Juste une minute

Vladimir Jankélévitch, a great philosopher and eminent musicologist, wrote in a magnificent text on music, to evoke its fleeting and ephemeral character: "Man is passionately, infinitely attached to that which lasts only a second."

There is no doubt that if the author of Music and the Ineffable had had the chance to meet the author of Just a Minute, this quote would have been somewhat revisited!

So of course, we can cry scandal! What? Just a minute?!

When the first study, strictly speaking, counts 62 seconds, the third claims 64, and we have to wait until the sixth to finally find a fair and perfect count?

But who are we kidding, false advertising!! No, thank God you were dreaming.

Page after page, you will marvel at the treasures of ingenuity deployed by Bruno Garlej to achieve the miracle of reviewing with intelligence, precision and conciseness all the difficulties that can arise on the path of the young, or less young, beginner violinist.

With an increased knowledge of violin technique, coupled with constant kindness, the most pedagogical of violinists has indeed exploited to the extreme the treasures of the first position, choosing, moreover, to give full meaning, and this is the most crucial, more than it ever assumed, to the beautiful aphorism that Joseph Haydn taught his students: "Sing beautifully, and your music will be beautiful."

As simple as that.

So, to the question of what led Bruno Garlej, among the three daughters of the Minute family, Anne, Justine and Corinne, to choose the middle one, the answer is simple: "Why play so many notes when you just have to play the most beautiful ones?"

Neither too much nor too little, the ideal dosage, just what is needed: Miles Davis said it, Bruno Garlej did it!

Nicolas DAUTRICOURT
International soloist, professor at the Versailles Conservatory