October 2007
October 30, 2007 04:37
I'm really excited: I have a violin/viola teacher! After a few days of phone tag (because she's busy with rehearsals), I connected with the teacher my former teacher recommended. Based on the phone conversation, I think it's going to work out well.
She plays and teaches both instruments, although she's currently doing more violin than viola. She has similar preferences and outlook to me, though, in terms of liking the inner voices--2nd violin and viola--in an orchestra. She has played and performed several of the Bach cello suites on viola and is happy to work on them with me. She's also enthusiastic about Rebecca Clarke's music and says it's very playable for someone at my level. She said that she wouldn't feel comfortable teaching me Walton and Bartok, but we're not there yet.
However, since I'm going out of town on this business trip this weekend (the one that nixed my first orchestra performance), I can't start lessons until the 12th of November. At that time, I will have Fantasia on Greensleeves and the Bach Double to work on on the violin, and I will have the orchestra music for the December concert on the viola. I am going to try a lunch-hour lesson schedule. My workplace is pretty flexible and I believe that a 2-hour lunch every 2 weeks will be okay with my boss. I can take the T two stops and get to my lesson in about 20 minutes at the Longy Music School. I'm hoping this will provide a nice break, and that I won't be too tired to get anything out of the lesson, the way it might be if it was at the end of the workday or in the evening. I will end up bringing 2 instruments.
Last night I dreamed I had a viola that was really beat up but sounded really good. In the dream, people came from all over to see and hear this instrument with big divots out of its back. This is not the reality of my viola all, which is quite new and in very good condition. It does sound good, though not enough to attract people from miles around or anything like that. I think I'm missing the viola right now because I'm working exclusively on Bach and Greensleeves and don't have time for more.
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October 24, 2007 04:47
I finally got up the courage to call my old teacher over the weekend. She's a really nice person, and yes, I should have called her sooner. Because, like me, she has two kids and is insanely busy. As we were talking about what I had been doing since we last met (when I was 7 months pregnant with my daughter, now 8), and what she is doing now, it seemed to be becoming clearer to her that it would *not* be a good idea to take on another student right now, even one who would come to her house on weekends every 2-3 weeks.
She said she was covering a few students of a friend of hers on maternity leave, and when that friend came back to work in January, she'd have a few slots opening up. She also recommended another friend of hers, who also plays violin and viola, and said I should try giving that person a call if I wanted to get started sooner. I also brought up my two biggest goals on viola: trying out for the Longwood Symphony Orchestra and learning Rebecca Clarke's Passacaglia on an Old English Tune. She thought both of those could be realistic, although couldn't really say for sure without hearing me play--it's been a long time.
I'm not sure why I'm feeling a little discouraged. Even if this other teacher she recommended doesn't work out (and I have no reason to think that she won't), January isn't that far away. But there's still something about setting goals and saying them aloud that scares me and makes me feel weird. Other people tend to be very up-front about their goals and aspirations, and often find "shooting for the moon" to be a great motivator.
That hasn't been my experience. I tend to guard my goals and dreams, hide them, keep them to myself. I have a fear that once I say it to someone else, I will get put down in some way, be thought of as arrogant, silly, or unrealistic. Even be made fun of. That has happened.
But that didn't happen this time (one reason I liked taking lessons from this teacher, when I did, is that she's very encouraging and supportive), and I had no reason to expect that it would, from her, so I must be reacting to something else from another time and place. I think this reticence is hurting my development as a musician.
But perhaps on the flip side, if I face and get over this, maybe it will really help me turn over a new leaf.
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October 22, 2007 04:19
The kinks have still not been ironed out of the elementary string program in our school district. Last week they started a new schedule, one of the main teachers was absent, and they didn't tell the kids which classrooms to go to for their lessons. It started badly: when my daughter and I arrived for drop-off, we found a confused mother looking for her own daughter not knowing where she was supposed to go, and another girl who plays cello (who the other mother and I knew personally) crying alone, lost, in the hallway. We asked around and found out that we should start on-stage, so we directed all 3 girls there and got them settled (after my friend's daughter was found). Later, during lesson time, I got a phone call from a parent with a cell phone saying that she'd found my daughter wandering around the hallway, crying, not knowing where her lesson was. I told my daughter to ask that parent or one of the people in T-shirts (the high school student interns), and she said that it was in "room 103 or 110" and went there. Yet later, after I had already left to pick my daughter up, my husband got another call from the teacher saying that we should pick her up immediately because she was still crying. When I did pick her up, the teacher said my daughter wasn't on her list. She (the teacher) seemed a little confused and overwhelmed as well. While I was there I also saw a kid with a horn case wandering around and had no idea how to help her--didn't know her, didn't know where the horns were meeting.
I wrote an email letter to the lead teacher of the string program during the week, offering to help direct traffic the following week. He apologized and it seemed clear he was making a good-faith effort to improve the situation, but he has 340 students to deal with.
So this week I came and stayed the full 2 hours. I sat in the audience for the orchestra and took notes. I was the only parent there. Then I went to the small-group lesson, and was also the only parent there. I apologized to the teacher and said that my daughter had had trouble last week so I needed to sit in, and I would try to be unobtrusive. We verified that my daughter was on the class list this time.
The teacher, a different one from last week, was a nice high school-age kid with a viola. He had 7 3rd-grade violinists to teach. My daughter and her friend from school seemed to be establishing a rapport; my daughter helped her friend with a few things. The two boys in the class, however, were really disruptive. They plucked when the teacher was trying to talk, they put their instruments away when he wanted them to play, they gave him a hard time when he didn't immediately remember their names. They asked to play "repertoire" that they weren't ready for. The other kids in the class, all girls, were trying to pay attention, but were mostly bored.
My daughter, to her credit, played well the few things she played. She played in tune, in rhythm, and assertively. The teacher told her "very good, excellent," and she visibly brightened. She sat up a little straighter in her chair. But there wasn't enough of that; too much time was spent on crowd control and on getting the disruptive kids to sit down and be quiet. My daughter, as well as two Asian girls who looked and sounded to me like they had Suzuki experience, were looking at the clock over and over. At one point my daughter looked over at me and mouthed "booooring!"
I talked to the teacher again after class. He said it was his first time teaching and he apologized. He seemed like a good musician and was really a nice kid, but didn't have the crowd control skills necessary for a class like this. I felt bad he thought he had to apologize to me; clearly he was doing the best he could. I sympathized, too, I told him that he had a really challenging group with all the different levels to contend with. He said that he was going to talk with the lead teacher about grouping the kids by ability level, because right now it's all by grade so that any given class is a random mix of 3rd graders. I told him I thought that was a good idea, and also that he was doing a good job.
I feel like I'm in an awkward situation. The teachers are all very well-meaning and I don't want to challenge their authority or be an obnoxious stage-parent who makes their lives more difficult. I respect the difficulty of what they are trying to do: 340 young music students on Saturday morning. I want to help. But at the same time, the situation is still not working for my daughter.
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October 18, 2007 09:36
I finally got my violin bow re-haired, in anticipation of performing the 1st violin part to the Bach double, and Fantasia on Greensleeves on December 2. It meant I had to schlep my violin case around, bring it to work and back on the bus, so I would have somewhere safe to put the bow when I picked it up. "Rosin it up good," said the luthier, "or you'll be the quietest violinist around!"
That evening, while following his advice, it hit me how weird this whole process was. Why or how would someone ever think, in the first place, to rub dried conifer tree resin on horsehair and then pull that horsehair across a taut string to make a sound? And given how bad that process usually sounds at first, especially with less-than-optimal equipment, why did he/she/they press on and refine the technology? Why didn't they just give up? Amazing.
Then I started to help my daughter practice her violin with "Smart Music." Her break from Suzuki last year does seem to have helped her attitude, she enjoys playing again and has been an enthusiastic "teacher" with her best friend, who just started viola this year. The whole computer angle is a little scary: you play along with some electronic accompaniment, the computer listens to you and tells you whether the notes you played were in tune and on time. She loves it, though--and actually, so does my 4-year-old son. Smart music made him want to play her old, outgrown violin. All 3 of us were plucking our open A's and D's in time to the rhythm and trying to match what was on the screen. The software caught late notes and wrong notes and put them on the screen in red. The instant feedback seemed to be very motivating to both kids. They wanted to get all green notes, and were willing to try repeatedly to achieve that goal.
It seems like a good way to harness the computer game mentality and put it towards something useful. I can imagine there could be a concern that it's somehow reinforcing a computer game mentality, and that that could be inimical to the development of "musicality." But I don't think you ever get to explore musicality in a meaningful way if you don't have basic rhythm and pitch under your belt first. And my daughter is challenged by basic rhythm and pitch: her Suzuki teacher noticed it, her piano teacher noticed it. She has a hard time keeping a beat, or especially generating any kind of internal beat. She's instead very focused on tone and tembre. That is, does it sound "screechy" or "scratchy"?
I recognize these characteristics, or related ones, in myself too: what I hear first, naturally, when I listen to someone play are tone and tembre. I have to think about pitch and rhythm; it takes conscious mental effort and therefore it takes a split second longer. Of course over the years of lessons and practice that I've done, I've been trained to notice, and work on, pitch and rhythm, to the point that the early exercises in Smart Music are mostly trivial to me. But not entirely. I think that this type of training could probably help me clean up my own playing as well.
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October 11, 2007 04:45
This is roughly the one-year anniversary of my picking up the violin again after I took time off from it for having kids. My first blog on this site followed soon thereafter, in October 2006.
And, I am going to play Fantasia on Greensleeves again in church this December (in the same service as the Bach double 2nd mvt). I also did this piece last year; I was concerned that doing the same thing again would be boring or stale.
But it's not. I tried Corwin's bowing exercise from the "Singing without Vibrato" thread: to play long, slow bows without pressure. The technique is difficult, and I can't seem to get enough volume, let alone crescendo, especially in long slurs, with no pressure at all. But it was still an interesting exercise; it brought back what I had called a "light touch" on the Infeld Red strings. It made subtle phrasing easier, gave simple phrases shape and form and color.
It also helped me with an ongoing issue I've been working on: keeping tension out of my shoulder and left arm. I have a tendency to clamp down too hard on the instrument with my chin, especially when the music gets difficult or intense; this can cause back pain and ruin my vibrato. It turns out that one of the contributing factors to that harmful clamping with the chin was the presence of too much pressure bearing down from the bow. I was unconsciously pushing back up with my left hand and shoulder to keep the instrument up. Not good. But with less-to-no pressure from the bow in the first place, it's much easier to remain relaxed and free. I really love Fantasia on Greensleeves.
Then I chanced to look at my watch, and it was 11:25 (p.m.) I'd completely lost track of what time it was and felt like I could play for another couple of hours. But I had to stop and go to bed.
It occurred to me that this was one of the first times I had really loved hearing myself play the violin. I often love hearing other people play the violin, and I occasionally love hearing myself play the viola--but usually I just tolerated how I sounded on the violin. Practice sessions were something to be endured, maybe even enjoyed, but for other reasons: working towards a goal, seeing improvement from last time, feeling my arms, hands, and fingers moving quickly and accurately in a satisfying way, whatever, not just for the sheer beauty of the sound I was hearing.
I have come a long way from last year.
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October 8, 2007 20:31
My violist friend and I finally have a date for playing the 2nd mvt. of the Bach double in church: December 2. We'd been talking about doing this for a while, and I want to thank v.com and v.commer Jennifer Warren for making it possible. Jennifer arranged the 2nd violin part for viola. As my friend is the real violist of the two of us, she will be playing the viola part, and I'm going to be playing the 1st violin part. On the violin. My friend had seen a viola part on the web already last spring but said it wasn't very viola-friendly. We ended up tabling the idea until Jennifer's arrangement became available.
So, I guess one could fairly ask, why do this at all? Bach wrote the piece for two violins, not for violin and viola. And I have to admit, the first time I heard the 2nd violin part on viola, it was a little jarring. Here in the 2nd movement, it starts an octave down from what I'm used to, and, well, it's a little weird the first time through. But I want to bear with this and give it a try anyway. I don't feel that I'm mature enough or that my reactions are mature enough to dismiss it out of hand. I may come to the conclusion that it's better on two violins after all, or I may be invigorated by the experiment. This is a UU church we're playing in, and Unitarian-Universalist ministers like to play around with the "new wine in old bottles" metaphor. The bottles and/or the wine don't always end up spoiled in the attempt.
So I'm struggling a little bit, but not in a bad way, with how I should play my own part. I first learned the piece in 1978: it says so on the music, in my then-teacher's handwriting. 10/31/78 is written there right after letter B. An interesting Halloween that must have been. I was 13. I actually still went trick-or-treating that year--with my orchestra stand partner. And Jennifer Warren wasn't even born yet.
Okay, enough distractions, it's time to get serious. I'm supposed to be practicing. Heifetz, is he serious enough? Heifetz, on YouTube, playing with Friedman, plays the 1st violin part as my teacher had me do it: lots of shifting up and down on the A-string.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXRlnO3K3hk
But a recording I recently downloaded, with Elizabeth Wallfisch and Allison Bury, seems to do it differently. Since I've probably offended all the purists already with this violin-viola business, I might as well go all out and be honest and say I prefer this Wallfisch/Bury recording to the Heifetz one. It looks like it's an "authentic" period recording, trying to capture the Baroque style as period musicians would have played it. To my ear, this sounds cleaner and sharper, with less vibrato and more on the E-string.
This is how I want to play it too, and my violin seems to concur. Its best range is on the A and E. It has a sweet, clear, bell-like tone on those strings. This is not a viola sound, and perhaps that's the point. But on the other hand, maybe it would be better to play my part more on the A-string and lower, when possible, because it would blend better with the viola part that way. Contrast or blending, contrast or blending?
Already I'm thinking about this much more deeply than I ever did in 1978, and it seems to me that's all to the good.
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