What A Musician Hears

Capital-M Music

Essays

by Richard Bruner

Here’s an interesting point that I’ve noticed a couple of times. As a trained musician, I hear and perceive music in a different way than someone who is not a trained musician, and I perceive the kinds of music I’m trained in differently than I perceive music I’m less trained in or not trained in.

This relates to a point I made in Life Tips Composition Tip No. 15 (XY Grid of Difficulty), which is that there is a difference between what a general audience thinks is hard to play on an instrument vs. what is actually hard to play on an instrument. This has led to a whole genre of video on YouTube / Tik-Tok etc where people show some of these comparisons for their instruments. My most recent encounter with this idea is from an album that just released (the day before I’m writing this) from fiddlers Bruce Molsky and Darol Anger, but first - I first really consciously thought about this concept a few years ago when I was playing 1st violin in an orchestra playing Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major.

In the third movement of that concerto, there are a couple of passages featuring trick harmonic playing, where the soloist plays double stop harmonic passages. This doesn’t really seem all that crazy to most people - this is not the part that the general audience would probably think of as the crazy virtuoso part of the piece. But as a violinist myself, when I first heard that passage and realized what I was hearing my mind was blown and I had to come home and immediately download the solo part for that to see how it was notated. I remember thinking to myself “wait - is that even technically possible on the instrument?”

Double stops are not themselves that hard, and neither are harmonics. Tuning double stops takes a lot of practice, but my mind wouldn’t have been blown if this passage was regular notes in double-stops - I would need a lot of work to play that successfully, but the virtuoso soloist who is actually playing it should have done that work and it would probably be pretty good. Harmonics are generally pretty easy once you get the hang of them. We have two types of harmonics on the violin (or any string instrument) - natural harmonics and artificial harmonics. I won’t go into full detail here as it gets a little more complicated and that’s not the point of this analysis, but suffice it to say that artificial harmonics can be played on any note and will sound two octaves above the pitch you think you are playing, while natural harmonics only work on notes related to the harmonic series of one of our open strings. Melodies tend to work best with artificial harmonics, though one thing I like doing is playing tunes using natural harmonics to see what I can come up with. The most salient point here is that it requires two fingers to play an artificial harmonic - we put down the first finger on the note we “think” we’re playing, then lightly use our fourth finger to touch a fourth higher to bring out the 4th harmonic (two octaves above the fundamental, or the pitch we are fingering with the first finger). Because of this, it’s harder to do double stops with artificial harmonics because you are already using the full frame of your hand (1st to 4th finger) to play one note. Then to play shifting intervals of double stops is really where my mind was blown, because you have to change which fingers you are using to get different intervals, so I had to go and see if they notated how to play it, because it would be extremely time consuming to work out a fingering yourself from each notated sounding pitch. Sure enough, in this passage, the method of playing each harmonic is notated, rather than the sounding pitch (they have an ossia line indicating sounding pitch as well). If you want to see this passage yourself, here are some videos, timestamped to that spot: Video of player, Score video, and here’s a link to the solo part from IMSLP (the score shows sounding pitches, the solo part shows fingerings. Letter D on page 16).

As mentioned above, the reason I’m writing this up right now is because I just encountered this idea again in a somewhat different context when listening to a new album yesterday from Bruce Molsky and Darol Anger. The album is Lockdown Breakdown, and the song in question is the title track, “Lockdown Breakdown”. This song broke my brain a little bit as I was listening to it yesterday, but I realized later that that only happened because I have some knowledge that most people would not have. To them, this might just be a grooving track that sounds cool (or not, depending on how they feel about old-time fiddle music in the first place!). But I’ve met Bruce Molsky personally, and both Bruce Molsky and Darol Anger taught fiddle at Berklee while I was there. I happen to know that neither of them plays cello, so when the track started to sound like it had a cello it caught my ear. It also seemed like this is a strict duo album, no guest artists, so that ruled out a third cello player. Then the sound wasn’t quite right for a cello, something I know from many years of intense ear training getting ever better at the very subtle timbral details of all the main acoustic instruments. It was too “woofy” for a cello. It’s also too low in pitch for a normal 5-string violin, common in American fiddling in particular these days, which goes down to the viola C string (basically a hybrid violin - viola). I know that range very well both from playing viola of course, and from having a 5-string violin myself, which I use when playing with the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles. These notes were cello range notes, not viola range notes. I came up with two possibilities, from what I know of the type of music that Darol Anger does (it seemed like that was more likely his line, as the melody line sounded like Bruce Molsky’s playing, something I figured from many hours of listening to his recordings over the years). The two possibilities were either some kind of octave effect on a 5-string violin, or possibly a 7+ string violin, which I know exist, and might be something that Darol Anger would play.

When I got home, I found out that there is a video of them recording this track where you can watch them play, and this seems to have confirmed my first guess - he’s playing an electroacoustic 5-string (you can see the 5 pegs in his scroll), and it’s plugged into an amplifier which probably has some kind of effect involved dropping his pitch by an octave. It’s also telling that the lowest pitch you hear is the open cello C string pitch, exactly an octave below the C string of a 5-string fiddle (or viola).

Another note here - Bruce Molsky’s sound is not without interest on this track. You can see in the video that he is playing a 4-string, but he’s definitely hitting the E below the normal G string pitch of the low string. This one is easy enough to explain, knowing what I know about him. He’s retuned the fiddle so that the G string is an E string a third lower. This tune reminds me of one that he taught when I took a workshop with him at the Fiddle Hell camp in Boston a few years ago, called “Glory in the Meeting House”. In that tune, he had us use this tuning - EADE from high to low (normal top three strings, G string lowered to E). This gives you a nice bass drone for your E dorian tunes, and retuning (cross-tuning in technical terms) is a common old-time fiddle technique.

But again, all of this only made me pause and say “wait, what?” because I play this music myself, I’ve been thoroughly trained in ear training (musicianship) to listen super carefully all the time, and I know something about these people specifically that most people might not. It’s music for a general audience that sounds cool, but if you know what you are doing it can be astonishing in a way that most people would not notice, whereas many times, things that the general audience would be astonished by seem fairly tame to me because I know they really aren’t that hard to play.