get out the violins

19Apr07

from the pen of the knackered hackette

Question: when is a violin shop not a violin shop? Answer: when the floor’s fallen in.

For a small business, with an expensive stock of delicate instruments, you could call this a black swan event, after the new book by Nassim Taleb, already out in the US and due to be published in the UK next month. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian Tsunami, and Virginia Tech were all large-scale, black swan events – sudden, unexpected and devastating.

Well, to be honest they were making fairly light of it at the Bristol Violin Shop this week, where this unforeseen interruption to business-as-usual had occurred. The biggest problem seemed to be putting off the more single-minded customers who seemed not to be able to hear the advice that a shop with no floor is not really able to receive clients, no matter how far they have travelled.

For my part, I was searching for a violin case to protect my newish Yamaha electric fiddle – a fabulous 40th birthday gift from the knackered hack (family et al) that has languished in its cardboard box since it arrived almost 2 years ago, inviting a range of possible black swan events at the hands of a curious seven-year-old.

Peering through the shop window, the scene inside was now a surreal blend of delicacy and devastation. Beautiful stringed instruments still hung, dust-covered, from racks at the back of the shop while a team of workmen ate their packed lunches balanced beside sheer drops to basement level.

The manager seemed surprisingly good-humoured, in spite of the surrounding chaos and the total impossibility of his selling anything that day, and…well, those rather determined customers.

Could that single-mindedness perhaps be correlated with high musical achievement, the knackered hack piped up?

The manager thought it more likely to be revealed in a robotic playing style: “I’d rather hear mistakes and something musical, than perfect technique and note accuracy. ”

“Hmph,” intoned the knackered hack. “I’d give my right arm to be able to play the violin like a robot.”

Sir Antony Sher, speaking on the radio recently about acting, said that the director Terry Hands had once told him that his earliest performances with the RSC were almost too accomplished and well- prepared. This left them somehow unsatisfying. Perhaps it is a slightly ragged, imperfect edge which reflects our humanity and stimulates our interest?

I hope to be returning to the Bristol Violin Shop over the next couple of weeks, partly to get that case, partly because my curiosity has been whetted: I need to know that the story has ended more or less happily. I’ll bet that many other customers will do the same, so the manager need not get out the violins just yet.

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