It can be downright discouraging, as a recent story by former Juilliard student Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch illustrates: I used to love playing violin. But mastering it broke my heart. I certainly have sympathy, even empathy, for Rauch 's experiences: the "hours of tedious, obsessive nitpicking" that can shred the soul and kill musical enthusiasm. Training at the elite level is unforgiving and carries no guarantees. Keeping balanced in an environment of top-level expectations can be nearly impossible, particularly if you are matched with the wrong teacher.
And it's not just at the top levels that this can set in; learning violin and playing it reasonably well require a unique level of precision at every phase, and this can be crazy-making. Just producing a reasonable-sounding noise on the instrument requires some serious coordination, not to mention issues of intonation, tone production, music-reading, memory, fluency, etc.
It's one demanding instrument. And yet, I would argue that striving for mastery on the violin has actually strengthened my heart, not broken it. I see the same in my students. I'd even defend tedious and obsessive nitpicking -- as part of a healthy overall diet.
There is a positive side to the deliberate, single-minded effort of perfecting a technique on the violin: achievement. More often than not, I've found that the "impossible" is actually possible on the violin.
Striving for those goals has taught me that some things take more than a day's work to achieve; they can take a few days, or a week, or a month -- even years. But practice and persistence brings those goals ever closer, until one day you pass the mark and don't even realize you've reached a new level of mastery.
