Things You Don't Know You Know

I had a wonderful week of lessons from Pierre Amoyal; mostly small points and musical ideas, but also some helpful theoretizing on the relationship between vibrato type and tonal colour changes.

But what he was interested in was my pizzicato! "What is Zat? It is Fantastique! Wat are you doing?" Turns out, I had unthinkingly altered the pizzicatos (in Prokofiev's 1st Sonata - vicious, nasty things!) to something between a normal pizzicato and a Bartok pizz, and slid the finger up onto where the bow normally plays, so the resin on the finger would create a 'sticky' beginning to the note. "You have changed my thinking of 40 years about pizzicato! You should open a pizzicato academy!"

I think it's fascinating that I hadn't been aware of what I was doing, and also that someone who has been pizzicatoing (if indeed that is a word) for the best part of half a century hadn't tried it before. It is proof that we never truly know the possibilities of our own selves. Because while we can learn by imitating and following instructions, we cannot do this with something we have not yet conceptualised. To close off the mind to the idea of believing in the possibility of something we cannot imagine is to completely destroy this same possibility. What kind of attitude does an astronaut have towards space?

This is why you need to trust a violin professor, but more importantly it's why you need to trust yourself. And that's a tricky thing to do.

That oft-repeated poetry of Donald Rumsfeld bears repeating:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.