Violin technique: A Position on Positions
I think it is wonderful that v.commie is now seeing more and more adult learners (teachers are adult learners too, BTW!) posting ideas, questions and performances. As far as this last is concerned, one of the biggest black holes appears to be in regard to shifting/positions. For me it seems that the moment I use these labels, a sense of the issues involved may begins to emerge, since shifting and position are not the same thing.
To try and get a handle on this I’m going to use a weird metaphor. Let’s say that every time we play something on the violin the left hand decides to take a road trip. Before this trip, once it has chosen a destination it’s going to have to know where that place is situated geographically, what to do there and how to get there. If we apply this idea to students who are about to embark on the exciting venture into positions this translates into the following issues:
- Knowing where the hand is.
- Knowing what range of notes exists in that position.
- Knowing how to get there.
If we neglect consideration of one of these things, the end result may be less than salubrious. Some otherwise excellent methods and approaches to violin playing (both old and modern) do indeed fall short in this regard. That is, they fail to aid the student in understanding left hand technique in a wholistic sense and how its component parts interact with each other.
There is a strong tendency in the majority of violin methods to start in first position, stay there for an awful long time, and then start work on third position "because it’s the next easiest." How one gets there is often somewhat glossed over. There is a baseline assumption that once a student know that "the first finger is placed where the third finger was in first position" and has done an exercise repeating said note with these two digits, they are ready to try out some little ditty that requires applying the substitution.
Of course, competent teachers fill in the blanks on how shifting should be done, but there is a huge gap between the hit and miss exercises presented in some otherwise excellent method books and, for example those by Drew Lecher in his Manual of Violin Technique, which clearly has the learner getting used to using a guide finger and open string drones to hone the student's ear. In that particular book, there are dozens of variations on a simple glide into third position, providing much needed and varied practice.
This lack of of adequate isolated practice material is important, and students would be well advised, under the guidance of their teacher, to supplement their studies with something like the Yost shifting exercises which can be downloaded from IMSLP. This would take care of how the road trip is actually carried out!
However, I think the underlying problem is actually an over-concentration on latitude rather than longitude, right from the beginning so that the player becomes psychologically inhibited about moving up the fingerboard. That is, way too much time is spent in only first position before the seemingly logical "next step" of a new position is introduced.
If, on the other hand, the student has, as well as as the relatively long period of time spent in first position (not in itself a bad thing), been encouraged to move up and down the fingerboard from a longtitudal perspective finding harmonics, perhaps matching note from first position on other strings or trying to find a note the teacher plays on a certain string they will find the idea of having the hand in some place called third position as completely non-threatening. Furthermore, if that student has already begun one-finger scales, something that is highly neglected in the early stages of learning, moving between these "position thingies" is both psychologically and physically considerably easier.
Then there is the question of what happens in a position, or, referring back to my metaphor, what are we going to see on our trip… One of the great "secrets" of violin playing (thankfully not a secret at all) is that the more concretely you know the small number of basic finger patterns involved, the more efficient the mind is at decoding what’s written on a page and sending out appropriate instructions.
This is explained and illustrated in great depth in a book by Robert Gerle called The Art of Practicing the Violin. As one masters these patterns (Drew Lecher’s book is ideal for this) one begins to analyze whatever we are playing, be it a scale, a chord or whatever, in chunks. From this work, one becomes faster and faster at instant recognition of what the left hand is doing, which opens the door into the higher levels of violin playing. This understanding of patterns is often neglected in favor of a piecemeal teaching approach in which during the lesson a teacher will point to an individual note and say it’s in the wrong place, or sharp or flat , instead of giving the student the tools to figure out this kind of things in advance.
So, that’s pretty much it. The student needs to be fearless and relaxed in moving up and down the fingerboard, making connections between where the hand is when certain notes are played on each string, and what notes fit into that particular position of the hand.
Once this more free and relaxed state is achieved, the student is ready to play the two octave scales first presented in Galamian’s scale manual, in which all positions are covered in all keys with the mind controlling their concomitant finger patterns. Whenever a student asks me about how to practice a certain piece one of the first bits of advice I give them is: practice those scales in the key of the work before anything else. In the same vein, a student who is able to work in more technical depth on the kinds of things mentioned above has a much better shot at playing the Vivaldi A minor concerto than using the concerto itself to master where third position is, how to get there and where on earth the fingers are supposed to go.
You might also like:
- Practicing Shifting by Speeding Up, Not Slowing Down
- Kurt Sassmannshaus: Developing High-Level Violin Technique in Young Artists
- Violin Technique: Shifting and Sevcik - Defining the Fingerboard
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Replies
Thanks Raymond,
It looks interesting. I would like to take a look at the whole approach. However, for beginners it might be having to take care of too many factors at once and I think it is important to avoid creating tension. I would like to see 5ths introduced at a much earlier stage since they promote stability and correct angling of the finger tip.
Regards,
Buri
One point that definitely stood out to me: “Way too much time is spent in only first position before the seemingly logical ‘next step’ of a new position is introduced.” My first teacher felt that I was ready to start position-playing after I’d had the first 3 months of lessons. She was right. I took to this area of study quite readily and am thankful, indeed, for this early intro to the positions. Side note: for some years now, I’ve used 3rd as my starting position for daily warm-up drills - before moving down to 1st position to stretch the left-hand muscles further.
One question I’ve had from guitar players: “How do you know where the positions are?” - i.e., with no frets to guide you. The best answer I can give is that it’s a combination of pitch sense and muscle memory - hearing the upcoming notes mentally and using shifting drills to get a feel for the distance between one position and the next.
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May 22, 2024 at 10:48 PM · Very nice post. What do think of using intervals across the strings as a way of determining fingerings in all the positions? For instance, do you think it’s helpful to transpose the first position fingering of a minor sixth, A natural and F natural on the G and D strings, to an octave higher on the D and A strings, and to another octave higher on the A and E strings - all using the same first and second finger pattern. Would this be helpful for beginners? I came across this system via a book on violin technique by Andre Mangeot.