World Left-Hander Day: "We make music with the left hand"

For the Beatles, it was even convenient that Paul McCartney gripped his electric bass with his left hand.

This way he could sing into the same microphone with John Lennon without them interfering with the necks of their instruments.

Left-handed Jimi Hendrix revolutionized electric guitar playing, and Charlie Chaplin attracted even more interest as a hobby cellist because he played left-handed.

Guido Holze

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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With these three most popular examples, two Frankfurt professional musicians, who met by chance in a street café some time ago, but do not want to linger much longer - although or precisely because they are passionate about the topic, as is immediately noticeable when talking to them: Christine Vogel herself plays the gamba left-handed, Sophia Klinke, who is left-handed on the violin, is currently still in the lengthy re-learning process.

She hasn't quite reached the level of play that she struggled to achieve with her right hand from childhood, she says.

Nothing speaks against playing with the left hand

Exactly one year ago, on World Left-Hander Day

on August 13, the two Frankfurters launched their website

together .

Since then, according to its own statements, it has developed into the “leading international platform for professional musicians who play left”.

Under the heading "We make music with the left", left-handed musicians who are very successful in their home countries, such as Mexico, China, India, Argentina or Turkey, are presented with CVs and interviews on the site.

With the examples, Vogel and Klinke want to encourage people to exchange experiences and show that “there is nothing wrong with playing an instrument with your left hand”, as they say.

Accordingly, this realization is becoming more and more common in classical orchestras.

The old argument that it's better for left-handed musicians to play with their right hand because it gives them a better chance of finding orchestral employment is invalidated by the "left-handed" community that has been successful in their professions.

Even if a right-handed and a left-handed player in the orchestra play together on one podium, with a little good will there doesn't have to be elbow fighting and space scrambling.

"Relearn or quit?"

Finding the right instrument can still be difficult.

In the case of stringed instruments, for example, the strings can simply be drawn in the reverse order, so that the deep, thicker strings of the cello or viol, for example, are on the viewer's right.

The bridge, the small curved piece of wood that is only placed on the body and which lifts the strings, can also be exchanged or rotated.

It gets more difficult with the parts inside the stringed instruments: with the sound post under the highest string and the bass bar under the lowest string because they are glued – under the wrong strings for left-handers.

"But it often sounds quite good anyway," think Klinke and Vogel and advocate trying it out if in doubt.

In the meantime, Vogel has attended instrument making courses for a number of years and built her current gamba herself – an enormous technical achievement.

She first started playing the cello normally, and her first teacher told her that it wasn't so important which hand she used to hold the bow, the musician says.

"I tried both hands for a couple of weeks and thought I could do it." So she started in a right-handed stance.

When she also started playing the viola da gamba, after a while her right bow arm hurt so much that she consulted a doctor with no result.

She played well and not tensely: "But I couldn't turn my right hand the way it is important when playing the gamba." When she was studying in Leipzig, at the age of 20, she saw herself faced with the decision: "Relearn or quit." She read Walter Mengler's book “Musicieren mit links”, published in 2010, and decided to relearn: “You start from scratch.

You know how to do it.”

"Always played as if on stilts"

In principle, it's not a problem in class with the lecturers, Klinke also confirms: "You see the teacher as if you were seeing yourself in the mirror." That works quite well, although it would be better for the left-handed students if it was from Greif - and bow hand would be spoken instead of right and left.

Klinke had also held the bow to the right for years and had also written with his right hand.

It wasn't until she was 24 that she decided to change both.

"My writing looks much better now." As a violinist, she was good in the wrong position, "but always played like she was on stilts," she says.

Even if she doesn't play as well as before, she enjoys playing music with her left hand much more, so much so that she's now also learning to play the guitar.

The freelance musician, who completed her studies in Hanover and Paris, is scheduled for her first orchestral concert in November: "I'll play Mendelssohn's 'Paulus' to the left."

Left-handed musicians will be giving street concerts in downtown Frankfurt on August 13 between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m.

A concert will follow at 7 p.m. in the parish hall of the Andreaskirche (Kirchhainer Straße 2).

Admission is free.