aged naturally over 170 years of use. Choosing one’s instrument is an interesting process. There is magic, and romance involved, it’s not dissimilar to falling in love…. I am serious. I remember when my violin arrived in Hobart from Melbourne in its heavy aluminium travel case. It sat there for 3 days before I had the time to open the case.

It was like being struck by a bolt of lightning. It was love at first sight and I knew I had found my instrument even before I put bow to string. It had a deep, rich, resonant, silky quality of sound, across all the strings.

Same thing happened when I asked Richard Tognetti¹ to try my ‘new’ violin. But this time it was my bow. I opened the case, he completely ignored my violin and homed straight in on my Voirin bow (French 1860s), he subsequently borrowed it to record the Haydn violin concertos. He left me his Sartori bow (also French) till he finished the recordings.

Should you ever visit the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, go and see the ‘Stradivarius’ violin nicknamed ‘The Messiah’. It is housed in a crystal, climate-controlled sarcophagus, the same as the one the Crown Jewels are held in, in the Tower of London. It earned its nickname because it has never been played, well hardly ever. Antonio hung on to it and never sold it. Then it came into the possession of the greatest of French instrument makers, Vuillaume. He couldn’t part with it either. The point being that IT LOOKS BRAND NEW! No character-patina at all, its beauty is entirely in the shape, and the quality of craftsmanship by the greatest of all masters. Patina is desirable, it gives an instrument character.

The Messiah is taken out and played occasionally. Instruments need human contact; they dry up and are prone to woodworm without it. They also need to vibrate to keep healthy and well. I feel sorry for ‘The Messiah’, it’s crying out to be held and played more.

Banks, wealthy individuals, and large corporations frequently buy valuable old instruments such as Tognetti’s Guarneri valued at $10 million. It is rumored that Russell Crowe bought and loaned it to him after filming Master and Commander.

Richard taught him to mime playing in the movie. Most of these extraordinary instruments are on loan to famous soloists who have the use of them for the duration of their performing careers, then they must either return them or pass them on to the next generation of players. As one old friend who owned a beautiful old cello said, ‘We are merely custodians of these precious gifts.

1Richard Tognetti is Leader of the internationally famous Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Dr. Rowan Thomas

MBBS, FANZCA, MPH, Grad Dip Health Informatics

Anaesthetist, Violin Founding Concert Master, ADO

‘I love how string instruments go through your body and resonate within’

Miki

Seriously considering the idea of becoming a professional musician, Rowan studied intensively with Chris Martin, Spiros Rantos, and others in his teen age years. It is our good fortune that he chose medicine putting him in the perfect position to be the inaugural concert master of ADO.

I met Rowan at the 1993 Mt Buller Summer Camp for Strings. It was serendipity that both he and Chris Martin were there as I had been thinking of starting an Australian Doctors Orchestra for some time. Rowan was not only a beautiful violinist, but he also had other qualities that make for a great Concert Master. He has a calm, encouraging manner, spoke confidently with authority, suggesting bowings, fingerings and how to shape (phrase) the music. He is affable and approachable, all of which makes for an ideal leader. Personally, I have learnt more about violin playing from him than anyone else over our 30 years friendship.

What does music mean to you in your life?

It’s a way of getting away from the materialistic rat race of having to earn money and get ahead and do more and more. Music is meditative, solid, and more enjoyable. I love the resonance of the string instruments, the way they go through your body and resonate within you. That contact and the fact that you can combine with people whom you wouldn’t normally even strike up a conversation and still share a moment. There is something about synchronicity that is important for us. If you can share in a moment, and make the same mistake, do something, and understand exactly what that person is thinking, then that’s one of the closest things that you can share with another person.

What was your earliest musical recollection?

My earliest musical recollections were the sounds that go with advertisements on the radio. We got a TV when I was about 10 years old, there were musical jingles and entertainment of other sorts. That was my total experience of what music was. My father had an old record player, rarely played, but he had four or five LPs one of which was Rossini’s ‘The Thieving Magpie’. I listened to that one day and was astounded that music could be so directed, complex and engaging for its own sake. I was about nine or ten and I got my own little radio and would fall asleep listening to it.

I decided to learn the guitar because most of the songs on the radio involved the guitar. I learned from a gentleman called Sergio and was very frustrated because when I played it didn’t sound terrific straight away. ‘Well, that’s because you have to work on it, you have to practise.’ We’d have arguments with me saying, ‘but I want to play now.’ I spent two long years with him trying to teach me how to practise so that I could actually play something better. I learnt some chords and some Flamenco, and I sang a bit with the guitar, but I gave up lessons after two years because I really didn’t like practising.

I was in the church choir; the choir master was also a piano teacher. He said that in order to understand music better, you could probably see all of the notes on the piano keys, that kind of made sense. So, I learnt the piano with him to about grade five. I would have probably been 14 or 15 when I stopped learning from him.

So how did you end up being such a great violinist?

(Rowan laughs at that comment.)

I was in second form (year 8) at school and each of the music teachers would come around and they would get you to try out an instrument.

The first one was a trumpet. We all had a blow, and I scored a B for my sound on the trumpet, having never been taught anything about embouchure or anything like that. So, I was told to learn the trumpet. Then the next week a violin teacher at Scotch College brought around some violins. The night before, I visited the piano teacher’s son called Christopher who was learning the violin. Christopher had chores to do so I asked if I could look at his violin and a book of the first 30 lessons. I used what I’d learned through piano and guitar to work out what the fingering on the violin would be, and just sort of taught myself how to hold the instrument and make a sound.

How old were you then?

Probably about 15. I taught myself how to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. The next day, the teacher brought out 20 violins and gave them to the class and said, ‘I’ll show you how to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ once, then I want you to see how far you can get through it. Then he showed us how to play it, what the notes were and where the fingers had to go.

I plucked ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ from beginning to end. He said, ‘Have you played the violin before?’

‘No’

‘You’re coming with me right now. Here is the book of Muller-Rush, first 30 lessons. I want you to learn those for next week.’

I went home and learnt the first 30 lessons and then I was chastised the following lesson because I wasn’t at Orchestra.

‘What Orchestra?’

‘Your name was on the list, and you didn’t turn up.’

So, I joined the school orchestra in the second week, and we were playing Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique’. Having learned violin for one week, the noise I made was horrendous, but it didn’t matter, there were one hundred kids playing trombones, clarinets, and other string instruments. Whatever you did with your fingers, you couldn’t hear yourself let alone anything else. That piece required playing in all positions², so I needed the second book to teach me how to do that.

You hadn’t had a formal lesson at all until this point?

No, I was thrown in at the deep end, then having to play in all sorts of different positions. My teacher said, ‘if you play the violin, you’ll never ever make it because violinists are a dime a dozen. They’re all very competitive and high achievers. If you really want to make it in the musical world, learn the viola, the viola has a beautiful sound. It is very lush.’

After week three, I converted to the viola in the orchestra, which uses a completely different clef to the violin, and I had never seen alto clef before in my life. Scotch College had a big orchestra, there were a hundred people in the main orchestra. All of them had been cajoled, enlisted, or bullied into playing. George Logie-Smith used to go around the classes saying Jones, why aren’t you learning a musical instrument? When he got to me, he said, Thomas, why aren’t you learning two musical instruments?

My violin teacher’s teaching method was not one I’d seen before or since then. Basically, it involved telling me that every note was either flat or sharp, so I would play the note and he’d say ‘flat’, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

I would play the next note ‘You’re sharp’, I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not, but if I had any sense of pitch, it was very quickly destroyed over the next three months. When I played on my own, it sounded disgusting. In orchestra you couldn’t hear yourself, so it was fine. At the end of that year, my parents gave me a viola for Christmas.

How old were you then?

I would have been 16 and I burst into tears.

‘Don’t get me a viola, I hate the instrument, it’s the devil’s work, it’s horrible.’

Rowans Father ‘But we thought you liked it.’

Rowan ‘Well, yeah, in orchestra, but on its own, it’s revolting. There’s no way I’ll play it long term.’ Rowans Father ‘Tell us about the lessons and tell us about your teacher?

I described a lesson, and they thought, well, maybe a different teacher might help.

The trouble is that if I learned from a different teacher at the school, it would have been embarrassing confronting my current teacher.

‘You don’t have to learn from the teacher at school’.

‘But I like the orchestra and you have to learn from the schoolteachers in order to stay in the orchestra.’

‘Okay. What if you had extra lessons?’

They found Barbara Argall and when she heard me play, she said:

‘Ah, this is terrible we’ve got to go back to step one, preliminary; this is how you put your fingers on the fingerboard and this is how you move the bow, and this is the sound you have to make.’

We went right back to the beginning; she worked in a way that I could understand and enjoy. She organised smaller groups called ‘Sunday morning breakfast Bach to Bacharach’.

She was very enthusiastic, and you’d hear other students whilst you were waiting because she always ran late. Other people would hear your playing, all in all it was a lovely environment. I wanted to work really, really hard for her and by the time I was in year 12 I played with the Victorian Junior Symphony Orchestra and the Victorian Concert Orchestra which toured the state. I also played with the Kelmier Orchestra, which later became Aussie Pops. I also really enjoyed all the social aspects music had to offer, that was my passport to fun and socialising.

I started formal lessons when I was 16, then by the time I was 18 I was doing sixth and seventh grade pieces. Well enough for HSC and the result was included in my top four for the high school certificate, VCE equivalent now. Once at university we started a small chamber orchestra at Monash. Yes, and it’s been through its ups and downs. Bronwyn Francis played in it and a few others who I still see, I conducted whenever we needed a conductor. The orchestra had a disproportionate number of medicos.

When I started to play L. Mus level pieces Barbara Argall sent me to learn from Chris Martin for a year. At every lesson he’d say, ‘Ah, what else have you got in your bag that I haven’t heard you play?’ He’d go through that piece and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll do something else next week.’ By the end of the year we had played through the entire viola repertoire. There was nothing left to play.

I thought, maybe I should change to the violin, I was 20 then and decided to take a year off from Medicine. I was wondering if medicine was really the thing I wanted to do.

I auditioned for Beryl Kimber in Adelaide and Spiros Rantos in Toowoomba. Spiros was very keen to have me, and I enjoyed practising on average eight hours a day for Spiros. There were only three major violin students with him at the time, as it was a recently established music course. He would spend as many hours as I could spare. We would have three-hour lessons, go through scales, studies, and pieces. There were only two days that year that I didn’t practice. The most I would practise was 10 hours a day, but on average about eight. I got most of my 10,000 hours with Spiros, on the violin in Toowoomba between my third and fourth year of Medical School.

How did he end up in Melbourne founding the Rantos Academy?

He stayed in Chris Martin’s house when he was overseas on sabbatical. He took over all of Chris’s students. On Chris’s return and after changing to the violin, I went back to Chris to give me some pointers on how to play some violin pieces.’

I had been playing the violin for a month, learning, ‘Ziguenerweisen’ as well as Mendelssohn’s violin concerto.

I played the Mendelssohn violin concerto for Chris and at the end of the first movement he stopped me.

‘You know, I’ve probably heard this played more than a thousand times by as many people and to this day, I have never ever heard it played well. You should put it away and take it up again when you’re 40.’

Well, he was right about that. The actual technical parts of it were not too difficult, but the music is very challenging.

What were your most exciting musical experiences, as a player and as a listener?

I’ve had more exciting musical experiences as a player. Music camp, playing in the first violin section of the second orchestra, I also led the second orchestra one year. To have every player play exactly the same rhythm and the same pitch is a brilliant experience in a violin section. I also played in Australian Youth Orchestra as a Violist.

As a listener there were many exciting moments, but generally, I prefer to be a participant rather than a listener.

Did you ever have a musical ahaha moment?

Listening to the Beaux Art Trio when we were in Ithaca, upstate New York, at Cornell University, it was 1997 and I was disappointed. They played like a recording and didn’t put any effort or energy into it. I had befriended the senior lecturer in strings at Cornell and I commented to her afterwards that I was surprised that I wasn’t as moved as I should have been.

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘They think they can come to Ithaca and think that they’re playing in some hick town, but they’ve got to give us a New York City performance. You know, we’re discerning musicians. I was as disappointed as you.’

She was furious and was going to go backstage to give them a piece of her mind.

It was a genuine response, they probably did have times when they turned it on in the bigger towns, but it didn’t feel like it then.

A positive ahaha moment was when Pinchas Zuckermann and Itzhak Perlman played Mozart’s ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ at Carnegie Hall in New York in1997. We got the worst seats in the hall for $300 each. It was some sort of charity concert; it was with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s not always superb music or perfect music that moves you, it’s the amount of effort and soul in the playing. Another moment was Maria Lurighi singing Villa-Lobos’s ‘Bachianas Brasileiras’ at a Mt Buller Summer Music Camp, her singing transported me.

Music is different from communication, it’s more about being in sync. It’s about knowing that your time is moving at exactly at the same time as somebody else’s. It’s even more important now a days, because we all are growing up with a different experience because we can do things online. We can learn what we want to learn. It’s not like everybody’s watching the same TV program at night, like we used to and then be able to talk about it at work the next day. Every conversation you have, is about someone trying to introduce you to something that they’ve seen that you may not have seen, rather than saying, ‘Oh wasn’t it funny last night when so-and-so did such and such, it wasn’t that great.’ I think that’s why art is also better when