Seminar 2: The “No Hold” of the bow and fiddle: lessons from Kato Havas.

The Hungarian violinist and teacher Kató Havas has had a profound effect on my personal development as a fiddle player and on the development of my teaching. Her main motivation as a teacher was to tear away at the overly regimented and unnatural pedagogy of the classical violin to get at the natural spontaneity and beauty of the gypsy violinists of her native country. In her book Stage Fright: Its Causes and Cures with Special Reference to Violin Playing, she wrote:

What can we learn from [the gypsy violinists]? The first thing that comes to mind is the ease with which they handle their instruments, from the word go. For example, while most of us classical violinists just about manage, after years of hard work, to establish a sort of love hate relationship with our violins, the gypsy's unadulterated pleasure in merely handling the instrument is a joy to watch. He conveys a feeling of not playing on the instrument, but playing through it. While a 'thorough' violinist is often acutely uncomfortable (if not in actual physical pain), the gypsy's bodily wellbeing, as he plays his instrument, is unassailable. . . One of the most important factors in the gypsy's power of communication is his 'rhythmic pulse'; an organic pulse, which involves his whole body, not just his arms and hands. . . Even if we do not get anything else from the gypsies, we could derive from them their total interplay of motion and balance, through their rhythmic pulse.

With out saying so, and perhaps without realizing it, Havas was quite close to very old meditation and tai chi practices, introduced in the first seminar, with her concept of the “no hold” of violin and bow. The seminar will introduce players to her exercises for achieving this “no hold”.

Tickets: £5.00
Tickets available at: https://www.belfasttraditionalmusic.com/afternoon-events-23/tuesday-martin-dowling
Further information: [email protected]