Peter Purich Part One

Below is the transcript to my 2022 interview with the luthier Peter Purich. The link takes you to the podcast and video versions as well as Part Two!

Leah Roseman:

Peter Purich 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. Part one delves into his development as a luthier and a creative musician. He shows and describes some of his innovations with chin rest design. The episode ends with him playing some improvisations and also some fantastic parenting advice. Part two will 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.

Hi, Peter Purich. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Peter Purich:

Well, thanks for inviting me.

Leah Roseman:

I met you, I think it was about 22 years ago when you made a chin rest for me.

Peter Purich:

Sounds about right, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

And I'm so happy with it. It's just been wonderful.

Peter Purich:

Great, satisfied customer. That's what I like to hear.

Leah Roseman:

You're such an interesting musician. You do so many projects, but you are very well known as a chin rest specialist. I think we'll be talking about that quite a bit today. I'm curious to know, it seems like music runs so strongly in your family and you actually learned the art of violin making from your dad. Is that right?

Peter Purich:

That's correct. Yeah, he was, I could say, an amateur maker, although he made a fair number of instruments, but he was... Most of his career he was a physics teacher. But he was a very amateur violinist as well. So he was like, let's say, my first teacher, but he wasn't exceptionally good. I mean, he started learning when he was a teenager and maybe a little bit late for what we think. And it was in the former Yugoslavia and he had to get money for the lessons and the war started and then everything just went to hell in a hand basket, as they say. So the war really messed things up. And after the war, the communists moved in. And so his violin career never really took off the ground.

But he ended up going to university in other fields and languages and sciences and stuff. And when they came to Canada, he was working with Marconi, the electronics firm. And eventually he became a mathematics and physics teacher at a high school and head of the department of science until he retired. But when he was doing that, he was also was interested in music and the violin and in the sixties, there was a Scientific American magazine that came out. On the cover was a violin showing interesting patterns of grains on it. Then it was an article about Carlene Hutchins, who was at that point, one of the premier researchers on acoustics of violins. And it was an article about her and the acoustics of string instruments and the work that she was doing. So he was obviously fascinated because it brought together all these fields that he was interested in.

And he said, "Well, yeah, I'm going to make a violin," and knowing nothing about it. And so he got a book, of course. Getting a book was a big thing in our house. It was always like, "You have a question, go get a book." So that was it. "Go look it up." That was the response. So he started making, and then... In those days there was no internet, so it was hard to get information, but he started making and I was just hanging around, the apprentice. So I'd be helping him hold stuff and gluing and everything. And I watched him for many, many years and eventually I've done so many times, I knew how to do it already without having had it done.

And so I actually started making bows before I made violins. I was in National Youth Orchestra back in '77, I think it was. And Maurice Clark from London came over and he had brought a bunch of baroque bows and transitional bows, and he gave a talk about them. And we got to use them in the little baroque orchestra that we had at the National Youth Orchestra at the time. And I was fascinated with the ideas because this was the first time I'd seen them up close. I'd just seen bad sketches in books and stuff like that. But to actually hold them and then to play them, to see what the difference is and to see the whole idea of different articulations and the stuff you can get just blew my mind.

So I borrowed the bows from him and I did very precise measurements of them and he was very nice, and I did these drawings and everything. I took them back home, and then I didn't have any bow wood though, but I looked it up, the back of some magazines. I saw this guy down in Florida, had some Pernambuco. So my dad was going down to Florida to visit a buddy of his and I said, "Here, look this guy up and get me some wood." And he came back with a whole stack of Pernambuco and he was going to be making bows too now, because he got inspired by this guy down there. So I started making some baroque bows with using Pernambuco, which is not actually the official wood for baroque bows. But hey, if you go to museums in Europe anywhere and look at instruments and bows from the time, one thing you really notice is that the materials and the shapes of instruments and bows varied quite a bit.

So you can imagine that 400 years ago, not everybody had everything available to them and you couldn't just order it online or something like that. And who knows what the trees, local trees you had. So you basically made the instruments with what you had at hand. And some of the bows were really crude and just made of regular twigs and stuff like that, practically. So it didn't bother me that I didn't have the official wood, snakewood or something like that. I was going to get hold of that later. But I made some bows and they turned out to be pretty good. So I learned a few things right there. And it was only when I was... I was planning to... After I graduated in '82, I decided, hey, I'm going to go to Europe for a few months and hang around. I said it might be interesting to have a violin with me, but I didn't want to take anything really valuable. And so I thought, well, hey, I'll make one. So I got some cheap wood around and since I knew how to do it, I just slammed it together, and it worked. Turned out to be pretty good.

Leah Roseman:

Were you busking in Europe?

Peter Purich:

Well, so the idea was I was going to make a small case for the violin for portability. They didn't have those fancy Bam cases in those days. It was like a big, heavy case. But I said, no, no, I got to make a small case. And I also made a small bow. So the length of a violin is about 23 inches. The bow is about 28 inches. So I said, "I'm going to make a small... I'm going to make a bow the same length as the violin." But also what I did was I said, "But it's going to have the weight of a full-size bow." So it had a special curve to it. So when you play it feels like a full size bow. It has the weight so you can do a lot of stuff. It's just that it's shorter. You just have to be careful when you get to the tip, it's a lot sooner. You can jab your bow into the strings.

So I had that. I made that bow and I made the violin. It was all set. I just needed a case and it was during the summer and I was working with fiberglass and it was very hot and that's not a good combination. And so as I was... I had the mold all set out and I was laying the fiberglass and it was just seizing before it... It just cured before I could even mold it and I got very frustrated and I just threw the thing in the corner. I said, "I'm not taking a violin to Europe." So that's it. And probably a good idea. I was thinking of playing there. I didn't have that much opportunity, anyway. I visited a whole bunch of violin makers in Cremona and got to play a little bit there, and a violin maker in Vienna I met up with so it was fun. Did some research, but didn't do any playing.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. And since this was the early eighties, how did you make contact with these people before you got there?

Peter Purich:

Well, in Cremona it's not hard. You just go to their violin shop. It's a bunch of shops. It was August so a lot of them were closed, unfortunately, because a lot of the stuff closes down. But in Vienna, I actually had a friend of mine in Montreal here in Laval, an old gentleman who was originally from Vienna, Carl Balaban, a fine pianist and violinist. And he was an old friend of mine and he said, "You must go to Vienna and see my friend." And his friend was a violin maker who was actually in charge of maintaining all the instruments in the Vienna Orchestra, in the Vienna Phil.

So in the Vienna Phil, they give you an instrument to play. You can use your own if you want, but you don't have to because they provide one for you. And it's downstairs in the... Below the pit, wherever, and you have a spot for your instrument and it's taken care of. If a string breaks, you just leave it there. And the next day there's a string on it. You can order which string you want. It's like the bows are re-haired regularly. It's amazing. So that's service, I tell you. And I went to see this actually because my neighbor across the street, his old buddy used to play in the Montreal Symphony and eventually went to play in Vienna. So I had that phone number. So I called him up and I met him just before they were playing a version, a concert of Tannhauser or something like that. He said, "Yeah, meet me backstage," type of thing. So I got to go to backstage at the Vienna opera and talk to Eddie Kulak. And he took me downstairs and I saw all these instruments and stuff like that. And we had a great chat. And then I went to see the violin maker who was... At this point he was retired, but we had a great chat. He showed me some instrument projects that he had going on. So that was... Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Cool.

Peter Purich:

That's how you do it.

Leah Roseman:

Did you know German or did he have enough English?

Peter Purich:

No, my cousin spoke German, so she sort of interpreted, so that was fine. And with Eddie, he spoke English so was not a problem.

Leah Roseman:

I was just interested when you mentioned the wood of the bow because I did play baroque violin for many years and I have a baroque and transitional bow. And what I found interesting when I was learning about that is that they hadn't discovered Pernambuco yet. So that's why those bows don't have the same bounce. What's special about Pernambuco, which is now a rare wood because of the destruction of the Amazon, is that it has this amazing bounce. So some people may not realize it's kind of interesting.

Peter Purich:

Yeah, well, it has elasticity, let's say. And a combination of... It's always a combination of things. So it's a combination of the elasticity and the mass that's important. So let's say ironwood or snakewood that you use in a baroque bow, that can be used for a modern bow as well. In fact, some of the... Let's say the Dodd bows and stuff like that. I tried a few Dodd bows, which the wood is so dark. You can't really tell what it is anyway. And you'd say this is not a Pernambuco. It's something else and a terrific sound, absolutely marvelous sound. So they might not give you the spiccato that you want, but the tonal qualities are really there. Because if you have too much spring in the bow and if it's too light, then you're going to get a light springy bow which will probably emphasize more of the higher frequencies, but you'll get a really, really crisp, spiccato out of it.

I think all violinists should have a collection of bows. And so I remember I was once playing a piece that had a lot of really spiky sounds. It was a 20th century piece, a lot of spiky sounds. And so I took this light bow that I had, very stiff and... It just worked fine. I wouldn't take it for Brahms because that you need is a much more buttery type of sound. It's going to just sink in and give you that thickness and warmth. So for that you take another bow. Yeah, I'm a big proponent of having a collection of bows, the selection of tools. You're not going to find the one bow that does it all for everything. So just go ahead and... I mean, I spend most of my time these days with a carbon fiber bow and even they are... There's a variety of them, but if you break them, it's not a loss.

So when I was playing a lot of Jewish weddings and so, right at the chuppah... We're at the chuppah and they break the glass and then they start going out. And so I'd go with the accordion player... But the crowds just get in on you and you're playing like this and they don't care about you. You could get... So I take a cheap instrument and my carbon fiber bow, because if it breaks, well, okay, it's not a big loss. Or if I play a show, you put your bow on the stand and the technician walks by and boom. So it's not worth it sometimes to take your nice equipment. So I have a couple of reasonable wooden bows, nothing fabulous. But if I'm playing Bach solo, yeah, I'll take them. I'll take a wooden bow.

Leah Roseman:

You've done some materials research in terms of being a luthier. You've worked with engineers, I believe, at McGill. You did some projects.

Peter Purich:

Yeah. The work at McGill was carbon fiber, working with carbon fiber. So they had the series of projects with students and they wanted to make an instrument out of carbon fiber because this was the materials lab. So I mean, it wasn't a unique idea. Carbon fiber instruments had been done already. And I've tried them and they're fine, I just found they had limitations to them. So I wouldn't use one myself. And I noticed that a violin was not as good as the viola, was not as good as a cello. This way, when I tried those three instruments, that range, I was much more satisfied with the cello sound than the viola sound, than the violin sound was... So it was a strange sort of size thing going there. So that was an interesting thing to me.

So then they wanted to make these plates and I said, "Well, there's different ways you can do it." And so we settled in on... I'm not sure if it was in collaboration with another area of the McGill research, but they wanted to check out the acoustics of the plates as well. And so I said, "Yeah, we can do that, but let's not make the whole instrument. Let's just make the top plate where a lot of the characteristics of the sound the instrument come from." And so what I did was I got a couple of cheap Chinese instruments and I made sure they were about the same size and everything, from the same manufacturer. And then I removed the top plates and I said, "Okay." I gave them the outline mold and said, "This is our shape. Okay, we are going to now make carbon fiber plates that are going to replace the wooden ones."

And so they started doing that and they would give me the plate and I'd... Well, it was rough, so in a press. So I had to cut away all the stuff. I had to cut the F holes and fix it up. Now I'd put it on the wooden body. I'd string it up and I'd play it and I'd analyze it. And I'd come up with comments, let's say. "It's too loud. It's not loud enough. This is dull. Let's do something different. Let's do a different layup." So we started to do different layer because the fibers is, it's like a weave. You can have all in one direction, you have two directions, or you can have more than one direction less or you can cut it in different shapes. So you can alter the layups. I think when they make the commercial instruments, they don't really worry about that. They just take one cloth and... put it down and press it in and that's it.

So yeah, we did that, too. And I found limitations with the acoustic qualities of that. So I said, "Okay, let's change it up a bit. Let's put different patterns." So they did that. And then I would check out the acoustics of it and I'd assemble it and I'd play it and say, "Okay, this is good then." So they'd give me stacks of plates with different weaves and I'd just keep replacing them all the time and coming up with comments. And then I discovered that what is really the interesting thing was that if I linked in one direction, the incident of these plates started sounding more interesting, but it did lack volume. Then the other way it got loud, but it was kind of boring. So I was always looking for interest.

To me, even a wooden instrument, I'm always looking for interest. The instrument might respond well, it might have a big sound, clear and stuff like that. But somehow if it's not interesting, it's not... I always equate it to looking at a fireplace. You can sit for hours, staring at a fire, but you put a picture of a fire there, you're done after a few seconds. It's just not doing anything. So to me, sometimes I pick up a violin and it's just like that picture. It's all there, but I'm not attracted to it. Or I take a violin and suddenly I start playing it and I like to improvise and I just playing stuff and it feeds back into me and I can do different things. And suddenly there's like hours gone by. Okay, this is the one. It interests me. It peaks my curiosity somehow. There's always something that I can listen to. So with the carbon fiber plates, they were very boring at first. And then I said, "Okay, let's introduce some complexity." So then I would say, "Okay, in the weave here, just take a piece of string and wrap it around like this. And then let's just set up some irregularities." Because the uniformity of the material was just too uniform. So once the irregularity started showing up into thing, then the whole thing started being more interesting. So that was fascinating.

And then another project with the lab was to make accessories like tailpieces. I have a special design tailpiece, which I can show you. And chin rests, which is... It turned out to be nice. I'll show you that as well, but it's not as practical for my purposes 'cause I make custom-made chin rests so every one has to be different. But if you're putting stuff in a mold, it's not going to be different. Oh, and I came up with a special design shoulder pad, which needed to have a shell-like structure, which was very stiff, but very, very light. And that's very good too. It's still in development. But yeah, a lot of fun with the materials. I always liked working with a lot of different materials, even on the instrument too. If I have a chance to try something new, yeah, I'll go for it. Why not?

Leah Roseman:

Well, should we dive into chin rests then?

Peter Purich:

Sure.

Leah Roseman:

This is your big area of expertise. So not everyone will see what you're going to show us, but for those of us watching, if you could show... Pull out what you have there.

Peter Purich:

Well, so let me have a little background. Why do I make chin rests? You can buy them in the store, right?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Peter Purich:

Well, it's because not everybody's comfortable. Okay? And so years ago I started out, I was playing violin and I was going to play viola at the conservator. And so I had a viola that my dad had found one summer and restored it, but it didn't have a chin rest on it. So I said, " Wah! I'll make a chinrest." So I said, "And you know what, I'm going to make it molded to my chin." So I took a mold of my chin in some clay, some plasticine, and then I had the mold and then I started carving out the chin rest and is a perfect mold to my jaw. And it's yeah, yeah, that fits. That fits, yeah. Okay, good, good.

Finished it, varnished , put it on, started playing. I said, "Dad, this is great. This is great." But then I realized as soon as I turned my head a little bit, well, it was no longer fitting. Right? So I couldn't turn my head. Well, okay. I suffered with that for a while, but it really wasn't that good. So that started me thinking, okay, a mold seems like a good idea, but it's not good for the rest of the body. So then I started making another one, which was less defined. But then I started thinking, so what's the purpose of the chin rest, as well. So that got me started. And then eventually I made one for myself, which looked like a standard Guarneri style chinr est, more or less. And I played with that.

I'd started playing with a shoulder pad, like a sponge or something like that. And that's what I was always using. But when I got to university, my teacher said, "No, no, you should get a Kun." Okay. So I got a Kun, but I didn't find it that comfortable and I started modifying it as well because that's what I do. I would modify everything. And so I kept changing that around. I was exploring different things for myself personally. I wasn't in pain, but I was in discomfort. It just was not... I just didn't feel right about it. I liked the sponge, but teacher didn't want the sponge. And so then I had a friend who had a very nice Italian violin, but with a little plastic chin rest. And I said, "That looks that doesn't look nice. It's such a nice Italian instrument." And I said, "I'll make you a nice chin rest out of wood." She says, "Yeah, but I like this chin rest." "I'll make it exactly like the plastic one."

And so I did that and she was very happy and somebody saw that and said, "Hey, can you make me one?" I said, "Yeah, what kind do you want?" And then said, "Well, I don't know." "So come, we'll talk about it." And realized that she had some problems and she needed a little higher or something like that. So I said, "Okay, fine. I'll make you one like that." And that worked out fine. Well, then word gets out that I can make whatever you need. So it turns out that chin rests, which are basically an interface between your body and the instrument, that's the only two places we actually touch. We touch the instrument with our hand and then with our chin, or collarbone, that area. We don't actually grab the rest of it.

So the interface between our body and something hard like that is very similar to our feet and our shoes' interface between our body and the ground. If you go to a shoe store, you'll have hundreds of different styles of shoes and different sizes and everything. And you can go into one shoe store and not find anything comfortable. And you go into another shoe store would see totally different styles and everything, and you still won't find anything comfortable. Right? So to me, the chin rest is like shoes, except that when you go into a luthier shop, you have about three different models and it's just like in three different colors. So it's the same shoe, but with a different color. So you get the ebony Rosewood or boxwood, but if you eliminate that, then you bring it down to... And they're all about the same height. So it turns out there's like for everybody in the world, like three chin rests. Imagine if everybody in the world had only three choices for shoes. That's not going to work. So it's going to work for some people. And the rest of us are going to be uncomfortable. And how uncomfortable? Depends on how badly it's fitting for us.

So yeah, once word got out that I could make people more comfortable than they were, then I started making, then I started working more with people who actually were in serious pain. And so that got me more interested in the physiology of performance, of playing, of holding, how it's holding and the whole physics of it. Why do we do what we do? And what's the purpose? And so then you'd start to think of why do we have a chin rest anyway? Because the individual instrument was not made with a chin rest, of course. Chin rest was, let's say invented in about 1833 by Louis Spohr. But prior to that, for a couple hundred years or more, they didn't play with chin rest. So how did they do it? So try playing without a chin rest and then you'll figure out why.

And it turns out that you can play without a chin rest. I mean, baroque historically, performance, practice, they do it all the time. Do they do it well? Well, some of them do, some of them don't. And so again, there's a question of how do you do it? How do you actually play the instrument? And this is another interesting fact, the violin is the only instrument that you play and hold at the same time. I mean, we can hold a flute, whatever, but that you actually move your hands around. The actual support of the instrument is constantly changing in the act of performing the actual instrument. That's the only instrument that that happens, that and the Viola. The cello, you got an end pin and it's you squeeze between your legs so you don't have to. Your hands are not obliged to hold the instrument. But the violin, the viola is the only instrument that you actually have to move your hands and around, but support the instrument at the same time.

So that is problematic. It's problematic not so much from the holding perspective. Well, yes it is. But how do you actually play while moving your hand around? That's the other problem that we have. How do you actually do what you're supposed to do while trying to hold something at the same time? And when you think of it that way, it's awfully tricky. So we have to learn how to do that. And so we've invented... There's a chin rest. Louis Spohr did that. And you can also imagine that, well, when he invented it, like any other invention, it didn't catch on right away probably. And his model was kind of high because he was a tall guy. And if he gave it to his buddy who was short, he said, "What are you doing with that?" probably. "I don't need one of those." Because in order to press on the instrument, we can just press on the left side of the tail piece, on the right side of the tail piece. And that's why you see all the varnish is worn away on old instruments on either side of the tail piece, because that's where the chin went. And yeah, that's not the best thing for the instrument.

Also it dampens some of the sound too. Never mind that if you try to put you on the tailpiece, well, that's not... That doesn't support anything at all. It's hard to hold anything on the tailpiece. And the reason why you want to put your chin on the instrument anyway is so that the instrument doesn't fly off the body because you can play very well without your head on the instrument as long as you stay in first position. And actually, I should say, yes, you can go up in position. That's not a problem because as you're going up, your hand, the friction pushes the instrument into your neck. It's going down that's a problem. As soon as your hand starts to move down towards the first position, then the instrument will come off your shoulder, collarbone, whatever. If you're not holding it somehow, it'll just come straight off your body. And so that's the problem. That's when you need some sort of, I'll say chin rest, but or you just need anything to hold it back there. You can have an assistant to hold it for you if you want. That'll work. Got to pay them extra.

But that's another interesting thing that because that's not the... There's a second time that we actually need some sort of retaining system. And that is when you vibrate.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I was just going to say that.

Peter Purich:

That's second one. And the vibrato, as you know, falls into two sort of categories. One would be so-called wrist vibrato, but let's say it's just the hand vibrato because it's a... You can imagine it as being a rod hinge going through the wrist part and coming out at the thumb. The thumb is underneath the neck and then the hand swivels back and forth through that position. And the finger will move on the fingerboard on the string lengthwise and thus changing the pitch and then you get your vibrato. The other form of vibrato is where the wrist does not bend, but you have an arm motion so it's at the elbow where the elbow sort of goes wider and the tip of the finger will roll lengthwise along the string resulting in the change in pitch required.

The thing is that with the arm vibrato, you're pressing on the string, but at the same time... Because whenever you press a finger on the string on the top, you have to counter force it with a thumb or something on the other side. So if your arm is moving, it means not just your finger on top is going back and forth, but your thumb is also either rotating or sliding on the neck a bit. That is like a grip on the instruments, whereas with the so-called wrist vibrato, the thumb rolls because it's part of the hinge system. So it just stays in place more or less and does not actually pull the neck. Okay? So all this is say is that with an arm vibrato, your instrument's going to want to fly off your shoulder much more readily. Okay? The arm vibrato will shake your instrument more than a wrist vibrato, which is a more stationary localized form.

But without a chin rest or some sort of restraint, both vibratos are pretty bad. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why they didn't vibrate much in the Baroque era because they didn't... It's not that they didn't know about it. The singers vibrated. But it sounded so bad when you do it without any support. You should try doing your vibrato without having anything holding your instrument. They weren't in the habit of holding their instruments all the time in the Baroque and Classical eras. So I think that's one of the reasons why they didn't vibrate. Spohr, 1833, invented chin rests and you... go up to the late 1800s and you have Marsick and he's teaching Kreisler. By this time they probably have you using a chin rest in some sort of getups. And so the instrument's more solid now in the neck. They can make a more pleasing sound vibrato. They have more control over it now and the movement doesn't disrupt.

Not just that, but it's discovered that if you do vibrate, your particular sound will be more recognizable in a group of other violinists, because if you're playing your concerto, let's say, and in those days, the concertos were starting to get bigger and bigger and the halls were slightly large and larger. How are you going to distinguish yourself from all the other violinists right behind you? Well, if you have a particular type of vibrato... I don't want to get into the physics of it here, but what happens is that your harmonics content of your note will change. And because the higher frequencies reflect sound, are more directional, it's easier for the ear for somebody in the audience to auditorily pinpoint who's playing that particular note if they are vibrating. If they're not, there's more of a blend. It's like suddenly a fog comes in, you don't know where the sound's coming from. But as soon as the vibrato comes in, there's sort of like a honing in sort of system. Yeah, we got it. We got it. We see who's playing. We can hear them. We can hear them stick out a bit more.

So vibrato is one of those interesting little techniques that really helps you to stick out. So if you're ever playing a concerto with a bunch of strings and you want to be heard, just tell them to stop vibrating and then you keep vibrating and you'll stick out a lot more. So that's the technique. So you can imagine that at that point, people start using vibrato more and more up until today. So vibrato is, in my opinion, a result of the chin rest, the invention of the chin rest.

So a chin rest can look like a regular chin rest and to the ordinary eye. Yeah, I've got one of those you say. And I say, "No, probably not because this is unique. And the next one I make might be a little bit different." And so what are the factors about a chin rest? Well, there's going to be the general height, which is from, let's say, from the instrument up to the highest point. That's what I consider the height. And then, so this one that I'm showing for those who can't see, it's like standard Guarneri model. A bit of it goes over the tail piece and then there's this cup that goes on the left hand side.

So in order to get a nice fitting chin rest... Shall I back up and talk about posture? Basically, I'm trying to help people who are in trouble, who are in pain or discomfort and that's physical. So I have to find out what their problem is and they come to me and so we look up, did you have an accident? Are you injured? Is your problem caused by the violin playing, or is it because you fell down the stairs and broke your collarbone or something? So we have to figure all this out.

And then they come to me and they play and I look at them and if they're playing a certain way, something like that and maybe a long neck and say, "Okay, well probably a long neck. You'd want to have a much higher chin rest." If you have a short neck, then you're going to get a short chin rest. If you try to play with too high chin rests, it's like playing with really tight shoes. It's not going to work. And the other way, if you have too low a chin rest, it's like playing with boots that are three sizes too big. It's not going to work. So yeah, people come to me and we look at that. I do a history, like the problems and everything. And then I listen to them play.

Very often, my key diagnostic tool is my ear. So while they're playing, I listen to their sound. And then during the course of the consultation, as we're trying different chin rests, I'm always very conscious of how its sound is changing because... They can tell me, "Oh, it feels better." Or they can say, "I don't know." But if their sound changes, that tells me stuff. So I'm always listening for the sound change. Sometimes they start playing, I say, "Ah, you like that one." They say, "Yeah, how do you know?" "You sound much better." And it's always sounding better because what happens is if you're not physically in line with, or in balance with what you really want to do, your sound will be compressed. It'll be tight. It'll be that your timing will be off. Your shifts will be out of tune. Whole lot of technical problems will just be present and they don't have to be big ones. They're just subtle things. Very often I start asking people, "Did you want to make that shift? Did you want to do that glissando? Do you really want to not vibrate on that one?"

And people think I'm giving them a music lesson, at first. 'Cause I say, "Okay, try it this way. Don't make that accent," and stuff like that. 'Cause I have to find out whether the musical choices that they are presenting to me are deliberate ones or are they part of their setup? You say, "I can't tell." So if somebody comes and they might be a really fine player and this is... "That's really good. Why did you make a crescendo there when there's not one written?" And they say, "I wasn't aware of it." "Can you do it without?" And then they try it without and realize that they can't or something like that. It's like, "Why did you stop vibrating there? There's a shift coming." Musically, I have to be aware of all the stuff that they're doing in order to understand where their pain is.

Leah Roseman:

The one you made me is quite high. I can show people. Actually, one of the videos on my YouTube channel is about my setup. And I talk about your chin rest. But yeah, anyway.

Peter Purich:

Okay. It's not actually... Yeah, well you're not a tall person and it's not that tall. I mean, I have... I can show you. Yeah, so this is a standard, let's say... This is a bit, actually a little taller than your standard chin rest. There's very, very low. Okay? Okay, there you go. Now I'll just put it up here, you see? So this one's very low in comparison to this one, but I could have, let's say something like this. Yeah, so this will be somebody who's maybe six foot four. Yeah. So in comparison to the other one, so you see it's quite a difference.

And some of them are... For instance, here's an interesting chinrest and you can see that the edge of it there, it actually comes off. The top part comes off. So what that does is... It's a lot of times we put our head forward, but it's much better if we tuck our chin back so that our spine, our neck spine... Because a lot of I've had quite a few clients, quite a few, several, that have a fused fourth and fifth vertebrae from playing the violin because what happens is they jut their neck out and they press down and that causes so much pressure there that their vertebrae actually gets fused.

So the way to release that is if you know anything about Alexander technique, for the violinist, as far as I'm concerned, the very first rule of Alexander technique is the only one you need to know. And that is tuck your chin in and think there's a string, like you're a marionette, hanging off the top of your head. If you just follow that rule from Alexander as a violinist, you're going to be well on the way to curing yourself. But how do you do this when your chin rest is over there? You see? so you have to put it forward. Okay? Or do you? What we do is we take the chin rest and we move it back so you can put your head there, but the instrument is still further out. You see? So this solves that problem.

Sometimes there... It's a partial coming off. So it's just the front part here. So depending on how you want it. Generally... I mean, as I say, I'm dealing with people who are injured. So I'm trying to get them back into what would be a healthy sort of way of playing. So something following the Alexander posture of your head straight, your chin tucked in is fine. But if you try to put that on a violin, you're not going to be successful all the time.

So here I am sitting straight and I just put a violin there and I put my chin down. There's nothing here. So I have to compromise. I can turn my head a little bit to the left and drop my head. Turning it more and more and more is going to start being a problem. So if somebody comes in with really bad neck problems and they're doing this, looking down at the instrument, I'm going to try to get them to straighten out a bit, just to save them years and years from down the road from this problem.

And so I try to... Sometimes I have to teach people that this is a different alternative way of playing. So here we go, we're going to try and... your head straight. And if there's nothing there, I'll put something there. I'll bring a chin rest that comes out just to make sure that your head doesn't have to go to the left. So that's a custom-made design right off the bat to move it because you can't buy one of those, of course. So that's one of the issues.

In some cases, here's a sample of a chin rest. But if you look at the... There's like a little bump over here, which is the nature of the... what you have underneath. This particular one was made for a chap with a beard. So something very often with a beard, you don't get the grip that you want. So this is more sharply attenuated here. So that it'll grab the hair in the beard under the jaw and able to do that. How often do I vary? I vary this section here, the bump section, depending on the distance, the person's their side of their jaw to the neck. Some people have very narrow jaws, such as I think you do in comparison to your neck. And so I think the model that you have is very similar to one that I made for my wife and called the Kathy model. And it has a very gentle, very gentle little bump because anything bigger than that starts to gouge you under the neck. So it's very important. So sometimes the edge is going to be very narrow. Sometimes it's going to be very gentle. Sometimes it's going to be very aggressive.

Leah Roseman:

I'll actually... I'll get my violin. I'll just show people.

Peter Purich:

Depends on the height.Sure.

Leah Roseman:

And you made a nice varnish to match my fiddle as well. Yeah.

Peter Purich:

Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. That's a very... Yeah, I know... Very familiar with that model. Yeah. There's a chap in the New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra that plays with something very similar to that one.

Leah Roseman:

So I was going ask you because, of course, many of your clients come to you in Montreal, but how do you deal with people who live far away who can't travel? I know you have sort of a method with magnets for a prototype. Do you mail that to people?

Peter Purich:

I've had to do a few long distance consultations and I must confess, they're very difficult. Very difficult for several reasons. It's like, again, just take the shoe analogy. I'm going to sell you shoes and I'm going to send you a pair of shoes, which I think might work and you try them on and "Yeah, sorry. They don't fit." You send them back and I send you another pair. It'll take forever. Whereas when you come to my studio, you sit in front of me, you play, I hear you right there, stereo, live. And I say, "Try this one. And you say, "Oh, better, but it gets me a little bit on the back." I say, "Give it back. Try this one." And boom, boom, boom. We just keep trying them until we narrow it down.

So yeah, I feel it's very difficult. Success rate is there, but it's not as... I just try not to do it. It's too much energy. It's a lot of my time. I had, like you say with the magnets, it's not just for the people that are at a distance, but also for local people. So what I do sometimes is I have... The chin rest is divided into two sections. So will be the base and the top part. And the top part comes off. It's connected with magnets and you could slide it around and move it around as you will. And so I might send a base plus a selection of tops, which have different shapes. So the person can, by themselves, try the different shapes. That again, is very time consuming and not always as successful because whenever I give somebody a chin rest, I want them to play right away and I want them to play the same thing they just played a second ago because I want to hear the difference and I have to see the difference in their posture. So it's not that easy to do it.

I've tried to do a couple of Zoom since Zoom has been a recent things. I've tried a couple of Zoom consultations and they're better because I can see somebody, but again, I don't get the sound that I want. It's hard to hear what they're doing. And if there's any little delay, it's very upsetting. So sadly, it's most effective if people come to see me, but they manage. A lot of people manage. I've had people from Florida, New York, a lot of people from New York. They might come to Montreal to audition for something and they heard about me and they just make an appointment. They come from L.A. or something like that or Ottawa, Toronto, on their way through.

Leah Roseman:

Have you had other makers apprentice with you for this art of making custom made chin rests?

Peter Purich:

No, no. There are other makers that make custom... So-called custom-made, but it's not anywhere at the level that I do. The problem is that... So there's a place in, I think, New Jersey, Frisch, that they now sell... They will give you a kit of toppers and you try different sizes and stuff like that. And that is a good step because they have different heights right off the bat. It's not always a question of height though. It's a question of shape and sometimes very subtle. There's a place in the Netherlands, Violin Balance, I think it's called, that you go in and you get a consultation and they'll make something for you. I've seen some of the results of that from some of my clients. And again, they're sort of compartmentalized, I think too much in some way.

What I do is somebody comes to me and so I'm a violinist, I'm a player, I'm a pedagogue. So I look at that part of it. I understand the physiology and I've got the creative inventive mind to come up with a possible solution and I make it. So it's like one stop, everything. You have to get somebody who... So it's one thing... Like the people in the luthier shop, you can go to them and say, "I want this." And yeah, they'll make it for you if you tell them exactly what you want. But for somebody to come and say, "I don't know what I need. What do you have to fix me?" They can't do that because they don't know.

Okay. We're back. Yeah. So when you talked to me at first, you said I'm known as a chin rest maker. Well, some people just know me as a violinist and people really like to compartmentalize and some people know me only as a violist and some people as a violin maker and said, "Oh, you make bows too. Oh, you make chin rests. You make the whole thing. But people like to just grab one thing and that's all... They think you only do one thing. But at the same time, in order for me to do this work, I have to know so much stuff.

So over the years and one of my loves is connecting all things together 'cause I think everything is actually connected. It's like a huge wheel with spokes all radiating out. So in order for me to deal with people's problems, I have to know how they play. I have to know how anyone plays. I have to know what the right way to play. So I've developed my own pedagogy as well. And I've looked at a lot of pedagogy and I got to tell you, I don't think there's a lot of good stuff out there.

There's a lot of misconceptions. I have some personal bugaboos about things that I keep seeing cropping up all the time, which I know sort of maybe work, but they don't work for the right reasons. I know that some of them are going to be problematic for my future clients. I say, "If you do that, I'm going to see you in a couple years." So yeah, I have a lot to say about the way the violin is taught and not just from the technical perspective. At the same time, I have kids and I want them to learn music. So how do I teach little kids, one, to be interested in music, and motivated, and to pick it up and play. And how do you teach them? How do you that sort of thing.

So I love to teach. I've been teaching since I was 12 years old and I teach anybody and I like to teach adults as well. People who are 50, 60, 70. I had a 96 year old student once. So I take lost causes too. People that have tried so many teachers and nothing worked. I said, "You come to me and I'll teach you how to play." And what do you want to play? Do you want to play Irish music? Do you want to play crossover music? Do you want to play classical? Baroque? I had one guy that just wanted to play scales. That's all he did. He didn't want any music. He just wanted scales. I said, "Okay, we'll do scales." I'm not saying you got to play this because it's all music is... It's like Duke Ellington said, "There's only two types of music. There's good music and the other kind." Whatever that is, it doesn't matter. And so you don't classify it that way. I play everything. And I just played the Jazz Fest two nights ago.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I was going to ask 'cause you play some jazz and blues. So with your scale student, did you teach jazz scale?

Peter Purich:

If they want to learn that, I will. I have one student that just wants to learn Irish tunes written by Carol Ann. It was really isolated and I said, "Okay, fine. We'll do it with that." And I try to broaden them out a bit, but I'm not going to force anybody to play something they don't want. So I love the variety and I think that you can have fun and nail it on any style you want. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. It's whatever you want, whatever's going to motivate you. It's whatever's going to turn your crank, so to speak.

So yeah, I started improvising when was a kid, but I'd improvise in the classical form. I'd sort of play like my own Paganini things and that sort of style. And then I loved fiddling tunes. So I'd search around for some good old East Coast fiddling stuff. It was hard to get hold of information back then. And then I heard some Grappelli jazz. I said, "Wow, what is this? How do you start with that?" And so it was just slow going at first. But over the years I managed to creep myself in and out of little things.

I liked Eastern European folk music. I played for 10 years in a Polish folk ensemble and I played... It was another five years I was in a klezmer hip-hop band, which was Raoul, which was fun because it was a really fusion between klezmer style. But we had a DJ and everything and... and everything. It was quite fun. And I played a lot of Jewish weddings with a band specializing in Jewish Hasidic weddings. So we learned a lot of the Chabad tunes and stuff like that. And then you play Italian weddings and everything. So you learn all the gypsy music for your Hungarian and Romanian weddings. That was fun. And I had a friend who was a blues guitarist. So he and I would get together and put on a few shows, playing some blues, blues with a guitar and violin. At that point, I also started playing washboard. So doing some rhythm work and playing mandolin as well. So it was just fun to do that and a bit of tin whistle. So whatever was fun, it was good to go.

Leah Roseman:

I have lots of notes on your performing career. I was interested to see all the different groups you've been a part of. You were also a founding member of I Musici.

Peter Purich:

Yes. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

I imagine Yuli Turovsky was quite a mentor for you?

Peter Purich:

I met him first when he came... When he came to Canada, he got a job teaching chamber music at the Conservatoire. And I was there at the time and I took chamber music and I took it with him and that was fun. It was fun because he had a way of making you play with... I wouldn't say breaking the rules, it was more like getting involved with what you were doing. And so maybe a less stiff, unconventional approach, a little more wide open and very encouraging. I remember I was playing viola for two weeks, at that time, at the Conservatoire. I had just started the Conservatoire and there was a quartet that was playing a Beethoven string quartet, and the violist got injured and they didn't have that many violas in those days. So he says, "Peter, you play viola?" I say, "Well, I just started." "You can play. You can play."

So he was very encouraging. So he threw me into this Beethoven string quartet. And it's just that sort of encouragement and confidence that, "Yeah, go ahead, do it. You can do it." And that was great. I did quite a bit of interesting chamber music with him over the couple of years. And then when he was interested, I mean, I Musici was formed in his mind, years before it was actually formed. So he had this plan going and he wanted to get young students involved. Maybe because we were more malleable I suppose, to the ideas. But nonetheless, I think he was a big proponent of enthusiasm. You didn't have to be young, but youth very often had enthusiasm and willingness to get involved, that sort of thing.

So it actually started off with a project with the Radio Canada to record the 12 Handel concerti grossi. It wasn't Musici at that point. It was just a pickup orchestra. But he put the word out and he called me up and I said, "Yeah, I'll do the gig and list recording." So we had a lot of fun and it formed at that point. And then I think that was the tipping point for him. He said, "Yeah, I think I can do this." And then he said, "Why don't we make an orchestra?" So that's how it started. And then there was, of course, no money. So we all had to pitch in with all sorts of jobs and stuff like that. And eventually I ended up being the librarian and I did arrangements for the orchestra. I was assistant stage manager, assistant tour director, and stuff like that. I drove the van, et cetera. So I had a lot of jobs to do there until I left.

Leah Roseman:

And you studied with Arthur Garami at the Conservatoire.

Peter Purich:

That's right, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

So I was looking to find a recording of him and I found on YouTube, there's this Violet Archer, violin concerto he recorded and so you can hear what an amazing violin player he was. What was he like as a teacher?

Peter Purich:

Arthur Garami was a wonderful, wonderful person. He came from Hungary and so he was a bit like the old school let's say. He had a blistering technique in some ways, but it wasn't the most prominent aspect of what he did. He was very musical and he worked very hard at what he did. His parts were quite marked up, sometimes in different colors, red and blue. And he'd spent a lot of time changing fingerings and bowings and stuff like that. And from a technical perspective, he didn't teach you anything about your position or anything like that or how to produce your sound. So he would just gently suggest some ideas and mostly from a musical perspective.

And that's sort what... I think with me, he felt that I was doing okay technically and I was teaching myself how to play technically and get by, which I wasn't such a good teacher at that point for myself. I was missing a few things. But musically, I stuck it out with him and it was very rewarding. Especially... He played a lot. He had the Classical Quartet of Montreal and every year, he'd be putting a couple of recitals on in Montreal and just to go hear and play and watch him perform, that was really good.

My viola teacher at the Conservatoire ended up being Gerald Stanick and he was also very helpful to me. He'd say, "Peter, how you can pull like that?" I was like, "Whoops, what am I doing wrong?" And he says, "Nah, you got to change that. You got to change that." And so he sort of opened my eyes to something that I wasn't quite right with my setup and that sort of thing. So yeah, it was a bit of a jolt. Also, at that point, I'd been with Arthur Garami since I was a teenager. And I got to admit, I wasn't planning to necessarily be a violinist anyway. So I maybe wasn't taking it that seriously, let's say, at that point. But by the time six years later, with Gerald Stanick, I was thinking maybe I might make a career out of this. Who knows? We'll see. So it started to percolate a bit more that maybe I should actually start practicing, or clean up a few things if I wanted to get something done. So that was part of my incentive to leave the Conservatoire and go to McGill.

Leah Roseman:

So you had mentioned that you have been improvising since you were young, and I know you play many different styles. Would you be... I'd love to hear maybe some of the klezmer style music you play or Celtic or anything you'd be up for showing us. It'd be really fun.

Peter Purich:

Yeah, and I like improvising and the different styles and I got to say, I think everybody should do it. I think everybody should do it just to understand better what it is they're actually doing. What are they playing? Because you always say, you got to make the music your own. What does that mean? But I think if people understand, from a compositional point of view as well, the composer writes something and where did they get the idea? And what is the function of whatever that they're writing? Is this supposed to sound like an ornament or what? So if we're going to play some baroque music... You've done baroque performance practice, so you know this. You play a sonata, especially in the Italian tradition... A little bit of Corelli or something like that. And then repeat. There's always a repeat.

You do the ornaments, right? Well, that's like, it's an improvisation, in a sense. You're making up something to go along with the harmonic structure and the general flow. So it's very important to you to understand when a composer is doing that. And if you look at the Bach solo sonatas, he's written out the improvisation. So it's very important to, let's say, deconstruct that, or at least take a lot of pieces and look at the fundamental and see where the ornament goes. And then take the ornaments off, maybe put in some different ornaments like that and just to understand how to play from a performance perspective. If I'm going to go...

Sorry, wire.

... I've missed the point. Yeah, I played the notes and I played them roughly in tempo, whatever it was, but that's not the point of the improvisation, which he wrote out. You understand that. So is it... It's a note. On a harpsichord maybe you'd... On the first chord you'd do the... So now you're thinking, okay, it has to be like a filagree. So you practice like that. You do all sorts of interesting baroque ornamentation when you're just fooling around and that's going to help inform your performance of all the works. And Mozart, the little trills and stuff like that. I love...

So gypsy music, as I said, the Eastern European, right? Okay. Famous Hungarian tune. Okay? Look at the other... A nice Hungarian tune written by an Italian. Right? You can fool around with it. You can do anything you want with those things. But then I got to thinking, well, yeah, we can do stuff like that. But what about Mozart and Beethoven and these guys, and Telemann, Bach. 'Cause Bach, he's got the improv. They would go to the cafes. They would've heard these gypsies too. And they take some of this stuff and they'd put it in their music.

So then what you do is you take these pieces of music and you change them. You just think of them. So if you take the Czardas... I'll give you another tune here. You might know this one. You know that tune? I'll play it straight, the way it was composed. Okay? Mozart Sinfonia Concertante, second movement, it's like a gypsy tune. Right?

I played the second time was what he wrote, but it still sounds like a gypsy tune, right? So you're thinking, well, if I play this straight, note for note, might be maybe not what he had had in mind. Where did he get it from? Who is the chap that he took that tune off of? More or less. So when I play this, I'm thinking, okay, let's put a little bit of paprika in there, a little flavor. So that's the thing.

So that's my approach to classical music as well. Improvise on those things. You don't have to think jazz is the only thing you're going to improvise. You're going to play your jazz and stuff like that. So I've taken it even further back. Telemann used to be a... He wrote a lot of folk music or folk-inspired, especially Polish folk music. And if you start playing Telemann with those ideas in mind, you can really have some fun with it. And I mean, having fun is really what it's about. I try to tell my students, "Don't be super strict about this, especially bowings." Bowings I find to be very creative and also I give people a lot of license with bowings, especially baroque to modern bow. It's not the same bow. You can't do the same thing. One hall to another hall, change your bowings. I don't care if it's not written like that. The composer is not around. They'd probably agree with you now. So I would take...

And then I put in... Who's going to shoot me? Where's the bowing police going to show up at my door and put me in jail? But what I've done is I've had a bit of fun with it. And so when I get another piece, I have this creative bit to myself that I can do that. The gypsy thing is I like to look at some of the Bach for instance, going back to the...

Just put a little spin on it, turn into something a little bit different. You look at Bach, the great jazz artists, Loussier, they've all done some sort of version of jazzing up Bach a bit. It's kind of easy to do, especially with those great baselines, but you can take the Bach and turn into any style you want. It's always fun. Klezmer is in interesting. It's not so much ornamentated, as you probably know. It's more reaching different levels. There's more like this... It's like Italian Baroque is a lot of notes. French Baroque, it's not the notes, it's the ornaments. There's a whole collection of ornaments that you can do, and passing notes and stuff like that. And so klezmer ornamentation would fall more into that category, let's say. So you have your chirps... And then inflections...

When you do the doing of the slow movements, which is... Doing is like a Romanian...

So it's a lot of colorations and the suspension and the tensions that you got to raise, and you want to raise it to another level. You go up in octave and stuff like that. So it's a different approach to the ornamentation and improvisation. It's a lot of fun learning these different styles. The same thing if you learn Irish folk, or Scottish, or Cape Breton, Texas swing, bluegrass.

Starting with students I like to, right off the bat, hit them with creative options to go with. Recently I was coaching some students in a high school and some of them had been playing for like a year and some for two years, maybe, so really not very high level at all. And so we were playing a very simple baroque tune, but I wanted them to do something else. So I wrote out just a 12-bar blues. It just was just really simple like... For four notes, whatever. But we had a lead into that. And what I did was... Because they couldn't play very much. I had them do... starting off with air sounds, very flautando. Okay? This is to teach them... Because whenever you play the instrument, you have to know what the extremes are, left, right, up, down. How far before you end up off the Helmholtz resonance, type of thing. So you're going to get like a... , which is a result of too little bow speed and too much pressure at a specific sounding point.

Finally, you go off in the other direction. So you have to go to these boundaries before you know where they are so you can get that middle ground and get where you want. So I started off with notes like this, then sliding, harmonics, get their hands sliding up. It's just making sound effects. And then we'd move from that into sea gull sounds. Then hitting and stuff like that. And slowly we just moved it out and then boom into the blues type of thing. So these are kids who've been playing one year, but right off the bat, something creative and you just point them, okay, play, play, play. No notes, just make sounds. And even with... If somebody's playing a simple tune, Danny Boy or something like that, I say, "Okay, now you got the notes. Let's try and change it up a bit. Let's have some bow speed changes and see what that does. Let's get something musical going." I always want to, right off the bat, you play two notes, let's make a musical. So that's where I head.

Leah Roseman:

I remember when I went to your house those times for the whole chin rest thing, it struck me 'cause your children are a little bit older than mine. So I was pretty new mother and I was very inspired because you had children's art all over your house, just all the walls from floor to ceiling, just celebrating the creativity. It was so beautiful to see. It really stayed with me.

Peter Purich:

Great. Yeah, this, I have on the walls here. I can't show you. I have copies of the Group of Seven paintings that they did. And I have here, this is-

Leah Roseman:

Compositions of your son?

Peter Purich:

Yeah. It's all over the place. It's just ready to go. This is a tandem suite for violin and viola that he played recently, which was recently performed at National Youth Orchestra by a couple of the staff there, the faculty. It was a brilliant performance that they did. It was wonderful. No, it's all over the place. Just let it go. Let it go.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Peter Purich:

You got to help them along. You got to help them along. To teach properly is not easy. And what I tell all new parents, I say, you're going to be your child's teacher, whether you like it or not. So if you want to teach your child discipline, you have to show them discipline. You show them that you're disciplined, not tell them how to be disciplined. You have to show them what discipline means. And then they'll learn that. They'll see that. So if you want to teach them acceptance, you have to show them acceptance. If you want to teach your creativity, you have to show them creativity. You have to give them the opportunity and it doesn't have to be over the head.

I never really taught my son a lesson on the violin. We just played together. And to me that was the best way to do it. Oddly enough, it's like what Suzuki... The foundation of his teaching was like teaching a language, just immersion. So it was just, yeah, let's just play. And yeah, you correct a little thing here and there. "You might like it better if you do it this way, here, try that." But have fun. And then slowly... If they take to it, they take to it. But enjoy it with them. And if you make it an enjoyable experience, better chance that they'll... They might not make a career out of it, but they'll stick with it longer and they might make a career and they'll enjoy it then because you've taught them the enjoyment of it. And all those little hesitations, they stop your creativity. I'm not saying my parents stopped my creativity. I'm just saying, in general, if you want your kids to be creative, just give them time to do their thing. And it's very important.

Leah Roseman:

Part two of this conversation continues next episode with a lot of specifics about playing and teaching the violin. Some of Peter's innovative instrument designs, his unique shoulder support and some great wisdom. 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.