Through the Bus

Through the Bus
RFT Music Stories
40
Through the Bus
I learned one of the most important violin lessons of my life, out on the streets of Los Angeles. I was a street player in LA for several years and learned many things, like:
1.) being able to pace the numbers in a musical set, so as to get the most money out of the audience (start cheerful and familiar, then something beautiful and singing, then something intense and fast (that's to coax the quarters out of their pockets), then something boring to move them along to make room for the next crowd);
2.) learning how to play into a big space,
3.) learning how to play amid numerous distractions,
4.) learning how to give energy to and to get energy from an attentive audience;
5.) learning to read people's minds—I actually became a little psychic and could tell when somebody was going to give me money and
when they weren't.
One day, I was playing on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax in front of the May Co., just down the street from the Museum of Art. Looking half a block down the street, I saw a woman who gave me the definite vibe that if I could make her hear me she would give me some money. So, I started sending sound down to her just as this great big city bus comes roaring around the corner. Desperate to get that woman's quarters, I flashed on what karate masters do when they break a log with their bare hands; they think "through the log," so I thought "through the bus," and suddenly felt my bow arm drop into the string, truly drop in a totally relaxed way into the string. I felt, rather than heard, the sound pour out of the violin like a river, washing up against the bus and deflecting down the block to the woman with the quarters.
At this point I'd like to remember that it actually worked, that I actually got that lady down to the corner to put money in my case. The truth is, that I cannot actually remember whether she did or not, I was so enthralled by my violin playing discovery, my realization about the

Through the Bus RFT Music Stories
41
connection between relaxation and the largest possible sound. I think she did. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Table of Contents

RFT Music Stories Stories, Parables, and Essays About the Transforming Power of Music  by Richard Freeman-Toole  Table of Contents  Introduction......................................................1 General Musicianship .....................................3  $100 Music Lesson ..................................... . 4 The Land Where Everybody Walked with a Cane .......9 The Village Idiot and the Band Leader .............................12  Hit on Head with Hammer ............................15 The Sick Soprano's High Note ................................16  Massive Doses and Quantum Leaps ...............17 A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough .........................20  Bunger/Prodigy/Fingering .............................22 Don't Pound on the Piano .......................................23  UCLA Audition ......................................
Read more

Bunger Prodigy/Fingering

Bunger Prodigy/Fingering RFT Music Stories 22 Bunger Prodigy/Fingering My piano teacher, Richard Bunger, was a child prodigy; when he was 9 years old he could play the Chopin Revolutionary Etude—he said, "I was the only kid on my block who could play that piece." "The thing is," he said, "I can't play the piece now; if I try to play now I remember all the childish bad habits, tensing, and stretching, and straining, that I had when I was nine, my brain reads back to the program of that piece that was put in when I was a kid. The only way I could play the piece now, is if I completely re-fingered it and made a completely new memory of it." My teacher made a big deal about putting the programming for a new piece into your brain perfectly the first time, so you wouldn't have alternate versions running around in your memory waiting to mess you up in a performance. This is why...
Read more

Handel and Corelli

Handel and Corelli RFT Music Stories 63 Handel and Corelli History is filled with stories of conflict between great musicians. The distinctly defined, often quite egocentric, personalities of truly great artists, may easily come to grate against each other, since these people are often socially abrasive, and hypersensitive at the same time. Well, to set the scene for this story, we have to first give some background on Corelli. Arcangelo Corelli's traveling band of violin virtuosi were spending a year in London, performing for the king etc. Correlli's music, through publication, had been exerting an influence on the baroque musical scene all over Europe; and his chamber orchestra was one of the hottest performing groups of the time, and did very well financially. So, it was natural that they should spend some time in London; London was not really the Big Apple of the period, and the English elite were all...
Read more