Tony Cunnane's Early Years 1935-53

In 1946, at the age of 11, I was given a full-size violin by a neighbour. By that time I had stopped going to the church because the incumbent vicar had returned from the war but had discontinued Sung Matins and I had the temerity to tell him I didn’t approve!! Looking back now, I suspect that most of the choir and the wartime congregation had passed on, or passed away, and the vicar was probably trying to attract a new breed of parishioners.

I was delighted with the gift of the violin. As far as I am aware I’d never expressed any interest in wanting to play a violin or any other instrument. It was, however, widely known amongst our family and friends that I had by that time acquired an extensive knowledge of classical music from my church going, from listening to BBC concerts on the wireless and by reading books from the local library. The violin came in a rather tatty and heavy wooden case whose interior was covered in a gaudy orange felt-like cloth. Accessories included a misshapen lump of sticky, yellowish resin whose purpose was a mystery until someone explained later, and a grotty tuning whistle to enable the four strings to be tuned accurately. The kindly neighbour showed me roughly how to tune the strings, gave me a well-thumbed copy of 'A Violin Method for Absolute Beginners Volume 1' and then beat a hasty retreat up the street and out of earshot, leaving my parents wondering whether to be grateful or apprehensive.

The tuning whistle had, apparently, had a long and busy life, judging by the tarnished state of the metal and the suspicious bits of grit stuck on the outside and even rattling around inside the pipes. I suspect that the item had spent a lot of time inside some small boy's pocket rather than in the small receptacle inside the violin case designed for its safe and clean keeping. Still, no-one worried much about hygiene in the mid-1940s. I never did discover whether the pitch given out by each of the four pipes bore any resemblance to the true frequencies needed. However, I could detect that one of them was definitely off-pitch because there was an interval of slightly less than a perfect fifth between two adjacent pipes. For those who do not understand these terms, a perfect fifth is one of the two easiest intervals for anyone with a modicum of musical intelligence to recognise; the other is the perfect octave. A perfect fifth, or a perfect octave, even a few cycles per second (that's what we used to call Hertz) too few or too many is not only imperfect but absolutely awful to listen to. So I did what orchestral professionals do with the assistance of the oboe player: I tuned the A string from the tuning pipe and then tuned the E and D strings a perfect fifth either side of that and the G string a perfect fifth lower than the D string. By so doing, all the strings were correctly tuned with respect to each other. Possibly they were all slightly off the correct pitch but the intervals between them were perfect and that was good enough for me – then!

I could tell that my violin had not been used for quite a long time because the tuning pegs were stiff to turn. I soon learned that if you don't keep the pegs pushed hard into their sockets, sooner or later one of them will pop out of its own volition causing the string to unwind alarmingly. Although I had never held a violin before, because I am left-handed I automatically picked it up with my left hand and took the bow in my right hand and that was a good start. The violin was not fitted with a chin rest but I did not miss it because I had no idea then that there was such a thing. The lack of a chin rest, however, did make it difficult to clamp the instrument under my chin and made it impossible to hold there without the use of my left hand. Initially I grasped the violin neck extremely tightly because I was afraid I might lose my grip altogether but that made it very difficult to stop the strings with my fingers to make other notes. Eventually I discovered that if I let the violin rest in the V-shape made by my thumb and first finger, my left hand could more easily slide up and down the fingerboard whilst still keeping the instrument under my chin. The disadvantage was that I quickly started getting pain in the web between my thumb and first finger so every few minutes I had to put the violin down and have a rest. My parents soon came to value those interludes.

There are no photographs of me with my violin earlier than the one above taken in the garden of our Salford home in 1951. The violin is the same but I had been having professional lessons by 1951 so at least I am holding the violin in the correct position - the 3rd Position by the look of it.

Why was I playing in the garden? Not because it was a nice sunny day but because one of our next door neighbours was a shift worker and it had been agreed that I would not practice indoors when he was in bed at the other side of the house!