Evolved or Endangered? Survival of the Fiddle-ist

Few people welcome change, and only anarchists embrace paradigm shifts. So I don’t blame anyone for resisting the notion that string playing must evolve along with the rest of our musical culture or risk becoming extinct.

Endangered Strings

For the average young person who is not a string player, strings and orchestral music (except for film-scores) are generally thought of as old-fashioned and useful mostly to add production value to pop songs. Strings are not considered a primary instrument in the popular music of our times, except in country and folk music. Guitars and keyboards join the bass and drums (or some computer version of these instruments) to create the rhythm section. Saxes and brass are the primary melodic instruments in jazz, electric guitar defines rock, but strings faded into the scenery of a bygone world—a world that produced many towering classics of western music, but a bygone world, nevertheless.

Why did strings hold to the old guard? Probably because they were the primary instrument in most of those towering classics. Fashions and styles changed, as they will, and strings were identified with the old world. Yes, there were a few amazing jazz violinists through the years, but they were exceptions. Strings never integrated into the evolving pop music spanning the jazz era to the present. For most of the 20th century, string pedagogy hunkered down with a 19th century technique and remained wedded to the worthy, demanding and somewhat anachronistic art of preserving those towering classics. But, as Marie Antoinette discovered, denial is not a great strategy.

Evolved Strings

Sometimes, what seems like a paradigm shift is just a turning point in what has actually been a steady march forward. I am old enough to be pre-Suzuki. When I was at Juilliard in the late 70’s, there were students there who had never heard of the Beatles. But now, even the most conservative of conservatories are populated by many young people who are not only perpetuating those towering classics, but also remarkably tuned in to all kinds of contemporary music simply by virtue of being born and raised online.

Young string players expect to participate, in some way, in the music of their own generation. They listen to lots of music online, and they are interested in what’s going on in clubs, pop concerts and recording studios everywhere. Artists like Andrew Bird and Apocalyptica have opened the minds of many young people to the idea of strings playing a primary role in pop music. Young people get messages from many sources about the importance of inclusion and acceptance that my generation could certainly have used. That bodes very well for the future in general, and as string players, young and old, it means that we should imagine what this inclusive future of string playing could look like.

A Second Language

So what does it mean to evolve along with the rest of our musical culture? It means we should be able to play our pop music authentically, without a classical dialect. It means we learn how to groove like a rhythm guitar, rock out like a lead guitar and swing like a saxophone.

It’s a little odd, perhaps, that we need to learn the native musical tongue, popular music, as a second language. The most important thing when learning a new language is to listen to it spoken, and the most important thing in learning to play in the pop idiom is to listen to pop music. If you’re a teacher, ask your students what they listen to besides classical music, and find out what they like about it. Ask them to play it for you on their instrument. The younger the student, the easier it is for them to start learning a second language. Don’t worry, your students won’t forget their classical mother tongue.

Just as the towering classics of the past were written in the popular idioms of their time and place, the classics of our time will come from the popular idiom of our time and place. If we want strings to be included in the classics of tomorrow, we need to do what the string players of the past have always done: speak the language of the popular musical culture.

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