The Armless Violinist and the battle of the brains

carl unthan the armless violinist. 1848-1929. this photo from 1868, aged 20 years old, first engagement in vienna, Johann Strauss conducting. carl unthan with another weapon left brain is competitive, controls, right bowing arm, even though speaking is difficult to do at the same time as play violin, grasping and comprehension are related, tool use is however privileged in the left (mechanical) hemisphere even amongst left footers right foot, hold prey or manipulate violin bow, right eye looks for prey, shoot gun (if you are Karl), separates the seeds from grit, close focus, eat with right foot (unless you are one of the cockatoos in my garden) right ear un- impeded for violin players. note- linguistic thought is not necessary for cognition or even communication. right brain (much bigger - especially in violinists) controls left fingerboard or left footboard, right hemisphere can deal with uncertainty - as in where are the notes on a violin? left foot in handy violinisits, left hand is given donkey work like scales but be aware of a surprise in the notation, look around for enemy or another violinist, left eye much bigger much than right eye, left ear assaulted by sound of violin but also assaults left side of brain due to proximity and consequently violinist cannot think much while playing because of the noise. note - a system with too much noise is unstable. conclusion - violin playing bad for the health of handy violinists; health uneffected for footy violinists.

Violin World does not tolerate left handed violinists, if you are one of the 10% of the population so orientated, then you will have to bottle your preference or go without the standard job options - ever seen an orchestra with a left handed violinist? So left is difficult, armless and handless considered the world of perversity, if not impossibility, until violinist Carl Unthan stepped into violin world consciousness. Unthan was born in East Prussia in1848, without arms, and died in 1919 - wealthy after a career on the stage playing violin - left footed! In fact playing violin hardly covers his skills. He was a first rate marksman with a rifle, performed card tricks, rescued drowning damsels in distress, un-corked countless bottles of wine, changed his costume in the twinkling of an eye, changed broken E strings mid-concert, often with a cigar in his mouth - most of which entered into his popular stage acts over the years. The violin playing of Carl was so impressive that Johann Strauss got him engagements playing in front of some heavyweight orchestras in Vienna and St. Petersburg. Apart form Europe, he toured Central and South America, before joining the vaudeville circuit of the USA. The transference of a subltle integrated haptic feedback to his feet would have assured Carl Unthan a unique position in violin history, but his transformation of handicap to a feat of feet made our hero arguably the greatest violin player of all time. Posterity has sold us short (yet again) of a recording of Unthan but he has left us his memoirs The Armless Fiddler, a pediscript (typed with two upside down pencils, one held in each foot) published by G. Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1935. They wouldn't let me take it out of the library as it is a collector's item. This book is a must for anyone wanting a first hand account of the world-wide vaudeville and freak show circuits of the 19th and early 20th century. Contemporary political correctness would have prevented a career like Unthan's today. Pity, neurolisgists would have been queuing up to scan his brain, but who to ask as a control subjects? An armless violinist could have been the ultimate cognitive conundrum to confuse the current orthodoxy of the left and right hemispheres. For a control group, I would pick the cockatoos in my garden (all left handed as far as I have observed). As the toilet wall says 'If the brain was simple enough that we could understand how it works, then we would be so simple that we couldn't'. Music supplied by The Rosenberg Foundation - Tenor Violin undergoing a PET Scan.