TAKING LIBERTIES
In contrast to Western-Classical violin standards, the European-American and African-American fiddle and violin styles share a wide variety of ways that players set up and hold the instrument. They may fatten the curve of the bridge to facilitate double stops, or cut the bridge lower than the classical norm for an easier action. Some fiddle players hold the bow stick several inches up from the frog or rest the palm of the left hand against the neck. Still others use what a Classical player would consider a fairly standard setup and hold.

When I perform for social occasions like weddings, I play several tunes that are hard to fit tight into either the violin or the fiddle category. (That must be why people ask me what instrument I’m playing.)

For example, during the prelude to a wedding ceremony while guests are gathering, I play some old Irish airs and other tranquil numbers to calm everyone’s nerves. Then, just before the bride’s processional, I often play my own arrangement of Henry Purcell’s Trumpet Tune in the key of D. Setting it this way gives easy access to plenty of double-stops using open strings for a big, bold sound, heightening the anticipation among the assembled guests.

At that point, taking liberties with a classical composition, am I playing violin or fiddle?

I’m not sure myself.

Another hard-to-categorize tune is the waltz “Sobre las Olas” (see transcript by clicking on PDF at bottom of page), a simple melody that seems to have led a life of its own—traveling through Classical, popular, and folk idioms—since it was first published in 1884 by Juventino Rosas. He was a Mexican violinista born into a poor Otomi Indian family of musicians.

After moving to Mexico City, Rosas achieved great success in his short life (he died at 26) as a composer of salon music for the aristocracy. His works included this piece in the style of the Viennese waltzes that were all the rage at the time. Later, as “Over the Waves,” it became a dance hit in the United States and a staple of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra, with its polished, classically-trained violinists.

I first heard the tune in the mid-1950s, played by a studio orchestra, as the soundtrack to Popeye the Sailor cartoons on my family’s primordial black-and-white TV. Then, in 1969, Nashville great Kenny Baker included his fiddle version with a bluegrass band on the classic album Portrait of a Bluegrass Fiddler.

All the while, in small towns on both sides of the Mexican border far from TV cameras and recording studios, “Sobre las Olas” was a standard tune at social dances and weddings. Abenicio Montoya of Santa Fe, New Mexico, plays it in that style on the collected recordings of La Musica de los Viejitos: Hispano Folk Music of the Rio Grande del Norte. This beautiful book and three-CD set, written and produced by Jack Loeffler, focuses on traditional Hispanic musicians (including several violinistas) of New Mexico and southern Colorado.

Following that path would lead naturally to Arizona and the old fiddle style of the Tohono O’odham (the indigenous Desert People that straddle the border of the United States and Mexico).

But that would be a different article!

Some of the most interesting music has always come out of projects that cross conventional boundaries of the day, and these days players with prodigious technical skill are busy collaborating across the violin/fiddle boundary.

I’m sure the Classical violin repertoire will live forever, as will the vast body of tunes that are clearly for fiddle.

But like an estuary where salt and fresh water mix, nourishing an abundance of life, there will also always be a rich musical territory where violin and fiddle music blend, and people puzzle over what they should call that instrument.