It was pretty cool to join the White Album Ensemble for a gig at Apple headquarters a very long time ago, but cringey, especially as a violinist, to have sheet music instructing me to play slightly flat on "Hello, Goodbye." I prayed that everyone listening knew the original recording well enough to know it was supposed to sound like that, but of course, especially with fewer school music programs all the time, it's possible that only a handful among the general public would recognize any problem.
Which brings me to a quandary I revisit every so often (and twice in recent weeks): a client asks if I can learn and perform a song at their event that a violinist is playing in a video they've come across. I check out the clip and, as a violinist, I listen and think, jeeze, this tone leaves a lot to be desired and quite a few of the notes are out of tune... The video usually has millions of views, hundreds of thousands of likes, and seemingly honest comments like "this song is what falling in love feels like," and "this is the greatest song I've ever heard."
I haven't yet thought of an inoffensive way to ask a client if they want me to include the questionable tone and lack of intonation in my rendition. After all, it might be the best song they've ever heard too. However, I really want to! And not at all to be mean or assert some kind of authority on the topic. It's an honest question I continue to ponder alone. On one hand we might assume their thorough enjoyment is due to them just not having as much musical listening or playing experience, but what if playing out-of-tune and even sometimes wailing or scratching a bit is what's actually making people enjoy a song more??
At what point does playing out-of-tune somersault from annoying to stylistically expressive, perhaps even critical to a song's feel? Enough spins for our ears to acclimate? Not being a violinist or other bowed stringed player who must dedicate years to learning how to create their intonation millisecond by millisecond? I can think of a few other fairly popular songs with badly tuned guitars (reggae), or horns (motown), or fiddles (old tyme/bluegrass), and one folk song with a terribly out of tune autoharp that had a long string of glorious comments on YouTube.
So far over the years I've learned the notes and rhythms of these special request songs, but performed them under the tone and tuning standards I aspire to. The clients hired me after all, not the YouTube, Instagram, or TickTock star they've seen, and as not just a service provider, but an artist too, maybe that's the only real way to approach it. Or maybe, in trying to "fix" the song, to play it "better," I'm taking away something that somehow makes it so compelling?
