ABSTRACT
Nothing in an exclusively verbal academic life had prepared me for the joys and difficulties of starting out on learning a musical instrument. Choosing a string instrument meant immediately that the physical skills involved were far less daunting than learning to swim in this wholly new wonderful sound world of timbre, rhythm, melody, harmony and counterpoint. The safety net of a fixed pitch instrument like the piano wasn’t there: where in the ether did these elusive notes lurk, to be reliably summoned without anything to which one might relate their pitch? And this fairly heavy, cumbersome thing didn’t even support itself on legs or a stout metal spike, yet both one’s hands are needed to be constantly in motion! So in all its formidable terrors this felt very like that first day at school, when initiation into impenetrable mysteries awaits.
