Peter Purich Part 2
Below is the transcript of Part 2 of my interview with the fascinating luthier Peter Purich. The button link takes you to the podcast, video and Part 1.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. This is part two of my episode with Peter Purich, who is an inspiring and creative violin maker, known for his unique, personalized chin rest design. He's also a multi-instrumentalist who performs in many different styles, and a dedicated violin and viola pedagogue.
Because this conversation was extra long, it has been divided into two episodes. If you missed part one, it delved into his development as a luthier, and as a creative musician. He showed and described some of his innovations with chin rest design, and you got to hear him playing some improvisations, and also some fantastic parenting advice.
Part two will now continue with a lot of specifics about playing and teaching the violin, some of his innovative instrument designs, his unique shoulder support, and some great wisdom. I've added timestamps in the description. Like all these episodes, this is available both as a podcast and a video. The link is in the description, and the transcript will be published to the same link.
Peter Purich:
I have a few bugaboos. I-
Leah Roseman:
Tell me about those bugaboos. I'm really curious.
Peter Purich:
Okay. Well, let's see, a couple of them. The weight. Okay? I hear teachers all over the place talking about using the weight of the arm.
Leah Roseman:
Yep.
Peter Purich:
And well, that doesn't make any sense. When you start to think about it, what is weight? Well, when we talk about our own weight, you weigh yourself on a scale. It's the force of gravity, which is pulling you down. Okay? Weight is by definition a force.
And yeah, we do use certain words in physics, and certain words in science, such as theory let's say. A theory in science is not the same meaning as a theory in colloquial terminology. I got a theory, which is more like a hypothesis. But in science, a theory is a different thing from what we usually say.
When we say weight, people think of weight as something that's heavy-ish, maybe, but weight is actually a force by definition. I ask myself what weight am I using? And I use the weight how? Force of gravity down this ... I can't, because I actually have to hold everything up. I'm using force to hold stuff. Because if I let the violin's going to drop down, unless I hold it up. And the forces are balance because it's not moving anywhere. The force of gravity goes down, I do the equal opposite force, and it maintains equilibrium.
My arm is here. If I use any weight to go down, it's going to go down. But it's transferred to the bow how? What is this? What does this mean? If I go up to the space station, can I not play the violin because I don't have weight? It's weightless up there? And which direction is this force going? And so, none of these questions made sense in the terms of weight, yet teachers talk about weight all the time, "Use the weight, use the weight," and they get some results. Okay?
And so, this comes back to my form of pedagogy. I have two schools of approach, what I call the front door or the back door. The front door is I tell somebody, "This is your bow. This is this. This is the angle, 45 degrees," da, da, da, da, "Go." And if it doesn't work, if I keep trying, explaining technically exactly what's happening, and I'm not getting a result, I go to the back door, which is through imagery. I say, "Okay," I say, "Think of a light, puffy cloud, and you're on this cloud, and you're floating. And your bow's there, and your violin's not. Gentle wind comes up, and now you play." Let's say that sort of imagery.
It has nothing to do with violin playing, it's just imagery. And they play, and it sounds great. I said, "Great. Let's go. That's it, you've done it." They don't know what they did. It didn't matter, the image, whatever they did, the reason it works is because our brain is very complicated. Okay? And our brain, we have two sides, left and right side. Left side is more like the analytical, the factual part, and the right side is more involved with generalizations let's say. Again, that's a generalization of the brain function, because the brain works in both sides all the time. But you can approach the same problem, right or left side of the brain, and depending on how you get at it, you could get the result that you're looking for.
The problem is that if I give somebody a technical description of what's happening, and it's not actually accurate, if they rely on that, they will fail. If I give them an image, they may succeed. Because their interpretation of the image, again, might not be the same as my image. And I might be just throwing images at them.
Okay. Forget about the clouds. You're in a pool of water. Okay? You're weightless, da, da, da, da, da. Okay. Now that works. Now you get that. Images can work through the fuzzy part of the brain, and then we do all sorts of stuff. Because to play the violin is very complex. It's simple physically, but what we have to actually do to accomplish the sounds, the bowings, there's a lot of things going on which our left side of the brain cannot keep up with, but the right side can. You see? I like to work with both sides of the brain, and train them how to work together.
When I talk about weight, I was thinking, "Well, what is happening?" And then, I discovered that, well, through all my work with people, getting them to be relaxed, and stuff like that, and the way the bow has to go perpendicular, and what are we doing with our positioning? Because when somebody comes to me, I align them. I take their measurements top and bottom, and how wide, how long their arms are, and stuff like that, and we set the right angle so they can be efficient and play.
But then sometimes, even though I set them up with the right angles, and stuff like that, it's not going to work. I had one client who said, "You know what? Doesn't matter what chin rest I give you, doesn't matter what size of this net, you're going to play in this tense fashion, and you're going to be in pain. You got to come to me for lessons on how to play differently. Okay? We got to change the way you actually approach the whole thing."
A lot of that has to do with the usage of the muscles, and the impressions that we have of our muscles. And you got to at some point maybe isolate them. You have muscles to hold up your arm, so it doesn't drop down. You have to hold the bow, boom. Your arm is being ... This is muscles that hold up the arm, but they shouldn't interfere with the ones they use to actually do the bowing. You see? But how do you isolate them? And how do you maybe discover which ones you actually need?
I've got a few devices. I got a loop thing suspended on a bungee cord, which will help people understand that this is the muscles that only hold up your arm. We're going to shut them off by having something else hold up your arm. Okay? Now, and so these are the ones that go back and forth.
Now, what is the direction that you're going to have to bow? And you're going to have to bow perpendicular to the string. I'm sorry. You can do it otherwise, but if you want to produce what we call a nice sound on the violin, you have to produce a Helmholtz resonance, and that is moving some object perpendicular to the string. That's just the way it happens. Any other angle, you're going to be setting up an interference, and your sound quality's not going to be good. Doing these air quotes here. Okay?
Because using words like good and bad sounds on a violin, I don't use those words, it just it's desirable. What are you actually trying to produce? Because sometimes you want to produce a crunchy sound. That is a sound that you have to produce, but how do you do that? You don't call it a bad sound, you just say it's a crunchy sound. Good and bad are terms one should never use. That's why I use these air quotes. But just telling somebody to, "Please, make a nice sound," what does that mean? It doesn't help me at all.
One of my inventions here is what I call my bowing machine. Okay? Here, it's a violin shaped piece of wood type of thing, with a solid wooden bridge with an adjustable setting here, and a little hole to which I stick an arrow, which is my bow. When you look at it this way, okay? Basically, the idea is that you have to bow perpendicular to this violin form, but this stick here is that hole that it goes through has a little mechanism which I made inside that if you deviate by a couple of degrees, this is adjustable, by the way, so you can make it really fine tune, if you deviate from it, it locks. Okay?
The only way to bow, if you start to pull to one side, is clearly only perpendicular. And there was no friction if you go exactly straight. Okay? But once you start to deviate, it'll lock. This is a very clear method to show people that they're not bowing straight. Now, if you don't bow straight, you can still make a sound, but if you want to make a nice sound, clean, Helmholtz resonance is what I like to call it, then you have to go perpendicular.
You're doing that, so you have to teach your arm to bow from the side. And that's very complex, very complex, because at every millimeter, the angles in your bone structure have to change. Okay? And then, your fingers and everything like that has to change minutely, the anti-bow stroke. And they don't do it in a linear fashion either. For instance, at some point, your knuckles are moving far more than your upper arm, but at some point at the end, your upper arm's moving because you're approaching the frog. But then, when you're around the middle of the bow, your upper arm and elbow doesn't move at all.
You hope different parts of your arm are moving at different speeds all the time. Very complicated. And how do you do that? Well, you have to get your right side of your brain into this action. Because to do all these subtle actions that are needed, your analytical part of your brain cannot handle that. Okay?
I have a series of exercises that I get people. You got the bowing machine. Series of exercises to get your, you start off with your left side of your brain to learn where the positions are for your arm, and then the transition is taken over by the right side of the brain. It's switching back and forth from the different sides of the brain.
One of my hobbies is archery, and I remember years ago, there was a music camp in Israel that did a lot of archery, and they thought it helped their violin playing. I tried to find how it did that, and what their methodology was. And all the articles I read at the time, there was no explanations as what they thought was the positive attributes of archery.
But anyway, I discovered some myself, three things that I can apply for my archery work to my violin playing. One of them is the meditative aspect, like zen meditation. I tried to do meditation years ago, but I have trouble sitting still like that in a sense. But I found that meditation through action, especially something focused like archery, was very beneficial. That's one thing, to learn to clear out the noise in your brain, and be focused is exactly what I needed sometimes in my violin playing as well. In archery, you have to do it. Because if you're not in the zone, if your head's not clear, your arrow just goes somewhere else rather than where you'd want it to be.
The other thing I learned was the difference between left brain and right brain action. In archery, the idea is you have to set yourself up, pull the arrow back towards your head, and maintain a specific position. Okay? And then, you have to release. And the position that you're in will determine the angle the arrow takes off, left or right, high or low.
And so, that's very important that you be very consistent every time. And this is very much a combination of left and right brain, but you do a lot of analytical thinking. "Okay, I'm going to move my shoulder blades in," and stuff like that. Get my position right. And then comes the moment of truth, the release. The release is extremely important because if you don't do it cleanly, you can affect just half a millimeter off here can mean two feet off at the target end. But the thing is, it happens very quickly, very quickly. The way you release has to be unconscious.
They did brain studies on archers, and they realized that the activity on the left side, conscious side of the brain was very busy while they're setting up. But at the very moment of the release, it's like the left side of the brain shut down, and was not involved, and only the right side, intuitive, so-called intuitive side, boom, is what you needed. And if you had the other side, then you're going to get too much. It's like paralysis from analysis type of thing. It's not going to work. You have to realize at which point you want to let go.
That taught me a lot about wanting, how to practice intonation, accuracy. And the other thing was that it taught me that you can isolate different muscular things. Because when you're holding 40 pounds here, it's very tight. But you can't be tight all over, you have to be loose at some point. The combination of using and not using certain muscles, when you bow, my big mantra is less is more. The less muscles, the fewer muscles you use, the better off you're going to be. Just you have to know which ones to use.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And I just wanted to ask you about this whole arm weight thing, because I also teach this, right? I have a video about arm weight. Because I was taught that by Fuks, and it makes sense to me. But I do think of it as more imagery, Peter, so it's not like, of course we have to hold up our upper arm, but it prevents people from squeezing and pressing down. And what I talk about is degrees of weight in terms of how much you're sinking into the string in the most relaxed way, but it's not-
Peter Purich:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Peter Purich:
Okay. I'm just getting to that. Just getting to that. Exactly. What you said is exactly what I was taught, which made no sense to me. Okay? Because I could also say, well, if it is gravity, and okay, I can understand this, but as I move to the E string, gravity's going down, and the E string is sideways. But what happens, what I discovered was that when you isolate the muscles, okay?
And then, I started doing that, realizing that, okay, in order for it to do all these things that needed to be done, and the proper thing, okay, if we reduce the muscles to only the ones that we want, you suddenly realize that, yeah, the muscles around your fingers really don't have to do that much, except just hold the grip. Okay?
If the concentration of focus is on the fingers, you will not be able to do those small actions that you really need to do. Okay? And then, they won't change as they need to, and then you'll get basically a rigidity, let's say call it a static, and you won't get a clean bow stroke. If these muscles and tendons in your hand can be as loose as possible, and you can use the larger muscles, okay? Then you'll get a much fuller sound. Okay? And using my support system, it was much clearer that this is what's happening.
And oddly enough, now that you mention it, I was at National Youth Orchestra with Mauricio Fuks, and with Rodney Friend, and I discovered this elbow hanging thing. This was while I was still taking lessons with Fuks. And so, I had taken a towel wrapped around my elbow, and with a rope, and hung it up on the hook on the door, and I was testing my theory out, and I said, "Wow, it sounds so different. I don't know. Is this true?"
I went to see Fuks, and Rodney Friend was in there. I said, "Listen, guys, here, turn around. I'm going to play you two things. Okay?" I played something as best as I could, passage, and then I hooked up my elbow to the door there, and I played the exact same thing. And then say, "Okay. What do you think?" And they said, "Well, the second one was just way better sound." Both of them agreed right there.
So boom, I said, "I'm onto something." This is the weight. It's not weight. What it is is using the right muscles, and relaxing the ones that you shouldn't have tense. Okay? It's more about being loose, yes, but it's not about weight, it's all about looseness. It's all about not using the finger ones. And so, if you can teach that somehow, then the end result will be the same.
Now, if some people say, "Use the weight," and you get it sound, it's fine. But to me, it just never made sense because I was thinking logically, "It doesn't make sense. I can't use any weight. I have to take weight off." In fact, most of the time when you're playing the violin, you have to be removing weight. The bow itself is 65 grams, approximately. Anywhere lower in the frog, you have to be taking weight off, unless you're playing forte, and we're not doing that. It just you have to learn how to take weight off, okay? And that was the whole idea.
And then for me, it's using the right muscles, using them in the right direction. Okay? And that was the other bugaboo was out, in, out, in. Why? Why am I going out and in? And everybody's talking about that out and in, and big names talking out and in, and I couldn't find the source for this.
Did you know? Do you know the source for the out and the in?
Leah Roseman:
I believe that Galamian wrote about that in his book, but I might be wrong. But yeah.
Peter Purich:
Well, I thought so, too. And I kept hearing that Galamian was the one who did it, so I-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I have it right there.
Peter Purich:
... got his book.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Peter Purich:
Yeah. And I read the book carefully, and there is one mention, and I think it's an error of the out and the in, but all the other things specify a straight bow with no exception. There is actually one exception, but it's not an out and in. And I think people have misconstrued what he actually wrote, because maybe he taught differently in class, but in his book, which he took 10 years to write, he does not say that. He does not say that. I could get the book, and read you the quotes if you want, but we don't have time now I don't think.
Leah Roseman:
No, no, that's fine.
Peter Purich:
Unless you want to.
Leah Roseman:
No. It's just funny, a recent guest, I spoke with Tracy Silverman, he studied with Mr. Galamian, so I was asking him about lessons with him. And it sounds like he didn't say very much at all lessons. It's very-
Peter Purich:
Okay. Yeah, yeah. I saw some videos. They're kind of boring. Yes. Again, once again. Okay, five notes. I was like it must've been different. But the book is very, I got to say, I read the book many years ago, and again recently, and I was looking for specific things, and my pedagogy that I designed myself. I agree with a lot of things he wrote. Pretty much everything. I just might say something a little differently than he says.
And I got to say, the book is the fundamentals. He doesn't go into a lot of higher level details. Sometimes he would say something, and I'd say, "Yeah, it's right." And then, I think, yeah, and he probably knows about the rest of it, but he just didn't write it in. But he's quite clear on, on the bow. And as far as I'm concerned, he and I agree that there is no out and in.
What he talks about, and you can read your book. Okay? I'll just tell you where it is. Okay? There's two paragraphs. What he's talking about, and he says, and you look at the highlight, it's right there, extremely straight bow. You must have a straight bow. And he says the bow must be straight in all bowing conditions. And he writes in italics, he's really big on that straight bow, so I say, "Yes, yes." Because for me, that's number one, Helmholtz.
And then, he says, "In order for it to produce a straight bow, okay? When you're in the middle, you're good, but as you produce, as you go towards the point, okay? This is where the mistake in the book is, and the editors did not catch this, okay? And I think it's a mistake because in the following paragraph, he says something totally different.
In this first paragraph, he says, so drawing the straight bow I have all these annotations here and stuff. This actually, this copy of the book is just, not to get too verbose here, is doubly annotated. The first annotation, I picked this up in a second hand bookstore, and there's a dedication here. It's 1963. It says "Pour ma soeur, Marie-Thérèse Eugène, Calvin Sieb".
Yeah. Calvin Sieb gave this book to I think his teacher, who was a nun I suppose, or something like that. And he dedicated it to her. I found it in a second hand bookstore.
Okay. Getting back to, yeah, drawing the bow straight. Okay? Page 51. Okay. Straight bow, the straight bow stroke from frog to tip is the foundation of the entire bowing technique. That's what he says. I'm going to get my reading glasses here. Okay. That's like me. Rule number one, okay? Unless there's exceptions, but always maintain that. Okay? Three stages. Okay.
Now, page 52 here, okay? The square, remember, we talked about this, square to the point. To draw the bow successfully from the square to the point as the bow hand moves outward to the right. Okay? Now, that's not really a misquote, but when he says outward, I think he's meaning out to the side. Okay? It doesn't mean out from the body, because as the bow hand moves outward to the right, it must also push very gradually forward in approaching the tip of the stick in order to preserve the bow's parallel relationship with the bridge.
What he's saying is you have to do something to make sure that the bow stays parallel, perpendicular, to the strings to the bridge. But the mistake here, it says the bow hand, and then the outward to the right, it was also pushed very gradually forward. It's not the bow hand that pushes, okay? It's the upper arm, okay?
Then, this motion is performed by stretching the for arm, and pushing forward the upper arm. Pushing forward the upper arm. Okay? The reason underlined, the necessary forward motion rests in the circular character of the natural movements of the arm. He talks about circles, which I find unnecessarily confusing. Because they are circular motions, but it's too technical thing for what we really need to do. I prefer to talk in linear motions rather than circular. But anyway, that's where he and I maybe just disagree in the presentation. But if you understand what he's getting at, we're talking about the same thing.
As the point of the bow is approached, unless the upper arm, upper arm purposely pushes forward, the lower arm will naturally describe a backward moving arc as it opens up on the down bow. What he's saying is that as you're bowing, if you don't move your upper arm forward and your elbow forward, if you just keep moving the lower arm, you're going to be describing an arc, and your bow's going to go crooked, because the rule number one is the bow must go straight. Okay?
There is no out, there's just straight. But what you have to do to produce a straight is to move your elbow forward. Okay? The bow hand has to reach gradually forward, frontward as the arm straightens. For the sake of brevity, we have called this forward motion on the down bow the out motion. It's not the hand that goes out, it's the upper arm, it's the elbow that goes out. "In order to keep the bow thus from the square to the point, the bow moves out on the down bow.:
And then, he proceeds. The next paragraph says, "When you're returning the up bow from the point of the square, the movements are reversed." Then, he says, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah, the elbow gradually bends. You're up here. Okay? Let's get in the camera. You go here, and it says, "The elbow gradually bends, bringing the forearm from a straight line position back to its right angle relationship as the middle of the bow is approached. The upper arm begins to pull backwards as the up bow stroke starts."
From you're up here at to point. As you start to go up, the upper arm has to move back. This is simple mechanics. You just, if you can make a robotic arm, this is what it would do. Okay? And he says, "The upper arm begins to pull backwards. This backward motion we shall term the in motion. The hand and arm return to the square position." There's no out, in of the bow. The bow's straight. He never said that. He never said that.
Later on, he talks about an interesting situation, which is what would be called an exception, which he notifies, and that is that you should have a slight angle. Let's say if you're doing an up bow, to bring the bow closer to the bridge, the sounding point closer to the bridge. You just extremely small angular change bringing it in, but he says, "This is the same angle for up and down." You see? Which is a little bit interesting let's say. It's a slight deviation, but it's not on every bow stroke you're going to be going figure eights, or something like that.
There was another chap from England who's, I've seen some YouTubes, who talks about not so much an out and in, but it's more a semicircular stroke towards the bridge. And he has written a book on pedagogy that describes this, and I, of course, as you've surmised, I'm not in agreement with any deviations. Plus, it causes you to put your arm too far out. It's hard enough.
Anyway, as Galamian says, a lot of people will get to the tip, and they're not actually at the tip of the bow. These people should get a shorter bow, especially young, young kids, or get them a shorter bow, or something like that. To push out at the tip is like it's worse for your shoulder. You should never have to push your shoulder forward.
And then, he advocates this sort of movement, and I say, "Okay." I look on YouTube to see how he plays, and I find one video. There weren't very many. I find one video which shows a nice visual angle, and he is bang on straight. He does no thing. He doesn't play like he teaches. He plays really nicely, but it's straight. I don't see the purpose if the purpose is ...
And I understand sometimes if the tendency is to go back while you overcompensate, you go forward, and maybe you'll be in the middle. And I prefer to say, "Look, just go straight. And if your muscles are getting tight at the tip, don't go to the tip. Just stay where you are," and that sort of thing.
Now, I do have exceptions to when. If you are approaching the tip, and you get to the tip, and you're not there yet, and you still have to play, yeah, you can pull back, but then you have to straighten out your arm again. Once you're back on track, then you do a straight bow. But it's not an out and in. When you're at the frog, don't go out. Your sound's going to get too articulated. Unless you want it to be articulated. There again, if you want to produce that bad sound, then go out at the frog. Bad sound would be what? Well, to me, I'd rather say articulated sound. You get that crunch. You get that consonance. Every note that we make has an attack, which is the consonance. It has a sustained and a decay. Just the same thing as when you hit a piano note, there's attack, sustained, decay.
On a violin, we can do the same thing. It's the attack, which describes the quality of the sound to a very great degree. If you could make a recording, and slice off the attack, and just hear sustain on a violin, you might not even know that it's a violin. You might think it's a trumpet or a oboe. Because the attacks are so identifiable to the characteristic of an instrument that if you don't hear that, even when you're trying different instruments. When I play different instruments, the attack is what tells me what the instrument is like. The sustain, almost one violin sounds just like the other, but it's the attacks, just that change from silence to noise, and grab, and release, that is where the character lies in that little microsecond. Okay? That's what's very important.
Leah Roseman:
Your violin you play on most of the time. Is it one you've made?
Peter Purich:
Yeah. It's the only ones I can afford, yeah. That was my thing. Yeah, I always played my own. I played my dad's violins all the time, since I was 12, and because they were good. And then, I made mine, and I thought, "Well, I might as well play mine." And my very first one, I was subbing in the Montreal Symphony, and it was fine. And people played and said, "Yeah, it's good." Then, I made two, three, four, five. And so yeah, they're good. I like them. And-
Leah Roseman:
Can you show us?
Peter Purich:
Yeah, sure. But what I can show you, while I showed you, this what I had was playing over here. This is kind of interesting. Because okay, let me just back up bit, why I do what I do. I make custom made chin rest, but at the same time I'm thinking, "Well, not everybody is comfortable with their instruments."
I was sitting in the Metropolitan Orchestra for a few years with my viola, and I said, "This is heavy. It's hard to play. Must be a better way," because that's all I do. I just keep thinking of better ways to do stuff. And I said, so I was sitting there and thinking, "I should change that. I can change that. I can change that."
I had a whole new design for viola come out. I wanted it to be ergonomic, I wanted the response to be different, and stuff like that. I came up with a new design of viola.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Peter Purich:
Okay? Yeah. This was actually my second model. My first model was very good, and I sold it to the wife of David Zinman in Baltimore. And it had a few more modifications than this one, but this was the essential design. First thing you see is the slope shoulders, okay? The reason for that is so that you can get in the higher positions a lot better. It's not a brilliant invention. Otto Erdesz Toronto was making cutaways, and he wasn't the first one. Where you just cut away the corner of the instrument, so your hand can reach up. That was, a lot of people didn't like it, because it had a bit of an amputated look to it. I opted to go for a more symmetrical.
But at the same time, the amputated look was basically a regular incident with a cutaway. What I did was I took the neck, instead of just sticking it on the end of an instrument, I recessed it back into the neck block. They occupy the same space, so that was an innovation. What that does is it brings your arm a little bit closer. Okay? That is the problem, that the arm, okay, this is what this discomfort is for violist and small violinist is the arm. The more the arm is stretched out, it feels heavier because it is. Your arm's out there. But the main, the critical problem is the angle between the upper body and the torso. It's this angle here. Okay? If this angle gets too big, okay, it's going to pull your shoulder blade out like that. And that's what really hurts. The whole point is to bring this angle down, so when you're playing a violin, it's much lower. Okay? Type of thing. And so, the whole point was to bring things in.
That was one of the issues. I was doing some acoustic tests. I decided to make the sound holes going out to the side rather than I wanted to increase a different vibrating area here and there. This was my first thought, but it was very successful. It worked nicely.
And so, this would be, let's say a medium size viola. Then, I made a much larger viola. I decided to-
Leah Roseman:
Oh, wow.
Peter Purich:
This is a, yeah, this would be 18 inches to here, or something like that. But because of the slope shoulder design, it's still very easy to play. That sort of thing.
And then, I thought, you know what? The problem is for kids. I made what would be let's say a three quarter violin with the same design. The whole point of this is to make a smaller instrument, but which has the acoustical properties of a full size instrument. Okay? This is part of the innovation here is we make instruments which are smaller for smaller people.
If you take, I did a whole measurement thing. People who are five foot six, this ... I'm average, five foot eight, eight and three quarter, something like that. I'm average size, so slightly less than me is five foot six. I don't know how tall you are. You're 5'6", or something like that maybe.
Leah Roseman:
5'3". Yeah.
Peter Purich:
You're 5'3", You're below the five. And go up to six feet, which is a reasonably tall person, but they can be 6'1", 6'2". I had one client who was 6'7". I said, "Please, please, take up the viola." You'rewasted on the violin, he's like this.
If you take, and assume that these standards four, four size violin is okay for the 5'6" to six foot person, okay? Well, the six foot person has an advantage over the 5'6" person. Okay? What is that advantage? I did some measurements and proportional percentage. It's hard to be exact on this, because everybody's built differently. But the point is that if I took the same sort of feeling for a 5'6" person to a six foot person, and I said, "Okay. Now, I'm going to reduce the size of the violin, okay? To make it comfortable for you the same way let's say for a shorter person." Okay? You should actually be playing a quarter size violin. Okay?
You understand what I'm saying. The way it works from that little middle section is that anybody lower than 5'6" down to five feet. I had clients at five foot, and they're playing violins, and that's a six foot person playing a humongous viola. Okay? Not a regular viola, it's playing a humongous viola. Okay? You can imagine the difficulties.
Leah Roseman:
But people's hand sizes and arm lengths aren't necessarily correlated to their height.
Peter Purich:
If you take a person, and measure them from their height, and then measure them fingertip to fingertip, most people are square. Yep. If you're 5'3", measure your fingertip to fingertip, you're probably 5'3". I measure all my clients the first thing when they come in. And if they're square, they're average. Some people are slightly longer in their arm, and they say, "Okay. I'm not going to treat you as a 5'3" person because you're obviously 5'5"."
For my purposes, which is where I'm going to put the bow in this thing, but some people come in, and they're 5'6", and I measure them, and they're actually only 5'4". I say, "Okay, we got a problem. Your arms aren't as long as you are tall." Okay?
I have to work out a position because I want the bow to be perpendicular. Also, I want them to be efficient, okay? If they're going to be doing their détaché in the lower part of the bow all the time, that is no good. The bow is not built for that. The bow has a ideal place where you want to do détaché. It's middle and bit into the upper area.
If you have somebody who's very tall, okay? And they're playing stuff that's ... If you just take somebody with string crossings ... Okay? Somebody who's tall, they're playing over here. Okay? Somebody who's short, they're playing over here.
Okay? It's totally different. Because as the bow does this, okay? You have all this upper part of the bow, which is mass, which has to swing back and forth, back and forth. Okay? And every time it does that, every time you change strings, this part doesn't want to move. It's a law of inertia, right? And when you do move it, it's a force. Okay? And the force results in pressure, okay? And that's an extra consonant.
If you want to play with a bite, you play on here. If you want to play smooth, you play up here. Okay? If you have to change strings like this, very fast but cleanly, what do you do? Well, if you're a long arm person, you're going to be playing up here. Take somebody like James Ehnes. You watch him play his Bach, all the détaché stuff is up here. Nice and clean.
Because he doesn't have the rest of the bow to give him his consonance, right? But a short person can't afford that. What do you do with them? You give him a shorter bow, or you give them a position where maybe they'll be able to be perpendicular. Okay? If you're here, and if you got short arms, that's as far as you're going to get. But if we move the instrument here and on your shoulder, suddenly you're perpendicular here.
These are all the considerations to be taken when you set somebody up. Then, now somebody comes like this, and they're short, I'm going to say, "No, no. We're going to have to move you over on your shoulder." Okay? Can we do that? Is the rotation of your arm going to allow this? Are your fingers long enough to handle the g-string now that I've moved you over? Because like this, it's a lot easier to get to the g-string. But once I start to move you over, okay?
Finding the correct position is a matter of all these parameters and compromise. Okay if somebody comes to the fourth with a short fingers, I can't move them over that much. They're not going to be able to play. Or maybe we're going to tilt the instrument. That's going to make it a little easier. But do they play with the shoulder rest or not? These are all things to consider. There's no one size fits all. I have to look at the whole situation.
Leah Roseman:
Are you playing with a shoulder support? Because you said you had developed something.
Peter Purich:
Yeah. Over the years, I've played with a lot of different things. I eventually settled back on just a little makeup sponge. Okay? And the way I would put that on in the back there, and I would basically use it for so that the instrument didn't slide off my shoulder. But I found that if I have a really nicely fitting chin rest, and of course I had the opportunity to make any one for myself. And sometimes I make one for a client, and I'd say, "Wow, that's good. I should make one for myself," and I'd make one. And then, the next client would come by and say, "Hey, that's really good." I'd have to give them mine. Then, I'd have to go make another one.
And so, I've been trying a whole bunch of different ones for myself over the years, and eventually, so this is the model that works for me, which is very similar to one that I was just playing a few months ago, but I just happened to have this nice piece of wood from a tree that fell in my backyard, and I said, "Let me make something. I'm going to make it a little different." And I just modified it slightly, and it's very comfortable. But the other one was comfortable, too.
But so, if you have a proper fitting chin rest for the proper height and everything, then you can just sit on your collar bone, and the instrument doesn't slide off. You see? And I don't need to have anything here. I see master classes where professors who maybe play without anything underneath, they say, "Take that shoulder rest away, take those pads off," and I think, whoa. I can play like that, but don't tell a student like that to do it right away because if their chin rest is not good for it, that's pain. They're not going to be able to do it.
I think it's very irresponsible to say that without giving them the option. I'd say, "You can take that away, but I'll give you the chin rest that's going to let you do that." Okay? Because if it's not the right height, you're going to be doing this. You're going to raise your shoulder. Okay? Which is maybe excessively. I say excessively because movement of the shoulder is like movement of any muscles. It's what's going to keep you flexible, and going to keep the stress out. When a teacher says, "Keep your shoulder down," and I say, "No, no, no. Move it." Okay? Up or down, just as long as you move it. Doesn't have to even be a lot, but your muscles need movement to keep fresh. Okay? Stiffness comes when you can't move something.
This is one reason why I'm not in favor of the rigid shoulder rests. Whether it be a Kun or Wolf, it doesn't matter. They're all the function of a rigid rest is to establish a set distance between your shoulder and the instrument. Not everybody uses it like that, but most people will end up with that. But the problem is that, here, I have nothing. Do you see it? Just right here. And now, I'm just going to go into the seventh position. Okay?
My shoulder naturally wants to go up, just by doing that. It's natural motion when you go reach for something, because your arm is not just your hand up to your shoulder, it's the extra part up to your neck. Okay? Your shoulder is actually not a fixed point, it's moving. It's another joint in the whole system. When you do this, your shoulder moves up.
Now, if I have a rigid shoulder rest, something like this, and I move up into seventh position, okay? I've reached seventh position, but without the aid of the flexibility of my arm to want to do that, you see? I've stopped my shoulder going where it wants to go, and stress and pain results. Okay?
The other problem with the shoulder rest is that I'm up here, and my shoulder's up, and I come back down, my shoulder wants to go down. But if I have a shoulder rest, which is relying on my shoulder to be clamped, and I then move in the lower position, and I release my shoulder, now the shoulder rest could slip off my shoulder. I'm obliged to keep this tension, even when I'm going down, which should be a point of release. You see?
Having a rigid shoulder rest solves some problems, but creates a lot of other ones. And I've had people with thoracic outlet syndrome where the shoulder rest will be cutting off the circulation of the blood and the nerves, and they can't play anymore. We have to give them something different, retrain them, and get them back out there.
I can play without anything. Okay? Because I have a nice fitting chin rest. And I like the idea of the flexibility. You notice when I'm playing, I can move the scroll up and down. This is vital for two reasons, at least. Okay? One, okay, it keeps the whole thing moving. Okay? My muscles are always relaxed. I can play for hours like this. Okay? The other thing is part of my pedagogy is that when you produce a sound, and this has to do with the weight idea again. Okay? Is that if you're going to apply weight, I have a demonstration that I do with people like this. I'll describe the demonstration.
You're standing in front of somebody, and you press on their forehead as though to push them back. Okay? And they're going to resist, because they don't want to fall over, right? Okay. And I say, okay, let's say I pressed you with about five pounds pressure, assume. Okay? Now, I'm just going to put my finger on your forehead, okay? And now, you're going to push back on my finger with the same amount of force that I just pushed on your forehead, and they do that. Okay?
But so, we had the same five pounds of force let's say. I push them, and they push back on my finger. Okay? But it wasn't the same production. I pushed them with five pounds force, and usually what happens, they resist. They regain their balance. And they regain it by tightening their stomach muscles. Okay? Because that's a natural thing to do. When I asked them to press five pounds on my finger, they always push their head forward. Okay?
This is my example, getting back to the weight business. Okay? The head is the small muscle. The core, the stomach is the large muscle. Okay? How as an exercise am I going to teach people? One's active, one's reactive. When I press them, they reacted using their stomach muscles. Okay? That's a large muscle. That's a reactive muscle. But it was still five pounds of force that they applied.
When I asked them to push, they use the small muscles of their head and neck, five pounds, right? When I'm bowing, I put five pounds pressure. Where did that come from? If I have the violin rigid here, like this, you take my hand away, whatever, and I put them right hand, and I press five pounds. I've got that. Okay? But it's five pounds. Again, we just realized in the previous experiment we have two different directions that I can come from. Okay?
What if I take the bow, put it on there, and then I push up with five pounds, and just react here? Immediately, the sound is different. I don't know if you could pick that up on the microphone. Okay? What happened was the same volume of sound more or less. Same five pounds. Okay? But this time, I lifted up with my left hand, and I reacted, but not with my fingers. I did the same thing with the core of my muscles, my stomach. I reacted with the larger muscles in my body, right down to my stomach. I feel the bow stroke, the force in my stomach, and my fingers are loose as anything. You see? This is the sound. If my left hand is able to move, and produce the sound, I have a much better chance of using the weight as a reactive force when my left side is free to apply the active force.
Leah Roseman:
Interesting.
Peter Purich:
If I can't do this, then I'm in trouble. Okay? Most people, when you see them, a violinist, and when I watch quartets, or chamber music, or orchestra, and you see them move, it's always from the waist. Why? Because they're locked in. Their head is locked into the instrument, because they're pushing it into the shoulder rest, into their shoulder. Okay? And if they're going to move and give a cue, it's always from the waist. Okay? If you watch me or anybody who does my technique, this is the cue. The head stays straight, and you go boom. You just have to cue the scroll. The rest of the body is like you're sitting and meditating type of thing. Okay? That's the way to do it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You're just going to show us the support you developed.
Peter Purich:
Like I said, the chin rest is only to make sure the instrument doesn't fly off the body. And so, what I did was, so here's the strap. It's about the one inch nylon type of thing with a loop. Okay? With a barrel lock on the other side so you can adjust it. This just goes on like that.
Now, I've got this little thing, triangular piece of leather with a bit of Velcro with a specifically designed hook. Okay? Which you can put in different areas. Goes on the back of the instrument. Simply like this.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. I see that.
Peter Purich:
Okay?
There we go. And then, this string here will be hooked under there. You adjust the distance here.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, okay.
Peter Purich:
Okay. Now, you've got this hook. It's really secure.
Leah Roseman:
Yep.
Peter Purich:
I don't even need a chin rest. Okay? For a baroque instrument, this is great. I can do whatever I want here, and just comes off, and I'm wearing a shirt here. But it's very easy to just put on and off. You see? And it really liberates your left hand. There's no stress at all in your neck, because you're not pressing down anymore, and yeah. My son, Leo's been playing with for years now, and it's his best thing.
Leah Roseman:
That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing that with us. That's really cool.
Peter Purich:
Yeah. That's my latest invention on the shoulder thing. I call it the Senza Rest.
Leah Roseman:
Do you sell it through ...
Peter Purich:
Yeah. Well, not through anything. I sell individually, so to people who want it. Like I say, I had other versions earlier which were not as convenient for some elderly students, like in my 96 year old student. He was hunched over, and so he had no collar bone really. And his shoulder was out of position, so it was very problematic, but this really helped to secure the instrument.
But the methods I had, and a loop isn't new. I read in the book Heron Allen's book 1887 or whatever, that some Italian who'd come up with some sort of loop system. It's nothing new. And baroque players, they play with some scarfs wrapped around. But most systems with these loops are a good idea, but it's the attachment is the problem. And I've seem to have solved the attachment problem with this little hooky thing. And it's adjustable, so you can move it around. If you want your instrument here or there, this thing just, this little hook comes off. And then, you can just put it where you need it to be.
Also, because of the Velcro, I've taken my little pad, and put a little Velcro there. I could just put that on there. Because if I need to turn a page, I got to temporarily hold it with my shoulder, and I don't want it slipping down. That works fine. I'm totally free to do what I need to do.
Leah Roseman:
You still don't have a website though, right? Just ...
Peter Purich:
You're right. I don't have a website.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Peter Purich:
I'd be inundated if I did. Finally got a YouTube channel where I put up that one video, and I have another short video about the Senza Rest, which I call it a hook and loop. I didn't put it up because hook and loop's not a good name. It sort of describes it, but hook and loop is also the name for Velcro. In The States, I'm going to call it the Liberty Loop, but yeah. Yeah. I'm just so busy, I just haven't got ... Yeah. Maybe once I write my book, and stuff like that, or get more time, finish my house renovations or something.
Leah Roseman:
And that YouTube video is beautiful. It's beautifully done. Shows the, yeah, I really enjoyed that.
Peter Purich:
Yeah. Well, it was my son, Leo, who made that video, and so that was a project for, he had to do an interview thing with, and shoot some video, so we said, "Okay. Why don't we do two things at once here?" And then, we played the music as well.
Leah Roseman:
Yep. Okay.
Peter Purich:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks for showing that to us.
Peter Purich:
Yeah, yeah. I'm glad. All right.
When I turned 50 type of thing, midlife crisis for me was, you know what? I'm just going to change bowings in Bach. I'm not going to perform them anywhere. Nobody's going to come, and come after me. I haven't got money to buy a fancy red Porsche, but a liberation type thing is to just let go of all the rules that have been holding you back. And said, "Why not? Why can I not change the bowings? Why can't I not play this reel up bow instead of down bow? I'm going to throw in a couple of slurs."
The printed page is great for a record, but it's a launching pad. Once you're up in the air, it's up to you to make it what it is. That's really what it's about. I encourage everybody to just go out and have fun, and that's the type of thing.
There's just so many restrictions in our life, from time when we were born, from our parents telling us, "No, don't do that," or, "Let's go. We haven't got time for that." And sure, you end up maybe in an orchestra at some point, and it's not really as fulfilling as you thought it would be, but the orchestra is a strange animal, especially for string players. We're not soloists anymore. You have to subjugate your individual personality.
But at the same time, you have to have the competence of a soloist in order to understand what it is that you have to do. But you can't just go off on your own, you have to be with the ensemble. If you're a first clarinet player, or something like that, and you have a solo, you can take a little time here and there, maybe as it fits, and express yourself nicely. But if you're a section string player, you can't do that. You have to play with everybody else. Even if you're better, quotation marks, or more musical. And that could be a frustration as a string player.
Leah Roseman:
I'm guessing for you, that was, when you play in orchestras?
Peter Purich:
I think my ego was large enough to be bothered by it, but at the same time, I always felt that I recognized the greater good, and at the same time, I recognize that I got to express my technical ability to be able to play as an ensemble player. The important thing is how good are you really at being with everybody? How good are you at listening? Okay?
Because that's another thing. It's not important to play your part as brilliantly as possible. The important thing is to play with everybody as best as possible. And that in itself is a virtuoso skill. You have to basically say, "I'm a virtuoso player. I can play as best as the best of them, but I'm now playing with other people, so I got to up my game now. I have to play with them, and encourage them, maybe affect them in chamber music, and stuff like that."
But in orchestra, it is more difficult. And yeah, sometimes if you think the performance is boring for you, it might not be for the audience. You can't say. They might've loved it. How many times I finished a performance, and the audience member comes up and says, "Oh, that was so beautiful." And I'm not going to say, "Lady, you had no idea what you're talking about." I say, "Thank you very much. I'm glad you enjoyed it." Because truly, I'm glad that she enjoyed it. I maybe didn't have such a great time with this lousy conductor, or something like that. And we just mailed it in, and it was not that satisfying.
And I'm going to go home, and have a glass of wine, and complain about it or something. I know that this is not the way Beethoven should be played, or something like that. But yeah, you have to at some point, either you quit the orchestra job, or you have some other things on the side. Start doing recitals, do some folk music, do something that satisfies you in a creative fashion just to get that pressure off.
Some people are satisfied being what I call musical artisans. They're technical, they know exactly what to do, but they're really not that interested in exploring the creative boundaries, doing something weird. And they're really happy sitting in orchestra, and just doing their part.
Leah Roseman:
You had talked before about archery, and getting in the zone, and meditation in motion. I'm curious, when you're doing, you're making your chin rests, and violins, and so on, and you're in flow, is that similar to the type of flow you get into when you're improvising, or playing in an improvisatory style?
Peter Purich:
No. When I'm making, there's a certain amount of, I have to, so when I have the client in front of me, and as soon as they come in, I start getting shapes of chin rests in my mind. And I do a lot of creative work in my mind. I like to do a lot of mental work, imagery. For instance, if I'm building a new shed out in the backyard, I don't start with paper, I start in my mind. I draw it out in my mind, and I try to do as many measurements in my mind. It just, it's kind of stupid I guess, but I just like to be able to flip things in three dimensions around. And I say this walking around, I measure it, "I need six inches overhang." I try to keep all the images in my mind.
When the client comes, I start getting images of how they're playing. And then, I imagine in my mind how their chin rest is affecting. Because I can tell from the sound where the pressure points are. And then, I say, "Take this one." And whenever I hand them a chin rest, I already know the shape of it, and I have an idea of what it's going to do to them. And I give it to them, and they play, and it comes out exactly as the sound that I thought it was going to be. I say, "Okay. Take this one off."
And I just keep feeding them. They don't know what I'm doing really. I keep giving them a different chin rest, and I get different sounds, until finally I'm narrowing it down, and I say, "Okay. I see what I see what you need." And sometimes I might make them three chin rests, because I have to fine tune it. I might give them three different shapes. That part is the creative part. Once I have the images in my mind, I get into my shop, and I start carving, and I listen to podcasts while I'm doing that. It's fun. But when I'm improvising, it's a different type of thing.
One of my difficulties is following the form, harmonic form of a tune. I can get lost easily, because suddenly I consider myself always a melodist. If I'm going ... I can go on and on for hours like that, but the thing is I might play 12 bars, 13 bars or 10 bars. I get lost harmonically where I am, and because I'm just following the melodic line in my brain. And it can go on forever.
And I can just go from one thing to another, but I have difficulty reigning myself in. So yeah, when I play, sometimes I put backing tracks on just to get myself locked in so I don't go off the rails, but a lot of time ... When I was young, I used to play etudes and I used to make up my own etudes in an improvisation. I would say, "Okay, I'm going to practice staccato, up-bow staccato today." I'll practice this. Then after a while, it's ...
I just keep going with this. I remember I was interested in staccato, and I asked Arthur Garami, my teacher, about staccato, and he gave me a short explanation. He said, "Here, take this etude, and this piece." And the etude was a short etude, and the piece had three bars of staccato in it, but he didn't tell me anything about pressure, nothing like that. He just said, "Take these and practice." And it was very limiting.
I had to go home, and I'd start doing etudes. And I did them all up bow staccato, down bow staccato. I just overlaid staccato on every single piece I could find, and then I would just make stuff up. And the same thing with double stops. You start with a third, a fourth, and back to a third, and then you octave, and you just keep playing. Then, a piece comes out, and just it's fun like that. Yeah.
And then, yeah, that's a zone. And if you can get into that zone, your practicing is a lot better because then you're really focusing on what you want focus. Because if I'm playing an actual piece, and I'm worried about getting ... in time, that's one thing. But if I'm just playing my staccato, and I realize that, oh, as I'm getting closer to the tip, it's a different technique than in the middle. And I'm definitely different when I'm at the lower half of the bow.
But if the piece I'm practicing is ... And if that's all I'm going to do, and I keep doing it, it's going to take me a while to improve. Better that I just go ... Stay in the middle. And then after ... do something at the frog. But what am I going to do? I'm going to make it up. My practicing became very improvisatory that way. I just, I'd make an etude for whatever I wanted to work on. Focus it, stay there, learn it, and then move on. Don't waste time.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. Well, this has been an amazing conversation today. We'll have to have you back, and talk about other things. There's so much to talk about.
Peter Purich:
Yeah, sure. Please. I'll tell you how to ride a bicycle. Yeah. That's one of my favorite ones.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Peter Purich:
Oh, how to teach your kids to ride a bicycle. That's also a good one. Because you probably know how to ride a bicycle. But if you're teaching your kids how to ride a bicycle, that's ...
Leah Roseman:
Can you tell us in two minutes or less how to teach your kids to ride a bicycle?
Peter Purich:
It's one of my examples that I give. When you're telling somebody a technique, which is imagery or not. For instance, so if you're going to tell somebody, teaching somebody how to walk a tightrope, you say, "Well, get on the rope, and stay on the rope, and go." You told them nothing. They're obviously going to stay. The whole point is to stay on the rope if you're tight rope, but you've told them nothing. But a lot of violin teaching is like that. "Put the bow on there, and make a nice sound. Go." You've told them nothing.
I use the imagery of the story of how to teach a kid to ride a bicycle. A bicycle, you're on the bicycle. It has a certain gyroscopic effect to how you stay up. And the bicycle can stay up by itself almost with nobody on it, running down a hill, a bicycle will stay upright, but so you get the kid on the bicycle, and you're holding them behind, and you're pushing and say, "Okay." You get to the corner, you turn right. They turn to the right, and they fall over.
The thing about maintaining staying on a bicycle is a question of balance. Okay? And the steering on a bicycle is designed in such a way that you steer in the direction that you're falling. Okay? Your steering in a sense is always avoiding a fall. You're always falling on a bicycle, but you have to steer in the direction of the fall to stay up. You see? If you're teaching a kid how to ride a bicycle, you'd first teach them stationary, and you lean them to the side, and you have them let's say to the left, and you have them turn steering to the left so they straighten up. Then, you lean them to the right, and you teach them this thing, how to stay up. Okay?
Why? Because when you're going, okay, let's say you're going straight on the bike, and you want to turn to the right, what do you do? Well, you turn the steering to the right, right? No. You're going to fall. Okay? Because if you're going right, and you turn to the right, you will fall to the left. Because your momentum is going straight, and your wheel is now going to the right, and you're going to fall. Okay?
What people don't realize, the subtle thing goes on when you're riding the bike is you're going, and you want to turn to the right, so you pedal straight, and then you have to, because you're going to turn, and before, we said that turning is balance for falling, right? You are going to lean to the right, okay? And then you're going to turn, and you're going to go to the right. But how do you lean to the right? Well, in order to fall to the right, you have to turn to the left.
You're going straight. You want to turn right, first thing you do is you turn a little bit to the left, you start falling to the right, then you turn to the right so make sure you don't fall. And that is your turn. This is what happens when you ride a bike. The initial left turn is so subtle that we're not conscious of it. Kids will pick it up. They'll eventually learn. This is wiggling around in the bike, and okay, and they're balanced, and they figured out. We all figured out the same way that you can pick up a violin without lessons, you can figure it out. But if you want to go to a next level, you going to need more lessons. You're going to need to know the facts.
It's like I spent a lot of time looking at how people walk, because I was helping my mother, and some other people teaching them how to walk when they were after hip surgery. Walking, you can say, "Okay, you stand," and you take a step forward, and that's one visual about it. Or you can say taking steps and walking is preventing you from falling down. In whichever direction you're falling, you put your foot there. When you watch a little kid who's learning how to walk, they're unstable. They're going left and right, backwards and forwards. Okay? They're figuring it out on their own. But if you're teaching somebody who's older, and doesn't understand it, you have to say, "You're going to fall forward, you put your foot there. You're going to fall to the right, you put your foot there."
Wherever you're falling, you put your foot. How do you start? You stand up straight. You lift your toes. As soon as you lift your toes, you're going to start falling forward. Then, you put your foot out to stop yourself from falling. And wherever you're falling after that, you put your foot there, and you're walking. Walking's basically us stopping ourselves from falling. Which is a different approach, you see? But that's actually what's happening when you think about it. You can't walk unless you fall. And the walking is stopping you from hitting the ground.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I feel there's a philosophical book there somewhere you could write.
Peter Purich:
I'm supposed to be writing a book on the chin rests and the violin performance, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It's way too ... I should get around to it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, you should.
Peter Purich:
Too long. Too many things.
Leah Roseman:
You have too many interests.
Peter Purich:
And there's only 24 hours in a day, and eight of those you got to be sleeping. And once you have kids, you don't have that time anyways.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, thanks for your time with us today. It was really great.
Peter Purich:
A pleasure. And any time if I can come back, and maybe we can narrow down the topic to something else. Impossible I think, but-
Leah Roseman:
We can do that. It's not like the way I usually do things, but yeah, for sure.
Peter Purich:
Unless you want, we can just rattle on for maybe two hours next time as well.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks.
Peter Purich:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
My life is so enriched by getting to know these incredibly inspiring creative guests, and their perspectives on their lives in music. Please follow this podcast, and sign up for my podcast newsletter to get sneak peeks for upcoming guests, and find out about newly published transcripts.
