Haslop and finding the problem

September 12, 2007 at 1:01 AM

Greetings,
Yesterday I had a great time putting together a very nice piece of work. I copied all of the e-mails in the `secrets` section of Clayton Haslop`s homepage into word. Cleaned them up and printed them out as a book. As I was reading through a number of things sprung to mind incidental to the sheer quality of the work.
First of all what a powerful tool the Internet is for making useful information available to everyone. Concomitant with this is a kind of change in people’s attitude towards teachers in a given field. For people of my age information and advice was earned the hard way. We had to earn the money, travel sweat. Often we had to earn the privilege to be granted information. Now so much is freely available there often seems ot be an assumption that teachers should freely give away their knowledge and resources without a care in the world, almost as though they have no families to support. So we sometimes see people commenting on how great violinists are ungenerous with their help (something I have never found) or I recall in Mr. Haslop`s case him being criticized on some forums for sending out commercials disguised as `violin secrets.` Well of course Mr. Haslop has to make money. More power to his elbow. But read this stuff again and one has to concede this is quite a gift. If you go through the whole lot and haven’t found anything that either inspires you or quite radically helps you playing or both then I would suggest you are the problem. (One of my favorites is great advice for a non-rest user: as you down shift raise you arm to compensate for the natural tendency to lower the instrument. Very important!)
On a different subject, something I have found very striking during my recent work with one of Japan’s best amateur orchestra which is putting on Mahler five. I got into the habit of going early to rehearsals to watch people practice and the noticeable thing was what a waste of time people were doing in the interests of learning the notes. I don’t think I have ever heard a player of any instrument recognize one of the simplest and most profound points that can be made about learning this instrument: any error or problem occurs between two notes.
Instead we hear players recognizing a phrase is not so good and repeating it ad nauseum until they give up. No wonder progress is so slow. It is an all to easy trap to fall into as I noticed myself doing the other day. I was having a little trouble with one of the exercises from Agopian`s `No Time to Practice book.` Basically, the fourth finger is anchored on an f in fifth position on the e string. The fingers then stretch back on the a string and play eff#gagf#f repeat using the following fingers: 12233 mm116 in 16ths. I tried playing it slower, relaxing and all the rest of it, but it wasn’t until I had clearly identified between which two notes the problem lay and practiced that as a discrete entity in different rhythm patterns that I was able to go back to the original and play it correctly up to speed.
We really do have to go to the source of the problem before placing it in context. `About here` just doesn’t cut it.
Cheers,
Buri

From Albert Justice
Posted on September 12, 2007 at 4:11 AM

I agree Buri. A single piece of advice from Haslop 'defined' my elbow in fast detache, has never ever failed me, and migrated to better competency in other things.

Your critique of the internet reminded me of Tyco Brahe a little. The serious minded Johannes Kepler took patronage under his influence, knowing that he had volumes of the absolute best information from direct observations of planetary motion.

The end result was that Brahe crumb fed Kepler, purportedly afraid to share his life's work in any other manner. Well, Kepler got his three laws of planetary motion correct finally, but after Brahe's death. (the elipse being the answer to actual planets behavior).

So I suppose one must agree that there are several ways to look at privelege and sharing. The internet is part of an 'information revolution'. Bringing opportunity to the furtherest corners of the world, yes the revolution will have a leveling impact eventually. But the noise involved in the leveling will be distracting for some time to come I think.

I've never seen anybody not willing to share knowledge in modern times. The guilded spirit of the past will be part of that leveling mentioned most likely. Benjamin Franklin's apprenticeship under his brother James, will become a way of 'the past'; and, probably rightly so--James was a tyrant, greedy and... Well, the rest is history.

Change, is the only constant in life. It's what we do with it that matters.

From Terez Mertes
Posted on September 12, 2007 at 4:56 PM

Well put, Buri.

From Yixi Zhang
Posted on September 14, 2007 at 4:20 AM

There is a lot to be said about expecting free information. One of my old philosophy profs used to say, ideas are cheap but it’s how your ideas get developed really counts. I really believe that. I also believe that ideas get richer and better developed when they are widely shared rather than being kept to oneself. This is why the underlining philosophy of intellectual property (copyright, patent, etc) bothers me a lot, as it tends to discourage free-sharing of ideas and creates a culture that isn't conducive to overall improvement of knowledge or humanity. That’s said, I also applaud when I see those who dare to raise the price of their products at a higher than usual level. The price itself sends a message saying that he/she is just that good. Budding artists particularly need people like that to make them feel that there may be a paying career for them as well...

Of course, once in a while, you'd see someone really good at what they do generously and frequently give out great but free advices to strangers. That makes one’s heart go squishy squishy.

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Haslop and finding the problem

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