At the 3:00 p.m. rehearsal at Carson Middle School in Pittsburgh, I remove my violin from my royal blue Tonareli. Don’t ask me what a Tonareli is.
Here’s what you should be concerned about: It sounds Italian, so it’s expensive. Chamber orchestra is the only extracurricular that requires an application, interview, and audition in the entire middle school, which means chamber players are the elites, the hallway celebrities strutting the few hundred feet between last period and rehearsal room with special fake leather sheet-music folders slightly too big for backpacks, a problem that has been solved by “reluctantly” pinning them to chests with crossed arms, done with sufficient care that non-chamber players like Joel and Janice can see the folders’ gold corners and laminated name-tag pockets. No one else in the 6th grade chamber orchestra has a Tonarelli.
It’s pretty sick to be able to tell everyone in the “regular” orchestra that you are a “chamber violinist” or cellist or whatever. Sure, Julia from social studies might not want me back. But do I really care? No. Because in the white-walled arena that is the rehearsal room, I am 1996 Michael Jordan. 2012 LeBron. 2000 Shaq. This is my kingdom.
There’s just one problem: if I’m better at violin than the “regular” kids, then what do I do about the other chamber violinists around me right now? How can I prove that I’m better than them? In an ideal world, I’d create a kind of chamber chamber orchestra in which I reign supreme.
Oh, right. I’ve done that. And I’m not just talking about the Tonarelli. I’m talking about my Snow Model SV200. A $1,700 beast from the workshop of master luthier Xueping Hu.
It is the perfect violin. My perfect violin. Hu may have bent and carved the Italian spruce and maple, but my baby was delivered to me straight from God Himself.
It happened two years ago in an Episcopal elementary school. Miss Crystal, my music teacher, led me to our usual practice room in the basement for our weekly lesson. Usually, she would tell me to open my rental case and get to tunin’, but today was different. I had finally outgrown my three-quarter-size violin, which meant no more neon green washi tape to mark notes on the fingerboard, no more letting the curious Joel and Janice screech out a couple measures of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on playdates, and most importantly, no more rentals. Miss Crystal had brought five violins from the music store to the basement for my perusal, and she was now waiting for my word before going back to the store to tell the owner: Oscar has made his decision. It was time to choose. My own full-grown violin. The kind professionals use. The kind that throws other kids off their game before seating auditions.
And now, I am playing a Snow violin made from Italian wood by a Chinese luthier. Some objects go through so many hands that your possession of them makes you feel special, like you have been gifted something from the world and chosen to be its final destination. By some random assemblage of events, my violin is here. It chose me. I love it for that.
Plus, it complements my Tonareli. People—orchestra kids and laymen alike—always ogle at the royal blue case, which can get annoying, but truthfully, that’s why I bought it. So everyone would know I’m a serious musician with a seriously permanent instrument—the kind that demands a Versace Miami Mansion for a case.
My violin is more subtle, elegant. It still likes to show off from time to time, but the varnished maple where the wood’s grain erupts like lines on a seismogram is only on the back. When the chin rest is nestled between my left collarbone and mandible like it is now, all I can see are soft grain lines—vertical stripes so thin and numerous that they don’t even appear on the instrument’s face until you’re up close. In the mass of an onstage orchestra rehearsal, my violin does not stand out. Like everyone else’s, my bow sheds rosin dust like spilled flour when I scrape it against the metal strings, all four of which are twisted onto pegs in exactly the same way to produce exactly the same open-string notes when we tune.
At least, that’s the goal. Some kid—the same one who played a C-natural instead of a C-sharp on the third measure of The Palmetto Suite during seating auditions a few days ago and was subsequently told to move five chairs back—always screws up our sound. He just sits there. Every rehearsal. Pretty much out of earshot from the conductor. Turning the peg too much. Making the G-string go limp.
Still, this kid and I are both just playing violins, regardless of how much I want to snap the neck of his for tarnishing the esteemed reputation of the 6th grade chamber orchestra with a bad ear during tune time. We’re both secretly afraid of the day the E-string’s catgut core can’t take the tension anymore—when it’ll tear through the gold coating to whip us in the face before the liberated spirit of whatever animal whose small intestine we were using to play our rendition of “Star Wars (Main Theme)” decides to haunt us. Really? You’re using my carcass for THAT? says the sacrificial lamb.
Mr. G-string and I also both put our noses on the half-inch slits a little below the fingerboard to get a quick whiff of the inside of our violins before concerts—the same way NFL players jolt themselves with smelling salts. We’ve traded ammonia for the sweet maple hidden in that wooden cavity, the hide glue that still smells like boiling bones, and the thin layer of white sap powder forming under the f-holes. The inside of a violin smells like wilderness. One instrument might differ slightly from another depending on if it was made with spruce or rosewood, but just how all forests’ earthiness is really just a product of a few basic components—dirt, plants, water, animals—so too are violins’ odors standardized: wood, varnish, sap, bones. At the end of the day, everyone is working with the same tools.
Unless you have a Tonareli. Or a seismographic grain pattern on the underside of your violin. The kind other 6th graders can only see when you rest the instrument vertically on your left knee because they’re seated behind you. The kind that draws their attention and makes them think, Fuck. Look at that $1,700 Snow model SV200 from the workshop of master luthier Xueping Hu.
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
