The Paganini Conundrum
by Stephanie Casillas
The great Paganini, violinist and composer, is considered one of the greatest masters of his craft of all time. Years, perhaps decades, of practice and toil, wired his brain for technical wizardry of the highest order. Many others over generations of time have aspired to his greatness, but failed. Without attaining Paganini’s skill and technique, the brains of those others could never evolve to the level that manifested in Paganini’s brain, and his brain, alone. This, to me, demonstrates a great riddle. How does one achieve the benefits of being a Paganini, without actually being a Paganini? I refer to this riddle as the Paganini Conundrum.
Great musical attainment has always been considered a gift or talent. Was Mozart born Mozart? Is it only a coincidence that his father was one of the greatest teachers of the age, and devoted his life to the training of his son? Mozart’s works evolved over time in complexity and beauty, as Mozart forged his mind’s genius. How can education systematically bring the neural benefits afforded the rarefied few, to the genesis of learning, for the many? This was a riddle that needed to be solved.
First, I had to define education in my own mind. We, the naked ape, are born with our “natural” abilities. These are the rom of our computer’s brain, the evolutionary skill set that allowed the hunter-gatherer to survive and thrive. Foremost to this is language. The human ape is pre-wired for pitch and rhythm, and the environment selects the pallet of relevant song colors and beat that we synthesize into language. Music, therefore, is the prima lingua, our first language, and spoken language is merely a distillation of music. If education is defined as the bridge between the “natural”, or innate, and the “unnatural”, the learned, the skilled, the trained, then logically, music, the prima lingua, must be at the epicenter of learning.
Second, I had to maximize the efficiency of the education bridge, and develop the simplest and most effective system for educators to teach, and for students to learn. The goal was to deconstruct the learning process of music into component elements, consisting of rhythm, bowing, and note reading development, muscle memory and strengthening, and intonation and tonalization.
Third, I had to develop the appropriate technology to satisfy the requirements of a music-based educational system of maximum efficiency, that is simple to teach and learn, and dare I say, fun. The result was the Kinderfiddle, a kinesthetic stringed instrument simulator, and accompanying methods. (Reference patent no. US 7,622,633 B2 by Mark J. Casillas and Stephanie H. Casillas, and complementary method books copyrighted by Mark J. Casillas and Stephanie H. Casillas)
The Kinderfiddle system is designed primarily for students aged 4-7, but can always be taught to younger as well as older children. The implementation of the Kinderfiddle system begins with Sing and Play. Students sing folk songs and kinesthetically accompany themselves on the Kinderfiddle, developing all the mental and physical constructs of stringed instrument practice and performance. The accompanying method book is conceived as a kindergarten class through music. It is designed to combine the deconstructed elements of early elementary education: numbers, colors, shapes, and alphabet, all together into a unified, interactive, creative, and entertaining musical learning experience.
The notation created for the system, Symbologic Music Notation, is designed to be intuitive and instinctive, and is constructed of circles, squares, and triangles, to communicate the rhythms of song and motions of the Kinderfiddle. The system is progressive, and methods advance to the Finger Gymnastics and Rhythmics, when advanced music technique can be deconstructed, practiced, and mastered early in a child’s musical life.
The Kinderfiddle Method for Children continues to build out from the musical core into science, mathematics, language, and history, as a synergistic web. Each lesson consists of a theme, which is visited through the many subjects. One example might be how the pitches and vibrations of violin strings are like colors of the rainbow, conducting to the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, locating Germany on the globe, the story of how Beethoven overcame deafness through his music, the radiation of the Big Bang, all under the theme, “Waves”.
It must be noted that the goal of the Kinderfiddle system is not for the student to be a great musician, but rather for the student to think like a great musician. The public education era of the 20th Century began its reign out of the religion-based education that preceded it. Educators stripped religion out of the system, compartmentalizing subjects into separate file cabinets that only opened and closed one drawer at a time. The failure was that point-of-view was never replaced with any adequate substitute. Without point-of-view, there was no content, no story, no insight. In my opinion, music should replace religion in public education at the core, to restore the context and purpose of thought banished from public education in the last century.
In the many historical writings on Paganini since his death, his amazing techniques have been dissected and digested. He would break one of his four strings and complete a dazzling torrent of notes on only the three strings remaining. No one knew then that he changed the tuning of the remaining strings to make the feat possible. He was perhaps as much a magician as he was a musician. There is always a way to make anything work, if only the tricks can be known. With the proper tools and techniques, learning can be magic.