When I was about 16 I was part of a chamber group in my home Suzuki program. As the senior-most violinist I was looking for additional challenge, so my teacher handed me his 17″ viola and suggested I give it a whirl. It was ridiculously huge for me but I used it at rehearsals for a few months (did I have a crappy little viola to practice on? I can’t recall but I must have) and that experience planted a seed. I loved the sound, the range, the timbre, and the quirky alto clef was a good fit for quirky me.
But I was a violinist, and I only had a violin, so I stuck with that. I played a couple of semi-professional orchestra seasons, first with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and then (during my medical internship, when I could fit the services around my call schedule) with the Newfoundland Symphony. When I moved to the middle of nowhere I continued playing violin and started doing some teaching. Then my mom moved to the area, and we found a cellist friend and began playing chamber music locally. My mom had a cheap viola that she lent me, and gradually viola became my preferred instrument.
When Noah switched to viola, I bought a better-quality 16″ viola for me to use, figuring he could grow into it. He did, and then he grew in new directions (he now plays an electric 5-string), so it came back to me. And the vast majority of my freelancing has been on viola for the past 6 or 7 years.
But it wasn’t a great viola for me. It was still too big, the tone quality was only in the “decent student instrument” category, it wasn’t very responsive and it had some quirks that made it hard to play, especially for someone fairly small. I was feeling kind of demoralized by my inability to play up to the standard I had set for myself for my orchestra gigs. I was thinking of resigning because it was hard to feel like I sometimes dragged the section down.
I had an epiphany one day rehearsing with my mostly-amateur local group, realizing that I had the lowest quality instrument of anyone in the room. I had just received some money from my mom’s estate and I knew that she would have unreservedly supported me spending it on a decent professional instrument.
So I started asking around about small high-quality ergonomic violas that might be available for sale. “Around” meaning scouring western Canada over a period of months for anything that might conceivably be coming up for sale.
And then it landed in my lap. There was an email chain with friend, a former student of hers in another city a few hours from me, a John Newton viola languishing at her mother’s place in yet another city, some intervening forest fires and delays, a long drive, a two-week trial and … I bought it!
I have to say it has changed my life. For the first time I actually enjoy practicing and love the sound I make. I can hear myself improving.