Comments

Laurie, I love reading your blogs about violin teaching, and this one is no exception. I agree that it is important to keep the body as relaxed as possible and that this means different postures for different students. The idea of not scrunching the neck and shoulder is good, but it is difficult for those of us with long necks. Violin playing has contributed to my severe case of TMJ. I have found adjusting posture to the individual's body is especially important for adult beginners who have accumulated years of stress, wear, and tear on their bodies. When concentrating hard on doing something correctly, people often tense the involved muscles. One of my trainers in the gym tipped me off that I do it, and I see my students do it frequently. In fact, I am learning a lot about playing and teaching violin from my own experiences with physical therapists and athletic trainers. The human hands and arms are capable of many kinds of movements, and often, the muscle skills needed for playing violin are not used for anything else in our daily routines. Playing violin is so complicated physically that I often wonder how I ever learned to do it, but I'm glad I did. Mark Bjork was my teacher at a Suzuki Institute last summer and I was having major wrist problems at that point, and he helped me out a TON...almost to the point of the wrist problems not bugging me anymore.... I liked what this teacher had to say, but I would invite readers to read the threads I wrote about injury on this site. I would also invite you to read what Dylana Jensen wrote about it too. As well as the comments about this from Ricci and Perlman. The bottom line is that most of what is "orthodox" today was not orthodox before, and the way the old guys played (no shoulder rest, violin more infront of them and much lower, thumb out, not under the neck, simple write vibrato, etc.) led to a lot less injuries. Yet I doubt if many teachers today wout put up with Perlman's or Ricci's left hand thumb way out position, or with Milstein's and Francescatti's violin positon, which was very low.

I think teacher's should think about that!