Finding the right chin rest and shoulder

rest
12 FEBRUARY 2015


Your violin set-up needs to fit you, not the other way round, says late
starter Lawrence Proulx, whose painful playing position sent him in
search of a custom chin rest and shoulder rest

I started learning the violin almost three years ago, at the age of 53. I had
become frustrated at playing the piano and was thinking, ‘Four little strings –
how hard can it be?’ Right from the beginning, my biggest challenge was not
musical but physical. I should mention that I am six foot three inches tall,
longarmed and skinny. When I started playing, not only did I have a multitude of
sore joints, but I also found that just keeping the instrument in place was almost
impossible. It would gradually slip away from me, or it would suddenly pop out
from between my chin and collarbone. My posture and hold were normal
according to my teachers, but something was wrong. While the piano has its
difficulties, at least you can count on its staying in place, but I could play the
violin for only a minute or two before I’d lose it. Or, less often, I would find what
seemed like a way to hold it, only to feel after five or ten minutes that I
desperately needed to stretch and work out the incipient cramps in my neck.

I tried everything to stabilise the instrument. I visited many shops and tried all
sorts of shoulder rests and chin rests. Some shopkeepers insisted that this or
that shoulder rest worked for me; others admitted that none did. For a long time
I played with a towel draped over my shoulder. I tried sponges, as well as
wedges sold specifically for the violin. I made a kind of bandoleer out of rubbery
material and tried all sorts of pads, hidden or attached, in the hope of getting
things right. I moved the chin rest right, left and back again. What eventually
helped, but only to a certain extent, were extra-long barrels for the chin rest,
which enabled me to raise it high with the aid of sliced wine corks. I persisted
with lessons for a long time, but eventually stopped. It seemed a waste of time
to be paying to learn something I couldn’t really practise. And yet my musical
intuition had been right: the violin delighted me. At the piano I had had trouble
memorising blocks of chords where inner voices changed frequently. The violin
didn’t pose that sort of problem. I found that trying to work double-stops into
tune was a delightful way to spend time, contrary to all the things you hear
about how awful learning the violin can be. Musically I’d found a home, except I
kept getting evicted every few minutes.

‘Getting a custom chin rest is not a magic bullet. You then have to unlearn
old habits or learn new ones’ – Gary Frisch
Through searching on the internet, I eventually learnt that there were two
groups of people working on problems like mine. Crissman Taylor heads a
programme in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and Lynne Denig and Gary
Frisch have one in Falls Church, Virginia, US.

Taylor’s programme grew out of her own struggles as a violin player. She says
she ‘hit the wall’ – intense pain between her shoulder blades – around the age
of 20. She found that many violin teachers didn’t want to know about students’
pain. Taylor blames what she terms a ‘maestro culture’, a ‘survival of the fittest’
mentality in which concentration on excellence and success is so strong that
potentially disabling physical problems are simply too frightening to discuss
openly.

After trying yoga, tai chi and other disciplines, Taylor discovered Alexander
Technique, a method of postural re-education. She also found a teacher who
made her a tall chin rest from a plaster cast. Taylor became a practitioner and
teacher of Alexander Technique, and over the course of more than 15 years
she assembled a team dedicated to producing better chin rests and shoulder
rests for the players who came to her for help. She describes her clients as
‘healthy persons in an unhealthy situation. The violin is their environment, and
the violin is twisting them.’ In particular, she says: ‘Tall people are really
handicapped, because there’s nothing for them on the market.’ But short people
can also have trouble, she adds: ‘Sometimes they are cramped by the shoulder
rest and find bowing awkward.’ Based on a design by her late technician
Servaas Franssen, she has produced a series of chin rests of variable height
called Equilibrio that she says Wolf Music Products will soon introduce on to the
market.

In her work, Taylor pays particular attention to the position of the head and is
dead set against what she calls the ‘diagonal clamp’, a vise-like grip of the violin
between jaw and shoulder. ‘As the head position is distorted,’ she says, ‘the
ability to perceive what is going on diminishes.’ She describes the results:
‘Muscle tension, pressure on the joints, and a sort of white noise on the brain
that interferes with the perception of sound, sight, touch and even spatial
thinking.’
In Virginia, Frisch, a violin maker and dealer, and Denig, a teacher, teamed up
five years ago to examine several dozen students in order to, in Frisch’s words,
‘come up with a systematic way to determine the right contour, the right height
and the right position of the chin rest relative to the tailpiece for a given player’.
Together, they have sought ways to ‘connect good posture with a support
system that focuses on weights and balances, rather than locking the body in
place and playing in a static position’.

Like Taylor, they do not accept the widespread notion that a player should be
able to hold the instrument steady without any support from the left hand, so
that the violin becomes, in Frisch’s words, ‘like a diving board bolted to the end
of a pool’.

‘There’s this idea that by clenching the instrument, the left hand is freer for
better shifting and for producing vibrato,’ he explains. ‘It seems logical, but most
people with really good vibratos have told us, “No, you really have to have your
shoulder free.† It’s the same with shifting.’ He blames this clenching for the
scars players get on their necks, the so-called violin hickeys: ‘They’re
leveraging their instruments with their jaws. How many professions do you know
that use ritual scarification as a sign of diligence?’

Frisch and Denig have developed a diagnostic kit used by nine teachers
throughout the US and one in southern France. In the kit there are eight or so
styles of rests and five lifts of various heights, each lift having two different
positions (over the tailpiece or to the left). By trying out the rests at various
heights, the teachers, who Frisch explains are not legally his agents and receive
no commission, can then advise their students and perhaps order a custom-
built rest from him.

‘Getting a custom-made chin rest is not a magic bullet,’ stresses Frisch, as

Taylor did. ‘You then have to unlearn old habits or learn new ones.’
I first contacted Taylor in June 2008, but what with our various time constraints,
I didn’t have my first session with her until mid-April of this year. In her office at
the Utrecht School of the Arts, she had me play for her while she noted down
her observations. In the summary that she sent me afterwards, she reported
that my head was generally held erect, but continued: ‘The chin rest gives little
hold as the large cup form and shallow edge give him no hold, and the violin
tends to slide towards the middle, leaving him hanging on the last left edge of
the rest.’ She pointed out during the session that despite my long arms I had
trouble bowing to the point, a problem that she attributed to the position of the
instrument. And after a careful examination of my collarbone and jaw, she took
measurements and entered them along with curved marks on a blank gridded
form that would be used by the chin rest maker.

‘As the head position is distorted, the ability to perceive what is going on
diminishes’ – Crissman Taylor
A month later I met Taylor at the workshop of Lies Muller, a woodworker and
instrument maker. Two hours went by as Taylor watched me and two of her
other clients try our new chin rests, which Muller modified to make them more
comfortable. Taylor made sure that no clenching was done by having me turn
my head slowly from side to side and then execute a slow vertical ‘royal nod’.
Irritating points on my pearwood rest were whittled away, especially near the
Adam’s apple and jugular vein, and the top centre was deepened to increase
the holding effect of the ridge.

The next day I was back in Taylor’s office, playing with my new rest as she took
measurements for a shoulder rest. During this meeting it seemed to me that the
chin rest was rather high and that I needed to hold the end of the violin quite
high in order to have the rest comfortable against my chin. So Taylor had me
return to Muller, who looked me over and said that the tilt might need changing
and that she might have to start again from scratch.

This, in fact, is what she did, and when I returned in late June, Muller had a new
rough-hewn chin rest ready for me. First I met Taylor to try out the shoulder
rest, which had been made from very light natural-rubber foam by model-maker
Sindy Buissink.

Taylor was pleased with the rest, which was scooped to fit my steep contours.
In the evening, I again spent a couple of hours at Muller’s workshop, along with
another client, a serious teenage student with a noticeable violin hickey, as our
chin rests were modified and adjusted. My instrument was now closer to my left
ear than when I’d started and the rest still seemed a bit high, but Taylor said it
looked right to her and that a period of adjustment was inevitable. Further
modifications could be made in the autumn after I’d had a chance to try it out.

I finally had my custom equipment about two and a half years after starting
lessons. A great deal of my initial enthusiasm, however, was spent, and the
persistence of sprainlike pains in my left index finger and my bowing wrist
added to my discouragement. Shortly before my last trip to Utrecht I heard a
recording of the Chopin G minor Ballade and longed to be back at the keyboard.

But my story is hardly the important point here. All over the world there must be
thousands of students who give up the violin, not because they are lazy or
unmusical, but because for various physical reasons they can no longer
accommodate themselves to it. I was fortunate in that, as an adult, I had
enough good sense to know when I was in discomfort and when set-ups were
unwholesome. But surely there must be lots of young people, dedicated to their
art, who as they grow find their bodies pulling in a different direction from the
unyielding physical structure of their instrument. Frisch directed me to a study
by Alice G. Brandfonbrener in the March 2009 issue of the journal Medical
Problems of Performing Artists that found that over 80 per cent of incoming
freshmen string players at a Midwestern university’s school of music reported
having had pain associated with playing. Many students, one way or another,
adapt their bodies, but what of those who can’t? Is it really inevitable that they
drop out?

‘There’s a problem out there,’ says Frisch. ‘If this divingboard way of playing is
so wonderful, why are so many people hurting?’ My experience suggests that
the average violin shopkeeper and teacher are incapable of addressing such
problems adequately. ‘There has to be a change in the education system,’
agrees Taylor. In the meantime, she and Frisch and Denig have taken
intelligent and praiseworthy steps to fill the gap.

https://www.thestrad.com/playing/finding-the-right-chin-rest-and-shoulder-rest/2206.article