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Brian Hong

Concepts and Analogies: Make your practicing easier and more fun!

The credit for this blog goes to my amazing violin teacher here in VA, who taught me all these things and completely changed my stance as a musician, and therefore I am so indebted to her for that.

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I am sure this has happened at least once to all of you: Everything in your practicing is going so well, you’re improving, you’re playing in tune.  Then all of a sudden, one day, something doesn’t go right.  Then another thing, then another.  You’re not playing musically, you’re having problems with technique, and your body is tensing up as a result.  And then, in order to combat this sudden musical “fever”, if you will, you start doing every single complicated kind of practice you can think of, thinking that in time everything will get better.  But it doesn’t.

Has this happened to you?  I know it definitely has for me.  But what can we do to fix it?

I believe that we as musicians sometimes forget the easy, analogy-ridden way we used to be taught when we were beginners, before we knew all about tone, musicality, and technique.  Instead, we start to find every single possible way to practice a difficult section of a piece: breaking it up, playing it slowly, doing exercises, all in order to make the phrasing flow easier and make it be technically smoother.  This is all well and good, and much of the time, it works.  However, when everything doesn’t go as planned, we start questioning ourselves and we wonder, deep inside (don’t deny it, we know we do), whether what we’re trying to fix will ever get fixed, whether we’re cut out for violin playing, etc. etc. 

But why put yourself in these blue funks?  Sometimes complicated thinking makes things….well….complicated.  Let’s make things simple-grab a glass of prune juice and let’s go!

I think that one thing that could truly make life easier and more fun while practicing is that old idea of concepts and analogies.  These were things that were used on us when we were little kids (“Make sure your left thumb makes a mouse hole”, for example).  Why not go back to those days and apply them again?  It can really make for a wonderfully efficient, entertaining, and ultimately rewarding practice session.  I can share a few of those concepts here and I’m looking forward to hearing some of yours!

There are those passages in which the technique is so difficult or awkward that it makes the musical line very chopped up and hard to stitch together seamlessly.  For me, practicing them slowly does not really help; in fact, it just makes it harder to play musically since everything seems heavier.  However, there is a sort of “quick fix” of sorts.  Imagine a thin, unwavering laser beam that shoots out from your fingerboard through the tip of your scroll and out into infinity.  Then play the passage just a BIT undertempo, but make every single note travel along that laser beam, shooting them out into infinity along the laser.  Do not let the notes waver, fall off the laser, or bounce too high.  Just let them travel smoothly.  If done correctly, this will make your musical line so much more intact and smooth, not to mention it’s a lot of fun!  Also, since you will most likely be concentrated on making the laser not waver, your violin will most likely stay still and straight-another bonus of practicing this way.

We also have those times when our sound becomes forced, pinched, and too thin.  That is something we never want.  Another simple concept which could greatly affect that is simple: imagine that, whenever and whatever you play, you make sure that you play so that you make the bottom of your instrument resonate.  Sure, we can all scrape the top of the strings and press in to make the sound bigger, but simply trying not to play the top of the instrument, yet playing to the very bottom plate makes a huge difference in tone. 

And, finally, I know that we all at some point develop tension in our left arms.  We end up grasping the violin too tightly and our vibrato, intonation, and muscles suffer.  My teacher told me to imagine one of those old fashioned, two side balance scales.  One side is the part of the violin that tucks into your chin, the other side is the scroll and where you hold the violin with your hand.  First of all she said to straighten out my neck bones so that they sit comfortably on top of my spine.  Then she told me to let my left arm “hang” on the scroll end, so that I’m not holding up the violin in any way.  And since that side of the scale would hang “down”, the other side would go up, into your chin.  The violin would almost feel like its drooping down, but if you look in the mirror, it actually shouldn’t be noticeable.  What will be noticeable is the huge relief of the tension in your arm, since the violin will be held up, but without any effort on your arm’s part.  This was hugely helpful to me, and something I am working on at the moment.

I am not saying these concepts should go in place of your complicated practice; this is just a fun, friendly way to vary your work, put your spirits up, and to make things easier for you so you can do much less of the tiring, intensive stuff.  It’s surprising how much of playing the violin comes from the state of your mind, not the muscle memory.   

I would also like to bring up a point that the great violin pedagogue Drew Lecher made in a blog of his here on Violinist.com.  Mr. Lecher basically wrote, “The violin is a piece of cake!  Have fun with it and play your heart out!”  Yes, we should do intensive studies to keep up our technique or to improve it, but the majority of the reasons why we play music are for the fun and joy of it, and these little exercises could drastically affect your practice for the better. 

Or you could just go and eat some prunes.

Brian

7 replies | Archive link

Playing pieces before you are ready for them; an ever increasing problem in today's music world.

 A little over a year ago, a very young girl, still in her single digits, played a Paganini caprice at a festival I was attending. It was in a masterclass for a famed violinist. To be honest, from my point of view, the performance was absolutely horrendous; it was completely out of tune, forced, with no musical content in it whatsoever. However, to my absolute dismay, the instructor praised her endlessly about how much of a genius she was and how she was incredibly gifted. Yes, the girl was, and still is, incredibly gifted. However, she was not technically or musically ready for that piece or any other piece she was playing at the time; all of them surpassed her skill level.

To me, this is a huge issue in the modern world of violin playing. Too many venues I go to offer me a recital, masterclass, or, God forbid, a competition in which someone is playing a major piece of the violin repertoire, ranging from Ravel’s Tzigane to the Beethoven Concerto, far before they are ready for it. It is true that there is a huge amount of incredibly gifted players in the world, but not all of them are a Sarah Chang or a Yehudi Menuhin. I posted this opinion on my Facebook page, and many of my friends agreed and commented. One of them made a simple yet thought-provoking statement. “I always see people who play Mendelssohn before Mozart or Bach or Bruch or any fine pre-requisite concerti.” This is true. People skip to the more famous, more commercial pieces that are likely to impress, not realizing that, in this particular situation, that Mozart or Bach is just as, if not more difficult than the Mendelssohn.

I believe that the main reason people play these pieces and think that they can get away with it is because in their heads they think that, “Oh, it’s [insert famous piece here], so I can play it uncleanly and get away with it as long as I play with passion”. And that, my fellow colleagues, is the crucial issue. No, you cannot get away with playing it uncleanly, even if it is a very musical performance. Yes, the music in some ways matters more than the technique, but there needs to be a certain technical standard which must be set in order to let the musicality shine. This doesn’t mean that the performance has to be perfect, though. Only a certain number of students, or professionals, for that matter, give technically “perfect” performances. I just mean that the piece cannot be beyond comprehension, that it must sound inspired and technically sufficient in order to be a convincing performance.

If there is one thing I learned this summer, it is the benefits of waiting to play a difficult piece until you are ready for it. My teacher at the summer festival I went to had a discussion with me about this. I told him the story of the little girl and the Paganini caprice, and he looked at me and said coolly, “I would have given her the first Rode caprice and asked her to play the introduction”. That quote had a profound effect on me. The Rode caprices are underplayed today; too much so. The teacher explained that the reason that so many kids play Paganini early and skip Rode is because of the fact that most music schools require a Paganini to be played in their auditions. This bestows a false sense of impatience in teachers and parents alike. I always ask the question: Does this help students? It has come to the point that people find Paganini caprices to be a whole set of pieces full of technical difficulty. They feel that if they get the technique, that’s all they need, they don’t need to play musically. Oppositely, there are kids who play it almost too musically and let the technique slide. 

That, friends, is where Rode is invaluable. In Rode, everything is obvious. If you make a mistake or play out of tune, it’s noticed. Plus, every single caprice has a huge musical statement to make; they are works of art that are meant to be played beautifully. To prove my point, listen to Oscar Shumsky’s recording of all the caprices. It is absolutely breathtaking, and in more than one instance I found myself with tears in my eyes. In my own humble opinion, I feel that Rode is actually harder than Paganini in many aspects. While, technically, it may not be as “flashy” as the up/down-bow staccato, left hand pizzicato, and harmonic-riddled Paganini caprices, musically, they make more of a statement, and it is a great way to work with a student on finding their musical identity while still focusing on basic fundamentals like intonation, correct and expressive bowing, and varying vibrato. They can get that with Paganini, but if they are not ready, they will most likely be overwhelmed with the technique.

The music world has changed drastically. Gone are the days of Auer and Galamian, who would rather impress upon students the genius of Bach and the fundamentals of technique found in exercises and etudes like Rode. Still, today, there are still a great amount of teachers who don’t give pieces to students until they can feel that they can play it convincingly and with good technique. I have been lucky to study under people like that; the pieces I play always challenge me in different ways, but they are not completely beyond my musical and technical ability. I am not saying that I don’t have much to learn, though. Quite the contrary. However, I have never been pressured to learn all the flashiest and biggest pieces known to the repertoire before I have covered basic pieces, and I feel that I have grown immensely from that. I think that the music world could be much cleaner, more friendly, and with more healthy competition if some teachers toned down their aspirations for their students and helped develop their technique and musicality instead of pushing it upon them. In that same vein, gifted violin students would become more than overrated so-called “prodigies”….they would become artists.

But what do I know? I’m just a kid.

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