Here I am, playing the unique,
embellished, Stradivarius Viola at the Royal Palace,
Madrid. My son, the Webmaster, has placed another picture
of me which you can see if you roll over the Stradivarius with your
mouse.
These pages were born approximately two years ago, under the URL
www.geocities.com/krakenberger, but don't try to click
on this because they no longer exist. I'll tell you
briefly, what happened. I had published some articles on high string
pedagogy in a Spanish review called "Doce Notas",
which is edited in Madrid, and distributed all over Spain. The same
is true for the English monthly "The Strad",
specialised in strings. On Internet I found many pages dedicated
to the violin, but the ones that impressed me most were
"Connie's Violin Pages", an empire of information on violinists
and many other aspects such as, for example, pedagogy.
After contacting the author, Connie Sunday, violinist herself, and
expert in HTML (which at this stage of my life I refuse to
learn), my page was born, with her acting as web-master. We complemented
each other, and this worked very well during almost two years.
I had a total of 30.000 visitors, who consulted my texts, which
appear in Spanish, English and German. So far, I have had no negative
reactions to what I propose in my pages.
My former webmaster Connie Sunday felt she wanted to renew
her important violin pages, and I also felt it was high time I had
my own domain. I went through all the problems one can
endure in getting one's own domain when one does not know one's
way about in the Internet, and using all of the material I had in
Connie's page, which I had stored away in my computer, I got my
son, Anders L. Krakenberger,
who knows how to construct web-sites, to set up my new website.
The purpose of the site is to help students or teachers in the difficult
task to learn or teach the violin or the viola. I feel
no anger about what happened - it lasted while it lasted and was
useful to many people. That is why it is worthwhile to make the
effort and reissue the pages, this time on a permanent basis, under
my own domain www.j-krakenberger.org.
That these pages come from
Madrid, Spain, of all places, isn't a matter of chance. The
teaching of high strings in Spain is handicapped by almost
half a century of isolation from the civilised world, and this brought
about a considerable delay in methodology and philosophy
concerning high strings. 80% of all high strings in the Spanish
orchestras come from abroad. Things are improving,
but at a dismally slow rhythm. If matters continue as at present,
it will take us still 40-50 years to normalise the situation. The
worst is that nobody seems to be interested
to improve the "status quo" - on the contrary, all
points towards a preference of continuing without change, even
if results are disastrous. I sincerely hope that the student
body that reads these pages will be able to realise
that they are being taken for a ride. Only if they do,
will they be able to defend their interests.
