Can an untrained ear detect major differences between violinists?

April 29, 2024 11:59 AM

I went to a concert of graduating students at a well-respected music school and sometimes I thought I heard notes that sounded a little off-key or just muddled in some way. I wasn't sure if it might have just been the acoustics of where I was sitting--I would have assumed that someone graduating from a school this would have the basics down. But wonder if I'm making an incorrect assumption here. Would you expect there to be a big difference in the sound produced by a concert violinist and a young graduate?
posted by Jon44 to Media & Arts (20 answers total)

Violin is a hard instrument. Like all string instruments, as you get higher up the neck, the notes are closer and closer together; but since the neck of a violin is so short, the distance between being in tune on a high note and out of tune can be a millimeter.

Playing in an orchestra gives everyone some leeway in terms of tuning. Everyone's at least slightly out of perfect tuning, but when playing together, you can't hear the individual notes (unless you're listening to a high school or lower orchestra — then the clunkers can really stand out). An orchestra would sound awful if every player were exactly in tune all the time. It would sound thin and small.

Part of the reason people become featured soloists is because they're good enough to be in tune virtually all the time. Not everyone can do that, which is why people who are second and third violins, violas, cellos, etc. generally aren't featured soloists. (That doesn't necessarily mean they're worse players — they're just not focused on being a soloist).

At a music school performance, there are probably a lot of graduates who are great players (but not necessarily Itzhak Perlman-level) who get featured (because it's a graduation and it would be hard to highlight the graduates if they were just playing in a section with others) who may never play a featured solo with an orchestra again, but will be excellent section players.

It also depends on what school you're talking about. Julliard graduates often go immediately from school to playing in a major orchestra, and they didn't all of a sudden get better between graduation and their audition.
posted by jonathanhughes at 12:15 PM on April 29 [14 favorites]

I say this as someone who is self-aware enough to know that I'm a lousy musician...some people seem to be born equipped with perfect pitch, perfect timing, or both. Others must work hard to develop it. And some, despite decades of practice, will never have good timing or good pitch or both. You can earn a degree in music and still be a marginal musician, yes. Here's the flip side: you can have perfect pitch and timing, and yet lack the capacity for any expressiveness or musicality. And that's also not good.

There's the famous anecdote where Madonna pointed to a single musician in a symphony orchestra recording sweetener for one of her songs and yelled, "You…get out!" Which sounds ridiculous, but I also once was listening to a small orchestra play, and I could tell *exactly* who the musician was who was off pitch.
posted by jabah at 12:49 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]

It's definitely possible for a layperson to recognize mistakes in a classical violin performance, and it's also definitely possible for a graduate of music school to make errors during a performance. It's even possible for professional soloists to make errors though it would be far less rare. Just like all humans, classical musicians are, believe it or not, fallible, though their whole job is to constantly strive for perfection.


Another possibility is that you were listening to a performance of 20th century atonal music or some other kind of music with an unconventional approach to tonality. In that case, to the untrained ear, there could be many moments that sound like errors if the listener is expecting conventional tonal music. But I'm guessing you would have noticed if the entire thing was atonal.
posted by winterportage at 12:54 PM on April 29 [6 favorites]

I'm certainly not a good musician at all, I gave up shortly after high school, but I have the ears. And anyone can have them, without training. That said and as the above answerers are saying: perfect pitch is not the all and everything of music.
I remember being at a concert with one of the great violinists (don't remember who), and he played wrong notes all the time. But you weren't at any moment in doubt that you were in the presence of a great master. It was his timing and also his feeling. It must have been at least 35 years ago and I can still be there in my mind.
posted by mumimor at 1:50 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]

To answer your question with a question: do you know enough to be sure your idea of what's basic in violin performance is accurate?

Which is to say, it's entirely possible you heard things that were mistakes but were much harder to play than you would think. That aside, as a general rule these kinds of performances in schools of music are meant to stretch the performer and be a real challenge. They're part of the education they're receiving. So yeah, even folks graduating from a prestigious school are gonna flub a few notes, because getting up on stage and feeling the pressure of being a soloist is part of the learning process. The skill it develops that takes practice like everything else, but it isn't something you can realistically practice as much as you can other elements of performance.
posted by Gygesringtone at 2:14 PM on April 29 [2 favorites]

The acoustics of where you're sitting won't affect the pitch you hear unless something very strange is happening or someone is moving and you're experiencing the doppler effect. If you heard an issue, it was probably real.

I'm a classically trained (to the could-have-gone-to-music-school level) violist, and as jonathanhuges said, string instruments are just very difficult. Recently, I was screening professional musicians for a small potatoes performance opportunity, and of the 6 or 7 professional violinists/cellists that I heard, 2 of them had bad enough intonation issues that I couldn't book them for the event I was hosting. It wouldn't surprise me to see a similar rate of intonation issues at a senior recital.

Sometimes college-aged musicians are performing music that is a bit beyond their personal capacity because it's the expectations of the program or because they just didn't get everything together by the deadline. Regarding their futures - even from a great music school many of the musicians are likely to go on to be music teachers, composers, luthiers, and other non-performance careers.
posted by A Blue Moon at 2:22 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for the clarifications, which help give me a good sense of how the violinist scene works.

BONUS QUESTION: So, if I went to see a top-tier soloist, might there also be the occasional clunky note and is the reason hearing them surprised me that they digitally clean up such notes on CDs (I thought I remember hearing something like that once)?
posted by Jon44 at 3:51 PM on April 29

So, if I went to see a top-tier soloist, might there also be the occasional clunky note and is the reason hearing them surprised me that they digitally clean up such notes on CDs (I thought I remember hearing something like that once)?

Especially if they're playing something difficult, even really good performers make mistakes. I've seen a world-class percussion ensemble perform where one performer must have lost his place such that he was still playing after everyone else stopped.

Or, like, here's a great pianist straight-up missing notes, followed by a really gorgeous performance of the same handful of measures by a different pianist.

So, do even really great string players sometimes occasionally play a sour note? Absolutely. But it's not just digitally cleaning up - sometimes musicians really do play flawlessly, or so nearly flawlessly as makes no difference. But in a live performance, anything can happen, and some pieces are so difficult that they're still difficult for even, like, the top five performers of the work, and there's some risk there, like a figure skater pulling off a really difficult jump or something.
posted by mskyle at 4:15 PM on April 29 [7 favorites]

I played the violin for 20 years (roughly ages 10-30) and also have perfect pitch. (Well, maybe *had* -- I definitely had it in high school, but 25 years later it might have softened to relative perfect pitch.)

Anyway, having perfect pitch does NOT mean that you will always produce perfectly in-tune sounds. Perfect pitch is about what you hear; producing in-tune notes on a string instrument comes down to the placement of your fingers on the string. Someone with perfect pitch will KNOW when they've hit a clunker of a note, but it doesn't prevent it from happening.

Even the best performers can be nervous on-stage, and having sweaty, shaky hands is a one-way ticket to some missed notes. (The concertmaster of the community symphony I played with religiously took beta blockers before each concert.) And like jonathanhughes pointed out, the very high notes on a violin (like past 5th position on the E string) are REAL GODDAMN CLOSE TOGETHER and the tiniest slip of the finger will cause an intonation issue. See also shifting your hand from one position to the other -- if your hand kind of slips or you move your hand too fast, it could cause an issue.

In my community symphony, we regularly had virtuoso high school and college students perform violin solos with us; these are the kids that will absolutely end up playing professionally. Obviously a bit younger than the grad students you saw, but these performers (who were WORLDS better than anyone in my orchestra) still typically hit a sour note or two. The violin is tough!
posted by leftover_scrabble_rack at 4:19 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]

Pro-trained here, just chiming in to Nth what jonathanhughes said.

Also to add that when I was a kid, I met Itzhak Perlman. Shaking his hand was like sticking my hand into a bag of marshmallows. Fat, plush fluffy marshmallows. I have no idea how he plays in the nosebleeds, so fast! So in tune! besides utter just plain fucking magic.
posted by Dashy at 5:47 PM on April 29

that they digitally clean up such notes on CDs (I thought I remember hearing something like that once)?

They've been cleaning up recordings since before there was such a thing as digital recordings or CD's. Even in the days of recording on analog magnetic tape and releasing music on vinyl records (because that was all there was), if a musician made a mistake you could re-record that section and then literally literally with a razor blade cut out the bad section of tape and physically insert the re-recorded good section.

Editing individual notes in this manner is seriously master-level work and probably not likely done much with classical music, but some of my first college course work back in '86 involved cutting and splicing stereo classical recordings to replace sections, with the goal being to do it in such a way that my instructors couldn't hear the edits.

So, yeah, there's about a 90% chance that any classical music recordings you've ever heard are not played and recorded straight through start to finish with no mistakes. Unless it was a live recording in front of an audience, and maybe not even then. (An audience cough is a great place to hide an edit.)
posted by soundguy99 at 6:27 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]

Although I will note (in fairness to the musicians), classical recordings are often edited more due to artistic and interpretive reasons than "mistakes" a layperson would hear. It's not that anyone played a bad note or had bad intonation, it's that the soloist thinks a certain section should be a little slower, or the conductor thinks the violas should be a little louder in this other section, things like that.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:07 PM on April 29 [2 favorites]

if I went to see a top-tier soloist, might there also be the occasional clunky note and is the reason hearing them surprised me that they digitally clean up such notes on CDs

There are basically two opposing approaches to dealing with "clunky" notes. One is to try to "clean them up"; the other is to lean into them. Personally, I hugely prefer the latter which is probably why my musical tastes remain stuck in the 1970s. When I listen to Janis I feel overwhelmed, often to tears. When I listen to Taylor, I just feel manipulated.

For me, the best part of listening to music is the feeling of sharing the performer's ongoing experience of the present instant, and to coerce a recording of a musical performance into alignment with a pitch and/or timing grid after the fact interferes with that. I'd rather hear the blue notes, thanks all the same. Those are where expression lives.

Being able to hear when an instrument is being played out of tune doesn't require perfect pitch, by the way. A good sense of relative pitch, or even just an appreciation of harmony, works too.
posted by flabdablet at 8:57 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]

Fairly certain I read about this busking experiment on Metafilter.
posted by kjs4 at 10:53 PM on April 29

On occasions such as you describe, there is a tendency to play difficult pieces to show off proficiency rather other pieces where the notes are easier but perhaps the emotional content is greater. Wrong notes are frequent when playing the hardest piece ever.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:28 AM on April 30 [2 favorites]

To answer one of the questions, a trained player with lots of experience listening to major artists can indeed tell them apart by subtle aspects of technique, tone, and intonation. As a once-cellist at a fairly high level, I could certainly tell you whether I'm hearing Janos Starker, Lynn Harrell, or Yo Yo Ma playing Bach. Within a few notes of dropping the needle.
posted by spitbull at 6:26 AM on April 30 [2 favorites]

As a member of a woodwind quartet who is a reluctant performer, I can say that there is considerable pressure on musicians to play when they should be calling in sick. The performance can be planned months in advance and substitute musicians impossible to find, let alone possible to find at short notice.I love playing, with or without a group, but I get no thrill from having an audience. A couple of the other members of my quartet live for being the center of attention and thus are eager to perform at any gig we can get regardless of minor factors like no remuneration, appalling acoustics, venue too noisy to be heard, indifferent or even mildly hostile audience, and terrible set up location so that the sun is in our eyes and we can't see our music... They aren't about to let a little thing like me having a migraine discourage them. It's pop a triptan and do your solo.

Maybe the graduating class you were listening to is the one that was supposed to get their most intensive first year training during Covid lock down? Or let's say, that in February Norovirus virus swept through the school. One third of their performers spent three weeks missing practices. They're not going to refuse to pass students who would have done better on their finals if they had gotten the practice in. Or let's say that the violin teacher went into crisis and ended up in a domestic violence shelter trying to teach over zoom on a smartphone. They can't give these students a second chance and make them repeat the year because they have a whole cohort of new students ready to take their places. They're not going to cancel the concert either. They're going to graduate a class full of musicians who are not playing up to standard.

The quality standard of graduates in most fields has been dropping, sometimes significantly. Chances are it's been hitting music schools too. (Note that this is not the fault of the students.)

Meanwhile, with every year since the invention of the phonograph our standards for the quality of the music we listen to has been going steadily up, since only the best, well edited recordings get significant distribution. Fewer and fewer people are learning music because the gulf between what they can do as a beginner and what they see as being the standard they have to reach has turned into a chasm. You're not comparing those violin student graduates with your old guy neighbour on the corner who plays the violin drunk every goddamn Friday night, nor with the fourteen different middle schoolers who file into the little studio above the cobbler shop for their lessons over the course of the week, or even your sister, banging out "Happy Birthday" on the family piano as many times a year as you have family members. It's not a surprise to encounter bad musicians (*waves) They may still outnumber the good ones by a hundred to one, instead of the historic thousand to one but it's no longer routine for every person from a family aspiring to be middle class to give their kids music lessons. But now you really have to look to find occasions to listen to musicians who are not professional. Thus you only have been listening to Maxim Vengarov and Anne-Sophie Mutter and Hilary Hahn, so your ear has been trained to expect exquisite music.

I think it's similar to hearing accents. If every announcer you ever listened to had that nice deep plummy BBC accent from the fifties, you'd notice when the odd burr or Midlands softness slipped in, let alone an American twang, or New York nasal. You might not be a linguist, but we are experts at spotting People Who Are Not One of Us by minute differences in accent. And if you have listened to enough music in one genre you'll be getting the same feel for a note off key as for a vowel shift. It'll be subliminal and irritating somehow. I'm hearing something wrong...Someone is up there who doesn't do this right.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:00 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]

Editing individual notes in this manner is seriously master-level work and probably not likely done much with classical music, but some of my first college course work back in '86 involved cutting and splicing stereo classical recordings to replace sections, with the goal being to do it in such a way that my instructors couldn't hear the edits.


Too add on to this: unlike a lot of recordings for other genres, recordings classical music is generally done in such a way that you wouldn't be able to clean up a note from just one instrument. For your average studio album, you've generally got isolated tracks for the different elements, with no sound crossing between them. You don't hear the drums in the guitar's track for instance, which makes it way easier to manipulate individual notes and such. In classical music, there's a much bigger emphasis on the sound of the ensemble as a whole in the space it's currently in. So any bit of splicing in involves having the entire ensemble recording from a good starting point musically, usually the beginning of a phrase or formal section, to a little past where the edit needs to be. That's to make sure that all sound that's was bouncing around the room in the original recording is bouncing around in the bit you're cutting in. Otherwise it won't sound right. The costs for this can add up if you're paying an orchestra full of top musicians for their time. So that kind of decision is not made lightly.

There's just a big difference in the philosophic approach to the recordings that then effects stuff on a very practical level later on.

If you're talking about cleaning up like using auto-tune to "correct" the note, I imagine doing that to a classical soloist is a great way for an engineer to get fired.
posted by Gygesringtone at 8:32 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]

if you have listened to enough music in one genre you'll be getting the same feel for a note off key as for a vowel shift

Notes that have been crushed into being strictly on key can also be jarring, because the pitch "correction" destroys microtonal variations that express feeling. Autotune, Melodyne and similar tools have become as readily available as reverb, and while using these things is reasonable when employed as a deliberate effect, they're now routinely applied in some kind of misguided attempt to "improve" already good vocals, which is ridiculous. Only a cloth-eared cretin would "correct" a guitar solo to get rid of all the bends, and yet routinely doing the same thing to every vocal that hits a mixing desk somehow gets a free pass.

Here's Adam Neely doing it to Robert Plant, Frank Sinatra and others for shits and giggles, and here's some nameless cloth-eared cretin doing it to Eric Clapton and his backing singers just because they can.
posted by flabdablet at 10:14 AM on April 30 [3 favorites]

Yes I would expect a concert violinist to sound better than a graduating senior, even if the music school is very good. Mostly what I would expect from the concert violinist is a more consistent performance throughout, whether or not I agreed with their stylistic choices.
posted by plonkee at 9:50 AM on May 1 [1 favorite]