Comments

Very helpful as usual. Would I be the only one interested in knowing what a practice routine should contain for a beginning intermediate player practicing about 1 or 1 and 1/2 hour? We don't get around to thirds.

Ihnsouk

Greetings,
I’m afraid it’s not really possible to write out a practice program for another teacher’s student except in broad generalizations and even those can be wildly off the mark. For example equally reputable teachers hold very divergent ideas about which kind of double stop interval to teach first, what kind of vibrato to teach and in what order and so on. Factor into this that a teacher is only using these principles as guidelines and should have clear reasons for deviating from them related to the nature and talent of the student.
So for what it (isn’t) worth here are some brief thoughts.
If a student has one and a half hours to practice I would divide it into two forty five minute periods. The first one is devoted to technical work. The second to musical. This order may be reversed on occasion. Another -very- healthy option is to divide the practice session into half music and half technique irrespective of length. This procedure was strongly advocated by Kievman.
In the technical session I would divide the time roughly in half between scales and etudes although you might want to spend slightly longer on the former.
The scale work might include:
1) 2 octave scales in one key.
2) One finger scales on one string (highly neglected, but vital from early on)
3) Acceleration exercise.
4) Scales with different rhythms and bowings.
5) Scales in octaves, 6ths, 3rds,
6) Don’t neglect arpeggios and chromatic scales.

You will have to work out a system so that all of these are covered in a week if you can’t do all of them every day.
At weekends I would change what you do for variety. That is, work in the finger patterns recommended in Gerle`s book `The Art of Practicing the Violin.` a must read for all students and parents. Basics also have the finger @patterns and how to practice thirds. 6ths etc in one pattern for a whole session. Just keeping the same spacing between the fingers for a whole session has a remarkable effect on stimulating clarity of mind and technique. Very powerful.
The etude work should be part of a systematic approach by the teacher. But one should cover basic bowings everyday, including a lot of work on string crossing.
As far as working on a piece is concerned this is usually a waste of time. I strongly recommend you read Burton Kaplan`s book `The Development of musicians` or something like that. There’s only one. It’s easy to find Shar etc. That will give you a very clear approach on the different reason why one might be practicing and a very clear plan on how to improve ones pieces without just scratching randomly at them.
It is also very important to have system of recycling repertoire. That is, just play through one old piece of repertoire a day to keep it under the fingers.
Listening to recording and following scores is also an integral part of practice on top of the hour and a half mentioned here.
Cheers,
Buri

Great stuff on thirds, Buri. Double stops are my nemesis (well, one of them :) ) and I'm always looking for new ways to think about them. Thank you, Buri. This is exactly what I was looking for. I'll get the Gerle's book and read Kaplan's book again. In a book, often things don't stand out in a way that I can adopt. Thanks.
Ihnsouk