Are you a violin teacher, player, or parent of a new player? Would you like to know something about how violins work, and figure out what's wrong with them when they don't? Then this book is for you. I will walk you through the vocabulary you need to be able to talk knowledgeably with a luthier, teach you about maintenance, and provide you with tips to keep your instrument functioning well. Violins are great, but best when they work. If your violin needs help, start diagnosing what to do here.

(String Letter Publishing). Here's the book that should have come with your violin! Written by a team of leading instrument makers, repairers and musicians, this is the one comprehensive guide to selecting, understanding, preserving and protecting any violin, from a modest fiddle to a priceless Stradivari. Richly illustrated with photographs and drawings, it covers topics including: selecting the proper instrument and bow, understanding common repairs, finding the right maker, guarding against theft, getting a good setup, protecting your violin, choosing a case, and more.

Drawing on the principles of Francesco Geminiani and four decades of experience as a baroque and classical violinist, Stanley Ritchie offers a valuable resource for anyone wishing to learn about 17th-18th-and early 19th-century violin technique and style. While much of the work focuses on the technical aspects of playing the pre-chinrest violin, these approaches are also applicable to the viola, and in many ways to the modern violin. Before the Chinrest includes illustrated sections on right- and left-hand technique, aspects of interpretation during the Baroque, Classical, and early-Romantic eras, and a section on developing proper intonation.

This handbook combines all the most important technical aspects of learning violin positions, from second to seventh, as well as connecting them through position shifting - all in one place: preparatory exercises, fingering exercises, scales (one and two-octave), exercises for all six types of shifts, finger charts.

Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto is the story of Sibelius as performer and composer, of violin performing traditions, of histories of musical transmission, and of virtuosity itself. It investigates the history and legacy of one of the most recorded concertos in the violin repertoire. Sibelius, a celebrated and influential composer of the late 19th and 20th centuries, was an accomplished violinist, whose enduring interest in the instrument has been paralleled by the broad success of the only concerto in his oeuvre: his violin concerto (premiered in 1904 and revised in 1905). Considering how violinists engage with the work, author Tina K. Ramnarine discusses technology's central role in the concerto's transmission from Jascha Heifetz's seminal 1935 recording to contemporary online performances, gender issues in violin solo careers, and nature-based musical aesthetics that lead to thinking about the ecology of virtuosity in an era of environmental crisis. Beginning with Sibelius's early training as a violinist and his aspirations as a performer, Ramnarine traces the dramatic historical context of the violin concerto. It was composed as Finland underwent a period of heightened self-determination, nationalism, and protest against Russian imperial policies, and it heralded intense political dynamics relating to Europe's East-West border that have extended to the present. This story of the violin concerto points to the notion of Sibelius - and the virtuoso more generally - as a political figure.

Carrying the torch of the Russian violin school that was handed down by towering performers like Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, Jay Zhong records his pedegogical findings on violin performance in A Violinist's Handbook, A Simpler Manual to Learn the Instrument. Mr. Zhong was a disciple of the celebrated violin master Elmar Oliveira and the noted Russian teacher Raphael Bronstein, an pupil of the great Leopold Auer. Mr. Zhong's talent was discovered and recognized by Nathan Milstein at age 14, and subsequently promoted by concert manager Harold Shaw. Mr. Zhong has performed as a solo violinist and chamber musician on four continents of the globe. He has held violin professorship at California State University, Los Angeles, Western Illinois University, and taught master-classes at Southern Methodist University, University of Delaware, University of Kansas at Lawrence, Beijing Central Conservatory of Music in China, among other music institutions.