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Letter: Playing by numbers

Published 2 May 1998

From Kenneth Goodare

Talking of excessive precision
(Letters, 28 March, p 64), when I was a child,
my father had an English translation of a manual on violin playing by the great
Hungarian-German teacher Carl Flesch.

It told budding violinists to lift their fingers 0.3937 inches from the
fingerboard. I still have occasional visions of music students trying to measure
this with micrometers.

Horsham, West Sussex

Issue no. 2132 published 2 May 1998

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