At the turn of the century Joachim and Sarasate, two of the most prominent exponents of nineteenth-century violin playing, were still active. Highly regarded throughout their careers, the two figures represented opposite ideals: Joachim was the serious musician who probed the musical essence of a composition, and Sarasate the elegant violinist who played with a sleek but somewhat glib virtuosity. Renowned for the depth and spiritual quality of his interpretations, Joachim was venerated as the greatest interpreter of the German masterworks. He had first performed the Beethoven concerto as a thirteen-year-old under the baton of Mendelssohn and, as leader of the distinguished Joachim Quartet, did much to bring the Beethoven quartets to the public's attention. As a close friend of Brahms, Joachim not only championed many of the composer's works, but also inspired and advised Brahms, notably in the writing of his Violin Concerto. By contrast, Beethoven and Brahms were composers for whom Sarasate had little affinity. The violinist Albert Spalding recalled that ‘he played Beethoven with the perfumed polish of a courtier who doesn't quite believe what he is saying to Majesty’. As for the Brahms concerto, Sarasate unashamedly refused to perform the work, explaining, ‘Why should I stand there while the oboe has the only proper melody in the whole piece?’ It would be unfair, however, to dismiss Sarasate's achievement on the basis of his musical tastes. He was a unique personality, and had sufficient musical qualities to inspire a wide variety of composers to write works for him.

The violin: introduction and terminology

The violin is an endlessly fascinating instrument, both historically and artistically. A performer's instrument may be four hundred years old, but it will not differ significantly from one made yesterday. That the frail-looking violin has endured shows the perfection of its design, both as an expressive instrument of music and as a beautiful object in itself.

The violin is a mechanically simple but acoustically complex instrument. The four tapered tuning pegs for adjusting the G, D, A and E strings are made usually from rosewood or boxwood for durability, and project laterally from the backward curving pegbox (see Fig. 1). This latter ends in the scroll, a baroque adornment which is a characteristic feature of the violin family. The backward slope of the pegbox tensions the strings across the ebony nut, which is grooved to locate and raise them just above the surface of the ebony fingerboard, against which the strings are stopped by the fingers of the left hand. The fingerboard is glued to the neck, which is carved in one piece with the pegbox and scroll from maple (acer pseudoplatanus). It has a curved top in cross-section, and increases in width from the nut end to permit wider string spacing across the bridge, allowing easier movement for the bow.

Treatises

It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that instruction books devoted exclusively to violin technique were published, John Lenton's The Gentleman's Diversion … (1693) being recognised as the first extant violin tutor. Like most of its immediate successors, it was intended for the amateur musician. Its elementary content was no substitute for oral instruction by a teacher, on whom many depended in order to learn techniques ‘which may be knowne but not described’. Earlier in the century some treatises had begun to reflect both the liberation of instruments from their subordination to the voice and the improved social position of the violin itself by incorporating descriptions of contemporary instruments, sometimes with some basic technical information. But these were publications addressed to musicians as a whole, dealing with a wide range of instruments, and were not specialist violin texts. Among the most significant of these ‘multi-purpose’ volumes were Praetorius's Syntagma musicum (1618–20), Mersenne's Harmonie uni verselle (1636), Zanetti's Il scolaro … per imparar a suonare di violino, et altri stromenti (1645), Prinner's Musicalischer Schlissl (1677), Speer's Gründ-richtiger … Unterricht (1687) and Falck's Idea boni cantoris (1688). John Playford's A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick demonstrates the increasing popularity of the violin in amateur circles, a complete section, ‘Playing on the Treble Violin’, being added in a second revised edition (1658) published four years after the first.

Introduction

A study of the physics of the violin gives a fascinating insight into how the instrument converts the player's intricate motions into musical sounds. Practising musicians are often blissfully unaware of the ways in which their instruments function, but a basic understanding of the mechanics involved can be of great benefit when teaching, selecting instruments or dealing with minor problems. It also brings a little more objectivity to a subject otherwise clouded with myth, mystique and superstition.

The twentieth century has witnessed a great increase in the scientific evaluation and development of a wide range of musical instruments. Occasionally, investigations are designed specifically to improve the performance of instruments or to achieve greater control during their manufacture. Some of these studies have been successful. More usually, they are carried out purely for the sake of curiosity – a desire to seek a rational explanation of an observed phenomenon. The researcher now has a wide range of powerful analytical techniques at his disposal. For example, he can use sensitive electronic instrumentation, high-speed computers and even lasers to probe the tiny vibrations of the violin. Although these physical studies have demonstrated the basic action of the violin and unravelled a few of its 'mysteries', they are still far from answering those tantalising questions relating to the finer details of violin tone.

In addition to the sonata and concerto, the violin repertory comprises four further principal areas: music for unaccompanied violin; variations; short genre pieces for violin with orchestra or keyboard; and transcriptions. The first examples of music for unaccompanied violin date from the late seventeenth century and the genre reached its first peak with the works of J. S. Bach. Interest in the medium then declined until it was revived in the current century by composers such as Reger, Hindemith, Bartók and Prokofiev. Among shorter genres, the variation form remained a favourite vehicle for performers from the early seventeenth century. It came to fuller flower towards the end of the eighteenth century with the popularity of the air varié, using a popular operatic aria or national folktune as its variation source, and became the favourite vehicle for bravura display exploited by virtuosi such as Paganini, de Bériot, Vieuxtemps, Ernst and others. The short genre piece, including romances, elegies, ballades and legends or national dances like polonaises, mazurkas or jotas, similarly found particular favour during the nineteenth century, and transcriptions of masterpieces of former times also became popular at about the same time.

Music for unaccompanied violin

Probably the earliest extended work for unaccompanied violin is Biber's Passacaglia (c.1675), comprising sixty-five variations on the descending tetrachord G–F–Eb–D, included as the last in the collection of sixteen ‘Rosary’ Sonatas. But there are also several shorter examples incorporated in John Playford's The Division Violin (1684) and Nicola Matteis's four books of Ayres of the Violin (Books 1 and 2, 1676; 3 and 4, 1685).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the derivative French classical school of violin playing was pre-eminent, based at the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris (established in 1795). The parent Italian violin school had largely run its course, but it was an Italian, Viotti, who had largely been responsible for laying the foundations of the highly systematised French approach to violin playing and teaching, and his methods were disseminated widely through his own performances and teaching. With the extension of the French school into Belgium in the 1840s and the influence of violinist-composers such as Spohr in Germany, the stage was set for the full flush of Romanticism to blossom in the form of the itinerant virtuoso, ‘one of the essential and corroding institutions in music history’ responsible for both the development and the debasement of the violin art.

France and Belgium

By the beginning of the nineteenth century Viotti had retired almost entirely from music in order to devote his attentions to his London wine business, the eventual failure of which left him with substantial debts; Gaviniés, Leclair's successor as leader of the French violin school, had left his legacy of distinguished pupils (e.g. Baudron, Capron, Guénin, Leduc and Paisible), some of whom had come under his wing while he was violin professor at the Paris Conservatoire; and Michel Woldemar (1750–1815) was encouraging the cultivation of more virtuosic techniques after the ‘school’ of his mentor Lolli. Although Viotti performed in public for less than ten years, the qualities of his playing dominated an entire generation of violinists. His technical brilliance, the breadth, beauty and power of his tone and the overall expressive characteristics of his performances captured the imagination of his listeners. Paul Alday, Cartier, Duranowski, Vacher, Labarre, Libon, Robberechts, F.W. Pixis and Rode were among his pupils, and both Kreutzer and Baillot have been regarded as disciples.

Introduction

The violin sonata took two avenues of development in the Baroque era. The seventeenth-century form, for violin and continuo, involved the violin as principal melodist. Harmonic support in the form of semi-improvised chords or the realisation of a prescribed figured bass was provided by a keyboard instrument (normally an organ or harpsichord), which could be joined or replaced by a plucked instrument (chitarrone or archlute); in addition, the bass line could be sustained, normally by a string instrument such as a cello or gamba. The sonata emerged first in Northern Italy, spreading to Austria and Germany, and later to England and France. The principal centres of sonata activity were Venice, Bologna, Vienna, Dresden, Hamburg, London and Paris, the very centres where patronage and publication were most easily attained. As the genre evolved during the seventeenth century, two different types emerged: the sonata da camera (‘chamber sonata’), which is essentially a suite of stylised dances; and the sonata da chiesa (‘church sonata’), the movements of which have no dance allegiances.

The sonata's second avenue of development, the so-called ‘accompanied sonata’, involved the violinist in a subordinate role to an obbligato keyboard. This type, which challenged the dominance of the sonata with continuo and eventually superseded it, began and ended in the Classical period, giving way to the true duo sonata for two equal protagonists.

The twentieth century presents string players with two sets of (somewhat related) technical problems: the variety of timbral and dynamic demands made upon the bow arm; and the intervallic demands made upon our left hand/arm. There are other concerns that make the music of this century difficult for many (Le. complex metric and rhythmic structures, and general questions of form and musical content), but these concerns affect all musicians, not just string players.

As regards the first problem, the assumption is usually made that the demands per se are new; unique; different. This assumption is at least partially false. It is the rate at which the demands change that is new, not the demands themselves.

As regards the left hand/arm, these problems result from the intervallic and harmonic choices used by composers in the music of this century, and string players have simply disregarded anything in their preparatory studies that might make this music less of a physical cipher to them. Indeed, the training material and thought processes behind today's teaching have generally continued as if the compositional milestones and solutions of this century had never happened.

The primary timbral demands made today upon our bow arm (other than normal bowing – which still constitutes the majority of what we do) are: pizzicato; playing on the bridge (Ital. = suI ponticello; Fr. = sur Ie chevalet; Ger. = am Steg); playing on the fingerboard (suI tasto; sur la touche; am Griffbrett); playing on or with the wood of the bow, either struck or drawn (collegno); and (occasionally) playing behind, or on the ‘wrong’ side of the bridge.

Preamble

As the twentieth century draws to a close, violinists are faced with a bewildering range of teaching and playing styles. Teaching rarely achieves the elevated status of the performing career except in the USA and, more notably, in the traditions of Eastern Europe. As a profession it lacks the formal training and benefits derived from systematic apprenticeship. Moreover, many players resort to violin teaching as a supplement to their main income – with the result that their lessons are invariably unstructured and idiosyncratic.

Written information on the violin fares little better. The authoritative texts of Flesch and Galamian are remarkably thorough; here the beneficiary is the specialist embarking on a solo career, not the teacher, for whom little is on offer. Subsequent authors have continued this trend, though contemporary ideas are even more acutely polarised. The books of Gerle and Jacoby champion a scientific and analytical expose of skills, while the works of Havas, Menuhin and Polnauer represent the more abstract approach, where general concepts such as Gestalt philosophy are preferred to detailed investigation. By contrast, although the Rolland and Suzuki methods are appreciably different from each other, they are both geared to the beginner and pioneer teaching en masse, involving extensive use of modern audio and visual equipment.

Serious gaps therefore exist not only for the general student of intermediate standard and modest aspiration but also for today's player and teacher, who is offered little perspective on a wide range of issues and techniques. While this chapter cannot profess to be comprehensive, it does seek to redress the balance. Its agenda, a judicious mix of new and traditional ideas, emphasises topics which are generally neglected, and makes only brief reference to those which can be easily gleaned from the main publications.

It is often assumed that the violin has had only a small role in jazz and related musics, although in fact its achievement has been quite large and varied. The roots of this diversity lie in the wide range of musics that contributed to jazz and allied forms. Jazz began in the USA, whence countless immigrants travelled from Europe, plus many involuntary immigrants from Africa. They all took with them their music, which the new world changed, and it may be that the most significant aspect of jazz in particular is the extent to which it has reflected the mixture of cultures and races that characterises the country in which it emerged.

The violin's place in all this goes back a long way. In Music in New Orleans: the Formative Years 1791–1841 (Baton Rouge, 1967) Henry Kmen writes that ‘as early as 1799 fifes and fiddles were used’ by the city's slaves. One line of descent from those times may be glimpsed in Yodelling Blues by the Buck Mt Band (OKeh 45428, 1929), where Van Edwards's fiddle reminds us of both country music and blues. So does the Johnson Boys' Violin Blues (OKeh 8708, 1928), except that Lonnie Johnson's violin, with its double-stopped imitations of train noises, anticipates the railway onomatopoeics of boogie pianists and more especially of the Quintette du Hot Club de France's Mystery Pacific (HMV B8606, 1937), and hence is closer to jazz.

In Plato's dialogue the Sophist, the main interlocutors, the Eleatic Stranger and Theaetetus, are trying to determine the nature of the sophist. Given that the phenomenon of the sophistic movement is so many-faceted and somewhat amorphous, it is not surprising that the first attempts in the dialogue to get a grip on the elusive reality underlying this phenomenon turn out to be not particularly successful, since they at best capture some superficial feature of the sophist. These features are recapitulated at 231c8-e7. Then, in 232a1ff a renewed attempt is made to capture the sophist; this attempt seems to go more to the heart of the matter, but runs into difficulties whose resolution occupies the remainder of the dialogue. The suggestion is that the sophist has a remarkable ability to represent things in a way that makes this representation, the sophist's statement about things, appear and seem to be true, though, in fact, it is not. This raises a series of difficulties, first alluded to in 235d2, then again in 236c9ff, and spelled out in considerable detail in 236d9ff.

PLATO'S ACADEMY AND THE SCIENCES

At some time between the early 380s and the middle 360s Plato founded what came to be known as the Academy. Our information about the early Academy is very scant. We know that Plato was the leader (scholarch) of the Academy until his death and that his nephew Speusippus succeeded him in this position. We know that young people came from around the Greek world to be at the Academy and that the most famous of such people, Aristotle, stayed there for approximately twenty years. However, it appears that, at least in Plato's time, there were no fees attached to being at the Academy. Thus it does not seem likely that it had any official “professorial staff” or that “students” took a set of courses to qualify them to fill certain positions in life. The Academy was more likely a community of self-supporting intellectuals gathered around Plato and pursuing a variety of interests ranging from the abstractions of metaphysics to more concrete issues of politics and ethics.

In Book VII of the Republic Socrates describes a plan of higher education designed to turn the most promising young people of a Utopian city-state into ideal rulers. It is frequently assumed (and quite naturally) that this curriculum bears a significant relation to Plato's plans for the Academy; sometimes it has even been described as essentially the plans themselves. It is important to see that this assumption is subject to major qualifications. For, first of all, fourth-century Athens is not even an approximation to Plato's Utopia; Plato could not expect entrants in the Academy to have been honed in the way the Utopian citizens are supposed to be.

For a correct understanding of Plato, account needs to be taken of the fact that his philosophical activity spanned some fifty years, during which time certain doctrines underwent considerable changes. To trace this development and so be able to identify the final expression of his thought, it is essential to know in what order the dialogues were written, but there is little help in this quest either from external sources or from the dialogues themselves. Regarding the former, the only information likely to be reliable is Aristotle's statement that the Laws was written after the Republic. This is repeated by Diogenes Laertius (III 37) and Olympiodorus [Prol. VI 24), who add that the Laws was still in an unrevised state on wax tablets when Plato died and was published posthumously by one of his students, Philip of Opus. As for internal evidence, cross references in the Sophist (217a) and Politicus (257a, 258b) indicate the prior composition of the former, while the Timaeus (27a) mentions the Critias as its sequel. Rather less definite is the apparent reference in the Timaeus (17b- 19b) to the Republic, in the Sophist to the Parmenides (217c) and Theaetetus (216a), and in the Theaetetus to the Parmenides (183e).

Plato (427-347 B.C.) stands at the head of our philosophical tradition, being the first Western thinker to produce a body of writing that touches upon the wide range of topics that are still discussed by philosophers today under such headings as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, language, art, love, mathematics, science, and religion. He may in this sense be said to have invented philosophy as a distinct subject, for although all of these topics were, of course, discussed by his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, he was the first to bring them together by giving them a unitary treatment. He conceives of philosophy as a discipline with a distinctive intellectual method, and he makes radical claims for its position in human life and the political community. Because philosophy scrutinizes assumptions that other studies merely take for granted, it alone can give us genuine understanding; since it discovers a realm of objects inaccessible to the senses and yields an organized system of truths that go far beyond and in some cases undermine common sense, it should lead to a transformation in the way we live our lives and arrange our political affairs. It is an autonomous subject and not the instrument of any other discipline, power, or creed; on the contrary, because it alone can grasp what is most important in human life, all other human endeavors should be subordinate to it.

In this essay I will try to identify and explain the fundamental argument of Plato's Republic for the astonishing thesis that justice is so great a good that anyone who fully possesses it is better off, even in the midst of severe misfortune, than a consummately unjust person who enjoys the social rewards usually received by the just. Plato's attempt to defend this remarkable claim is of course the unifying thread of the dialogue, but his argument ranges so widely over diverse topics that it is difficult to see how it all fits together, and anyone who attempts to state his argument must take a stand on interpretive issues about which there is considerable scholarly controversy. The dialogue's difficulty is increased by Plato's failure to give any explicit justification for the complex moral equation he boldly announces: Justice discounted by pain and dishonor is more advantageous than injustice supplemented by the rewards of justice. Even if he manages to show that justice is the greatest single good, we are still left wondering whether its value is high enough to make this equation come out right.

For some time philosophers have thought of epistemology and metaphysics as different branches of philosophy, investigating, respectively, what can be known and the basic properties and nature of what there is. It is hard, though, to see any genuine boundary here. The issues irresistibly overlap. Certainly in Plato there is no such divide. His views about what there is are largely controlled by ideas about how knowledge can be accounted for, and his thinking about what knowledge is takes its character from convictions about what there is that is knowable. As a result his doctrines have a different shape from characteristically modern ones.

Some earlier Platonic writings do have a somewhat modern look. Socrates was notorious for having questioned whether he knew much of anything, and for making people hesitant about their opinions (Meno 80c, 86b-c). c). Plato exploits this side of Socratic thought. The namesake of the Euthyphro judges that an action of his is pious. Socrates wonders whether Euthyphro ought to be confident about that judgment, and tries to make him less so. Elsewhere Socrates raises questions concerning his own judgments about which things are beautiful (H. Ma. 286c). Such questions seem to suggest a general policy of doubting, reminiscent to us of Descartes or of the various programs of ancient skepticism. In Socrates' efforts to overcome ignorance (Meno 86b-c) we might see a project of justifying beliefs like that of typical contemporary epistemologists.

In most of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates professes to inquire into some virtue. At the same time, he professes not to know what the virtue in question is. How, then, can he inquire into it? Doesn't he need some knowledge to guide his inquiry? Socrates' disclaimer of knowledge seems to preclude Socratic inquiry. This difficulty must confront any reader of the Socratic dialogues; but one searches them in vain for any explicit statement of the problem or for any explicit solution to it. TheMeno, by contrast, both raises it explicitly and proposes a solution.

THE PRIORITY OF KNOWLEDGE WHAT (PKW)

Meno begins the dialogue by asking whether virtue is teachable (70a1-2). Socrates replies that he doesn't know the answer to Meno's question; nor does he at all(to parapan, 71a7) know what virtue is. The latter failure of knowledge explains the former; for “if I do not know what a thing is, how could I know what it is like?” (ho de mē oida ti estin,pōs an hopoion ge ti eideiēn; 71b3-4). Nonetheless, he proposes to inquire with Meno into what virtue is. Here, as in the Socratic dialogues, Socrates both disclaims knowledge and proposes to inquire.