stylo

the 'girl of steel'

  • she/her

trans dyke, 32, jazz musician, counter strike, maybe some other stuff idk

vgm ep @ bandcamp.com/stylo-v


last.fm listening
musicboard album ratings
a spinning estradiol vial with the text 'powered by estrogen'


jcd
@jcd

I'm a bit of a weirdo in that I choose to spend a lot of my free time (and dwindling time on this burning earth) learning to play music, despite the knowledge that I generally get brutal performance anxiety and thus have no chance of ever actually turning into a practicing musician. I started singing in the school choir in second grade, did the mandatory years of recorder and ukulele when I came to Saskatoon, as well as joining the junior choir (and later for a year, senior choir) at my church. Flute in grade six band. Switched to horn in grade nine. Probably did the most with that, getting to play in the Saskatoon Youth Orchestra in grades eleven and twelve, as well as my university wind orchestra throughout undergrad.

When I moved to Ottawa, I did very little music. I didn't have a horn, and had my flute but didn't play it much. After a year I left for Winnipeg. Got a job, spent my first paycheques on furniture and a refurbished French horn, joined a community band. Dropped out of community band around the time that I realized nobody was practicing, so not only were we going to play "Shrek Dance Party", it was never going to sound any better.

That was when I decided to finally get a guitar and properly learn to play it. I have memories of stealing my mum's classical guitar in high school, along with some easier pieces she had from her days taking lessons, and trying to learn it. For whatever reason, it never took, but since 2007 has been one of the central anchors of my life.

All this to say that I've been learning to play music for most of my life, so when I bought a viola from a U of M equipment auction in 2017 and decided, at 36, to take lessons, I figured I had an idea what to expect. It's an instrument, right? Like, how hard can it be?

Turns out, pretty difficult. I wrote about this in an essay published in Riddle Fence, but I've never run into anything quite like it. Guitar, I think, has messed with my expectations, given that you can get a good enough sound out of it the first time you pluck a string, whereas on the bowed strings, you're caught between trying to place your fingers exactly right, at performance speed, on a fretless fingerboard, all the while trying to draw a beautiful sound out with the bow. There's a lot of things going on. Do anything slightly wrong and everything falls apart.

This is my sixth year playing viola. By the time I'd been playing flute for six years, I was entering the Real Repertoire territory: I was learning the Chaminade concertino, and starting to pick at Poulenc. On horn, I'd already finished my two years in the Saskatoon Youth Orchestra, having tackled half of The Planets, as well as the entirety of Kalinnikov 1.

I made my own bed by working with a Suzuki teacher, where everything in a particular piece needs to be perfect before I can proceed. This is very different from how I've done lessons in the past, where if things were good enough, we moved on, and I got a much wider breadth of experience and repertoire. Meanwhile, on viola, I've learned a few dozen pieces, though admittedly with excellent tone and technique.

Things come slowly, or for a period of time, not at all. Then quickly. It's a kind of progression I'm not used to given everything else I've done musically, something I think that's inherent to the difficulties of the instrument. Every instrument is hard in some sense, but usually there's some part of it that's not so bad: flute and horn only ever have to be concerned with single notes, guitar gets a good sound immediately. But viola sits squarely in some sort of fiendish sweet spot where everything has to be correct for the instrument to sound correctly. And then you have to internalize every single aspect of that to make a performance sound fluid.

I'm lucky that I can work from home. Most mornings, after C. heads off to work, I take half an hour for viola, half an hour for guitar. I work through things slowly. It can feel like weeks of little progress, or months, depending on what I'm working on. Then things will suddenly click. I feel like I'm making progress. The next day, it's gone. Pieces vary wildly. My vibrato is a project. But year to year I can see the improvement. It's just...slower. There really is a reason string players start so young.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @jcd's post:

This is very interesting to read about as someone who has no experience playing an instrument (outside of fourth grade clarinet). Have you read The Talent Code? The author talks about this music school where the students perform drills intended to accelerate learning, including playing a piece at slowed down tempo. They probably have other drills too, but I don't remember.

I haven't read it. Did a quick Google, looks interesting! I've always done all kinds of drills like that. Slowed down, practicing very small slices - a bar or two, maybe even just a few notes. Or my favourite, learning a piece both from the beginning and the end, which is something my guitar teacher does to learn a piece faster, since by the time you meet up in the middle, you've learned the piece.