BOOKS

The King of Violins: The Extraordinary Life of Ma Sicong, China’s Greatest Violin Virtuoso M.G. Crisci, Cheng Ken Chi

302PP ISBN 9781456635343 ORCA PUBLISHING £24.95

This book certainly describes an extraordinary life, but it does so in an extraordinary way, of which more later. It tells the story of a Parisiantrained violinist and composer who rose to the very highest rank in Chinese culture, only to have his career snatched away by Mao Zedong’s iniquitous Cultural Revolution in 1966.

Born in Haifeng in 1912, Ma Sicong (aka Ma Szu-ts’ung, Sitson Ma or Ma Sitson in English) was the son of Ma Yuhang, a leading figure in the revolutionary movement. He did not play the violin until he was eleven, but followed a brother to Paris and after some setbacks, entered the Conservatoire in 1928. His teachers included Jules Boucherit.

He also studied composition.

Ma married a pianist and together they weathered one of the stormiest periods in China’s history, giving concerts up and down the country. Ma developed a distinguished teaching career in parallel with his performing and composing. First in Tianjin and then in Beijing, Ma established the Central Conservatory of Music when the Communists took over. He was on good terms with prime minister Zhou Enlai, a man of some culture, but Chairman Mao referred to him, to his face, as ‘the expensive one who studied in France’.

When the Red Guards began running amok in June 1966, Ma was regularly humiliated, imprisoned in a cowshed and badly beaten up in public. With his wife and two daughters, he managed to escape to Hong Kong and thence to the US, where after the first flurry of publicity – his defection was useful to the White House as a means of embarrassing Mao – he lived a fairly low-key life. His 1943 Violin Concerto was premiered in Philadelphia by his brother Ma Sihong and he himself gave the odd concert. He toured Europe with his wife in 1985 but never returned to China. He died in 1987.

Ma Sicong: once China’s leading violinist

The authors have made the very questionable decision to tell Ma’s story in the first person. For me, a biographical subject’s quotations are sacrosanct. Has Ma’s son-in-law Cheng Ken Chi memorised pages upon pages, chapters upon chapters, of Ma’s conversation? Somehow I doubt it. The long Wikipedia entry on Ma says that he wrote an autobiography in 1937, so that book may have been a source for the early life. But the method reaches bathetic depths when Ma describes his own death and its aftermath!

The writing is banal, the editing is often poor, the photographs are badly reproduced, there is no index and the entire production reeks of cheapness. Ma Sicong surely deserved better, and for many of the facts of his life, which are omitted here, you are better off with Wikipedia.

TULLY POTTER

My Violin Needs Help!: A repair diagnostics guide for players and teachers Korinthia A. Klein

134PP ISBN 9781733388955 KORINTHIAN VIOLINS $15

This short book is a goldmine of useful and interesting information. It is aimed at teachers and players who would like to know more about their instruments but perhaps lack the confidence to make decisions about when to sort out small problems for themselves, and when to leave well alone. The author, a luthier based in the US, draws on her experiences as a teacher, learner and player, as well as a violin maker and repairer, and her aim is to help violinists (and other string players) to understand issues that may occur with their instruments, and to know what to do next.

The book gives a thorough inventory of the parts of the instrument and their associated potential pitfalls, as well as comprehensive information about the bow. There are short chapters on glue and varnish, as well as a useful section aimed at teachers running string programmes; speaking as someone who has a violin-graveyard-style cupboard filled with a motley collection of bows and instruments in varying states of health and decay, I found this section particularly helpful. Cellos are not left out – they have their own chapter, including information about wolf notes and how to hunt them, and endpins and how to wrangle them.

The text is written in a friendly, chatty style which manages to be informative, entertaining and easy to understand without being patronising, and there are many useful black and white photographs, clearly labelled where necessary. There is plenty of niche information, which is always useful to impress your fact-hungry students. Did you know, for example, that the horsehair in a bow is usually taken from horses living in places with cold climates, like Mongolia or Siberia, because the animals’ hair is thick and less likely to have been damaged by swatting flies in the heat? Or that the alternating light brown and black stripes seen on some bows should be referred to as ‘faux whalebone wrap’, as it mimics the old bow making tradition of using baleen (whalebone) wrapping?

Throughout the book, the focus is on identifying and understanding problems, and deciding on the next course of action. The author shares her knowledge about simple fixes,

highlights problems that need a luthier, and also addresses the issue of student instruments, such as when to spend money on repairs and when it would be more cost-effective to simply replace them: ‘If the stick on a student bow has snapped – it’s done. You can use it as a tomato stake.’

If you want information about all things violin, such as how to prevent bow bugs, when to change your strings and whether it is ever fine to use glue on an instrument, then this is the book for you. Perhaps more importantly, if you ever encounter a problem with an instrument and need to decide what steps to take, this practical resource will very likely have the answer. And although that answer will probably be ‘take it to a luthier’ – these words feature many times throughout the text, for very good reason – reading this book will educate and entertain you in equal amounts as you work it out.

CELIA COBB

Viola Basics Paul Harris, Jessica O’Leary

64PP ISBN 9780571541867 FABER MUSIC £12.99

Viola Basics is a guide from the very beginning of the young violist’s journey to approximately ABRSM Grade 1 level. While this might be true of the level of music presented, the volume does a great deal more in setting up methods, habits and ideas, which will enable the young player to progress beyond the tunes contained in these pages.

The book is presented in 18 stages, from open strings through to some simple chromatic movement. It is great to see harmonics played out of first position with a fourth finger introduced before first-position fingerwork. This promotes a healthy fearlessness of shifting at an early stage, and also supports a more naturally rounded left-hand position. There are 75 short tunes in the book: some new compositions with engaging titles such as Progression of the Scrolls and Waltz of the Loose Bow Hairs; and some familiar tunes, including Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

Each tune may be performed with a backing track, and Harris and O’Leary thoughtfully encourage this, slowing the backing down as necessary.

The real strength of the book comes with the superb practical advice. The ‘Four Ps’ are reinforced regularly and healthily: Posture, Pulse, Phonology (exhorting pupils to seek good quality sound) and Personality (of the music), which encourages character over correctness.

Each stage comes with its own warm-ups and activities. There are tips such as what to do with the bow during rests. The activities are fun and always useful. These may help with physical freedom and awareness, like an encouragement to sway the hips, for instance; they may help with creativity by encouraging improvisation or composition; they may help directly with learning, by getting the pupil to teach a new technique back to a teacher or to a parent or to a fellow student, which encourages greater depth of self-understanding.

The one missed opportunity is that there is no attempt to celebrate the viola as opposed to the violin. At beginner level the techniques are of course virtually identical; if the book were transposed into the treble clef, no one would suspect it wasn’t entirely for the benefit of beginner violinists. This said, Viola Basics is a must-have for every teacher of beginner viola.

ALEX LAING