Fiddle Studio: When to Stop Playing the Fiddle (Chinquapin Hunting)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus-Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Chinquapin Hunting from a jam at Anna Bandeira chocolates in Northampton Massachusetts. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we'll be talking about why you might not want to play the fiddle. This has got to be one of the weirder topics I've done. If you're looking for strange topics, definitely look up my podcast on instrument horror stories, as I sometimes do.

I posted this question when should someone stop playing the fiddle? On Facebook in the Facebook Fiddlers Association group and everyone got very upset. I like to think through questions and I like to play devil's advocate, but, as we all know, people on the internet take things very literally. There were a lot of strong feelings and I will say the overwhelming one was probably it's not up to you what anyone else does and you should never, ever, ever tell someone they should stop playing music. Oh, my goodness. Well, that's definitely not my intent and I completely agree, having talked to a lot of adults who we talk about music and I tell them I'm a music teacher oh, I hear these terrible horror stories about people being told they should stop singing or stop playing music, that they don't have talent, that they're tone deaf. Ugh, I don't know what these teachers are thinking. So please don't interpret this podcast as me telling anyone to stop playing fiddle. But I'm going to talk about it, I'm going ahead.

There are two occasions in my teaching career where I have talked to people about stopping the fiddle and they were not adults, uh, kids. I'll say two kinds of occasions, because it happened more than once for both types. One is, of course, the classic kid who is being forced to play by their parents. I will, in that kind of case, talk to the parents and try to convince them to let the kids stop. As a teacher, there's a relationship that I'm interested in preserving primarily, and it's not actually between the kid and the fiddle, it's not between the kid and me, it's not even between the kid and their parents. I am primarily concerned with preserving and improving the relationship between the kid and music. So in a case where the kid is being forced to play the violin and take lessons, I will make the pitch to the parents. I think it would be better to preserve this kid's relationship with music and learning overall, to let them stop, wait and see. You know you can check in with them in a year, see if they ask about a different instrument, see if they miss it and want to come back to it, but don't force them.

The other situation where I've brought up uh, not not playing, stopping, quitting, if you will there is a talk that I have had with several of my teenage students who've gotten really serious about the violin. You know, in the last few years of my full-time teaching career and this may have contributed to me needing to to cut back on teaching my studio got very intense. I'd been teaching a long time and a lot of my students got very, very advanced. They were doing concerto competitions regionally, they were auditioning for competitive, you know, music programs in high school and in colleges and youth orchestras and there was a lot of pressure on them and there was a lot of pressure on me and I found myself more than once saying to a kid who was putting a ton of pressure on themselves maybe it was under pressure that from their parents or or even that they felt was from me and I really wanted to let them know. You know you don't have to do this If you don't want to play violin and you stop playing the violin, you'll be okay. And just let them know.

Especially with a kid who I've been teaching five or even 10 years and we have a long relationship and they really as much as I don't want to make their journey about me, it's hard for them not to really want to make me proud and do a good job. I thought it was important to say to them I really care about you and I'm going to be proud of you, even if you don't play the violin, even if you don't win this competition, even if you don't go to music school, no matter what you do, I like you, I care about you, I'm proud of you. Sometimes someone just needs to hear that when they are thinking, if I don't win this competition or get into school, like my life is over, that's it, I'm a failure. So you know, you got to tell them. You know you don't. You don't have to play, it's not a requirement. Get, have a whole life where you don't play, it's fine. Okay, let's talk about adults. Let's talk about this is a little less me telling someone to quit.

I'll tell you what I've noticed about hobbies and sticking with hobbies and hobby angst. It's been a little while since I made a Muay Thai comparison on the podcast. But I do practice a martial art called Muay Thai Thai kickboxing. So I'm always interested to see the similarities, you know, between people coming in and starting kickboxing and people getting started with fiddling. A lot of hobby enthusiasm is similar across genres, if you will. You know there's stuff that people like and then sometimes it's something they want to like. You know it could be a hobby they like, a hobby that they're fascinated by, that they really want to figure out. Some people really like to learn new things and some people find it very frustrating to learn new things. You can really get in your own head about it, about whether you're good at learning new things or not. I think learning new things is a pretty natural process, just looking at children and humans in general, but it can be easy to overthink, maybe in the modern world.

In my gym, in my Muay Thai gym, sometimes we would get people who came in who are very athletic. So I think that's something that makes you hero though sport in my gym, and you think first, couple of times it happens. I think, wow, they're going to stick around, they're going to do great. But sometimes they would be so strong that they could hurt themselves and get frustrated, not come back or be very hard on themselves for being kind of behind, even though they were very strong or very powerful and had done other training. And musically I have taught lessons to people with a really musical background or they played a lot when they were a kid and they're expecting to get fiddling right away and they can get frustrated. To me it might look like they're picking things up really fast but they might feel like, oh, this is going way too slow for me. Sometimes having a background can make you think that you should be doing better than you are Having a really strong interest.

Yeah, we get people come into the Muay Thai gym who have watched Muay Thai fights for 10 years and they're so into it they know the name of every single move, they know all the names of the fighters and it's very different doing it from being kind of a fan of it. And with kickboxing and just to some degree with fiddle, it's hard and it's painful. And when you really know what you want, when you're very familiar with people who do it at a high level and you're kind of a fan, it can be really frustrating to try it and find it hard and in some ways uncomfortable or painful and just realize how far you have to go. Sometimes I'll teach someone who has had a lifelong appreciation for fiddling and really knows what amazing fiddling is and what it sounds like, and they can get down about their progress. So the folks who come in who seem to do well and you can learn from this, even if you see shades of yourself and the other types.

There's a lot said about beginner's mind. Beginner's mind is really not minding being bad, not minding not being able to get something the first time, being fascinated by little puzzles as they come up, trying to figure out little things, not being focused on the end goal of what you want to be at the very peak of your, of what you can learn, seeking out a lot of information, not being afraid to look like they don't know how I mean asking questions and taking notes. Is that's a flag, a green flag, if you will? For me, when I'm teaching, someone has a lot of questions, is very concerned with with how they're going to remember and study the information. I know they're. They're doing okay. Same thing in the gym.

I'll say, if you think about stopping the fiddle because you're finding it painful to play. I really think that seeking out some help from a physical therapist or a violin teacher with some background in helping people with their bodies can be a help If it's painful emotionally for you to play because you have a lot of practice guilt from your childhood or just sort of service in general around practicing or music. Or some people even just have a little bit of a defiant personality and they know they want to get into it but they Also really, really don't want to do it. Or if you're constantly comparing yourself to other people and it's making you feel bad about it. I mean, just keep in mind you don't have to play. You can play or you cannot play. You can keep it around and not play it. You can go to your lesson and not practice. I mean that's between you and your teacher. I would never tell someone to quit music.

Listening to music, making music, enjoying music there's a lot of different ways to do it. It doesn't have to be on the fiddle. This podcast was officially the worst advertisement ever for my business. You don't have to play the fiddle. Maybe you should stop. It's so bad. I will counteract it briefly. If you don't know I have these three fiddle books. They're called Fiddles Studio, just like the podcast. Most of the tunes from the books at least the first two with the easier tunes are also up on my YouTube channel, which is also called Fiddles Studio. So, trying to make it easy to practice the tunes from the books you can watch the video on YouTube. You could study the tune in the book. I am working my way through giving a little upgrade to those tunes, trying to make the videos not just me playing through the tune once, but giving a little more teaching content to those videos, playing it through at a slower tempo. So yeah, if you're interested in playing the fiddle instead of stopping, you can check out my books, my Fiddles Studio books they're on Amazon and the videos that go with them on YouTube.

We played this tune, our tune for today is Chinquapin Hunting. Chinquapin is a chestnut. We played it up in Massachusetts. We play it all the time down here in Baltimore. So this is a popular old-time tune everywhere. It's in A major, usually played in A cross tuning, so strings tuned to A-E-A-E and it's got three parts. The version of this people usually play is by Norman Edmonds and that's the version that we play in Baltimore. It's pretty close to what we played up in Massachusetts.

If you're looking to really dive into this tune, I think it's one of the tunes that Bruce Molsky does. He has courses on Peghead nation and I saw this tune covered there. It looked pretty cool. There's another version of this tune, which is not similar at all, from the Kentucky Fiddler, Hiram Stamper, and he said that the tune was at least as old as the American Civil War. Those are basically the two that I could find on the internet, but most people play the Edmonds version and that's what we're going to play for you here Chinquapin Hunting. Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.