March 2009

I am planning to write a thoughtful blog about a nice, fun experience performing in a string quartet for the first time. But in order to be able to do that, and hopefully stop obsessing about it, I have to get this off my chest first: I screwed up. UGH.

It was a Haydn Minuet, for goodness sakes. It never went above 3rd position and didn't even have any 16th notes. Of the two we were playing, it was supposed to be the "easier" piece.

I took a repeat 3 times, whereas the 2nd violin, the viola, and the cello only took it twice, as they were supposed to, and then they went on into the Trio, leaving me behind in the second strain of the Minuetto, in a different key. Once I realized I was supposed to have gone on to the Trio, I came in a measure behind. (At least I was in the right key at that point.) I was off for about 6 measures.

It sounded kind of interesting in a post-modernish sort of way, and most of the audience was eating dinner anyway. The food was good and there was a lot of it. There was also an ample supply of good beverages, which had been, and were still being, indulged. Several people, including the one who recorded the whole thing, told me later (politely I'm assuming) that they "didn't notice."

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Violin Shopping--How to keep from freaking out?

March 25, 2009 04:47

My daughter's teacher told her she's going to need a full-size violin soon. I had planned to give her my current violin as a first instrument. She's not much beyond the advanced beginner stage, but is freakishly tall. I think she will play on her 3/4 size for the rest of the school year, which means she'll be 10 when she gets the full size in the summer. It was my first full-size violin too, when I was 13.

When I do this, I'd like to get myself a new violin. I've been feeling for quite a while that my violin, which cost ~$900 back in the late 70's and was good enough for me then, is limiting my progress now. I bought a Rudolf Doetsch viola a couple of years ago and the contrast between the two, for me, is already pretty striking, even though the Doetsch is not a professional-grade instrument.

But I've been intimidated by the decision and have been putting it off. This plan of waiting until my daughter needs a full-size was a stalling tactic, and I thought I had more time.

I recently realized that one of the biggest reasons that I'm intimidated by the decision is that I'm afraid of playing a variety of instruments. Because . . . I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO PLAY!

I remember that feeling of walking into the shop, getting several instruments in front of me, and then having to pick them up one by one and play something off the top of my head. In front of all the people in the store.

My daughter completely freaked out last year when we were looking for her 3/4 size. She refused to play anything in the store. We ended up buying one mail-order from Shar. I'm older and allegedly wiser, but there's still some of that in me too. I'm not much of a shopper in general. I tend to get easily overwhelmed by too many choices when they're presented to me in parallel.

So it seemed to me that maybe it would help if I set some parameters first, such as "I'll only try 5 violins at a time." And I would like to come up with about 5 minutes of music that I will memorize and play on each instrument in turn for comparison. Some thoughts I had were:

3-octave G-major scale
Fantasia on Greensleeves-has a variety of styles and ranges
Handel sonata in F Mvt. 2
Pachelbel canon arrangement with double stops
Excerpts with bariolage from Preludio from Partita in E, Bach
Excerpts from 1st violin part of Dvorak Slavonic Dance #1
Clarke Passacaglia for viola transposed up a 5th
Cincinnati Hornpipe or Harvest Home fiddle tunes

These are mostly things I've played or performed recently or in the past. Some of them highlight the low-register sound I'm looking for, some highlight the high-register sound I'm looking for. One has double stops, one has bariolage. Are there other things people would want to know?

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An In-Body Experience

March 22, 2009 05:26

Signs of spring are arriving. First, setting the clocks ahead at a truly unnatural time of year. Finally, the snow is almost gone. What this means: time to start riding my bike to work.

The last time I rode my bike to work was last November, a little before Thanksgiving. Then one of the multiple big snowstorms of the winter hit and that was it for me. My husband soldiered on, wearing his funny hat, riding on days when the roads were clear. I had a good excuse, though, especially on lesson days: I have my violin (or viola). I can't schlep that on my bike in this weather. Are you nuts?!

Teacher out of town. Sunny. Enough daylight left in the afternoon that I won't be riding home in the dark. Hmm. Out of excuses. So, last Monday, I started riding again. The distance is about 6 miles (give or take, depending on the route), from my house in Belmont to the Kendall Square area of Cambridge, pretty much ground zero for the Massachussetts hi-tech sector. Going to work, it's mostly downhill. That means that going home, it's, well, it's not pretty.

This is not wholly unlike starting to play the violin again after a break. Rewarding in the abstract, in the medium-to-long term. In the short term, well, it's not pretty either.

The biggest hill on my way home is on Trapelo Rd. It is not that steep, but it goes on and on, for more than half a mile. It's also not avoidable. My house is just at higher elevation than my workplace. In November I had gotten to the point where I took it in stride. It was taking me 45 minutes to get home, or sometimes even less (relative to 35 on my way in). But it was my first time this year and I was fast reaching this mind space where I just didn't feel like I could take it any more. But getting off the bike and walking?

I often think about music when I ride. Sometimes it helps me keep rhythm, sometimes, as when I'm driving or riding the subway, I just work on fingerings or bowings in my head. This time I was thinking about the Beethoven violin concerto, because my daughter had a 2-line simplified excerpt to play in school. Surprisingly (to me anyway), she hadn't been very impressed by the 2-line excerpt. I got out the whole recording on a CD and played that for her. Still not impressed. Weird. I'm panting, riding up this stupid hill, puzzling over my daughter's reaction, and then I think about Pei-Wen Liao, our concerto soloist last year with the Arlington Phil. She played the first movement of the Beethoven violin concerto. And she played a cadenza that I'd never heard before, that was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen.

I noted at the time, that "When she plays the cadenza, at one point it's as if there are two violins playing. Double-stop trills, two soaring melody lines. And she has a little smile of concentration on her face, setting it all in motion. She's in the cockpit of a high-performance jet, or maybe the Starship Enterprise, flying." I had tried to capture the impression I'd had, that she was skillfully and somewhat mysteriously operating a very complicated piece of machinery. That somehow she was able to delegate certain details to her fingers so that she could be present in the moment for the music itself.

I didn't have that much more hill to go, but I was hurting. I was present in the moment for the pain and panting. Not for the nice sunset in front of me in the Western sky. Not even for Pei-Wen and her beautiful Beethoven, playing in memory. I thought, well, I can't do this, but maybe my legs can. My legs can go faster. Delegate the details like Pei-Wen does. So I made my legs pedal faster. And it wasn't that bad. They were a little sore, but nothing serious. They just kept pedaling faster, and I even gained enough momentum to shift into a higher gear. I crested the hill. Nothing else between me and home but a traffic light. It turned green.

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Sponsor's Concert

March 21, 2009 09:20

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Preparing for a Recital

March 17, 2009 04:44

I am having my first recital on April 5th, at the Longy School of Music where I take lessons. I will be playing Rebecca Clarke's Passacaglia on an Old English Tune on the viola, which I've already performed in church once, so I'm feeling reasonably prepared. I love the viola as a solo instrument. The viola is where, to me, all the advice about singing and making your instrument sound like the human voice makes sense. It's not an operatic diva, it's a plain-spoken, honest song from the heart.

Unfortunately my teacher, Dianne, has been out of town on tour and won't be back until next week, so I'm also feeling a bit lost at the same time. I know the piece by heart and have been practicing it along with the piano part on the CD I have. The piece is in book 5 of "Solos for Young Violists" and there is an accompanying CD track with a tuning note, and just the piano part with the viola part very softly in the background. I only get one 30-minute rehearsal with the Longy-supplied pianist. It just occurred to me that I could try to pay for another rehearsal. While the piece is only 5 minutes long, 30 minutes doesn't seem like long enough to get used to a pianist I've never met.

When I played in church, I played with the new co-music director, who is also a music professor, and he said the piano part wasn't trivial. There is a section where the viola takes some time with the notes. It is basically a descending scale and then the piano comes in and then the two instruments move together towards a climax in a big crescendo. I can't seem to get this section right with the CD. The recorded violist takes more time than I want to, or something, because the piano is always coming in at a weird place and then the crescendo doesn't work either. The real pianist is going to have to follow me in that section, rather than vice-versa.

I am both glad and regretful about my decision to play viola in this orchestra concert. I am glad because switching between viola and violin would indeed have been too much. It has taken me a while to get settled back into viola and have it feel natural again and this recital is important to me to do well. But I am regretful because the unfortunate fact is, viola orchestral parts are not as much fun for me as first violin parts. They sound weird and incomplete when you practice them at home, all inner voices and no melody. It's better at rehearsal with the whole orchestra, but if you haven't practiced your part sufficiently at home, even that can be rather harrowing.

And, I might as well admit it here, not only do I miss playing first violin for the music itself, I miss being the concertmaster. At first, when the conductor asked me to sit there, I was nervous. It's not a role I'm used to from the past, I hadn't been playing that long in this incarnation, and my confidence about myself as a violinist was not particularly high. But the experience was good for me and helped me grow as a player. I started thinking a lot more about the music outside of rehearsal. I started to enjoy standing up there in front of other people. But practically, I really needed a break for a couple of months. Not only do I have this recital, but work is pretty crazy right now due to applying for grants related to the government stimulus package at NIH. I'm lucky to have a job at all, so I shouldn't really be complaining, but it has been hard to fit in practice time, and it's been a relief not to have to concern myself with the bowings for the section. I also missed a rehearsal due to work commitments last week, and would have felt bad about that when I was concertmaster. So it's a dilemma. I'm doing the right thing for now, but already looking forward to the next concert when I'll go back to violin.

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Meerschweinchen und glückliche Fahrt

March 10, 2009 11:16

Last spring I played Beethoven's "Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt" Op. 112, with the Arlington Philharmonic. I was carrying the music with me and the kids saw it briefly. "Meerschweinchen?" they asked. "What's that about a Meerschweinchen?" Meerschweinchen is the German word for guinea pig. As in, we have two of them living in our basement. And when both my kids were younger, in a hopeful attempt to teach them some German, I used to read them this book, Ich bin das kleine Meerschweinchen by Amrei Fechner.

"What does this have to do with a violin blog?" one might reasonably ask. Well, like everything else about the violin, it all seems to come down to practicing, one way or another. I started making a deal with my daughter: some days I would clean the guinea pig cages while she practiced her violin. The cages are in the basement directly under the rec room, so I (and they) can hear her practice through the ceiling. I can verify she is doing what she is supposed to be doing while I'm scooping the you-know-what. My husband thinks I have the raw end of the deal, but I usually don't think so. I kind of enjoy doing something mindless for 20 minutes, communing with the guinea pigs while being serenaded by "Sitka City." And I want her to practice without me, to take charge of the journey.

It's possible the whole rewards-for-practice concept is getting a little out of hand, though. I've read research that points out that if kids get rewarded for everything they do, they may never develop the necessary internal motivation. I agree that's something to think about. The issue I wrestle with is that some people don't seem to develop internal motivation no matter what their parents do or did. Or they develop it on their own schedule according to their own plan, again relatively free of outside influence. It's called "internal" motivation for a reason. And while you're waiting for it, you might as well be doing something useful as not.

While I engage in the endless search for violin practice motivators, my (German) husband has been engaged in a parallel search for German language practice motivators. When we were first married, we had this dream of raising our kids to be bilingual. I thought this would be nice for them based on my own experience learning German. Although my ancestors immigrated to the USA from Germany in the 1800's, the language had been completely lost to the Allendoerfer family by the time my brother and I were born in the 1960's and 70's. Typical monolingual American suburban kids, we had to learn it in school, and had a difficult time when we lived in Berlin for a year during a sabbatical of my father's. While I did enjoy and got a lot (including, ultimately, my husband) out of the cultural experience of learning a foreign language as a teen and young adult, it isn't the same as being a native speaker.

However, even with a native speaker or two in the house, it was never as easy as it looked from the outside. When the subject of bilingual kids came up, well-meaning people would ask, "do you speak German at home?" and it got to the point where I'd want to invite them over to my house and give them an earful of what I got when I tried to do that: Why do we have to speak German? We don't know anyone else who speaks German! And the killer: It's boooor-ing! (In English, of course).

Still the violin practicing, with reward scheme in place, had been (slowly) yielding results. And then my daughter came up with the next idea on her own. She wants her ears pierced. She's been talking about it for ages, even longer than she talked about the guinea pigs before we got them. Then another friend got her ears pierced over the weekend, and that was the last straw. She's now willing to speak German every day for 2 months if she can get her ears pierced.

This morning at breakfast there was a lot of talk about Meerschweinchen, since they are having trouble coming up with new words easily, but they are making a good faith effort. The words Geige and Bratsche are also getting more use than they ever have before. And, down below, the guinea pigs are listening to their daily concert.

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A new teacher for my daughter

March 5, 2009 15:09

Today wasn't really my daughter's first lesson. She had some back when she was 6, from a Suzuki teacher, but wasn't really ready for them and quit. We both found that to be a discouraging experience. But then, looking on the bright side, if my daughter hadn't been struggling so much back then I might never have gotten out my own long-forgotten instrument to play along with her. And I might never have been surfing the internet for teaching tips, and so might have never found violinist.com.

My daughter is now 9 and in 4th grade. She has been learning violin in school for a year and a half, and is in the middle of Essential Elements 2000 Book 2. She is certainly one of the better, maybe even the best, violin student in her school class, and she's shown she has a good ear for intonation. She still needs work on rhythm, but who doesn't? She's been asking me when she can start learning vibrato and positions other than first. Neither of these topics appears to be in the remainder of the EE2000 book.

She has also started practicing more on her own. At first she just wouldn't do that at all. I still play with her at times because I found that it helped her intonation and rhythm to play duets with me. I wrote a few easy B parts to some fiddle tunes last summer and we played them together at the Farmers' Market. But, as with positions and vibrato, I was starting to feel like I was getting in over my head.

In the fall a young music teacher joined the community orchestra where I play violin and viola. She announced that she was looking to start up a private studio, and it seemed like she and my daughter might get along. After some scheduling snafus, we had a trial lesson today, and I think it went well. My daughter wants to have more. She played pretty well at the lesson, and got a lot of positive and constructive feedback. I was amazed to see her willing to repeat passages several times when her teacher asked her to--this is something she doesn't like to do for me.

Her teacher allowed her to sit down during the lesson, and sat next to her, which I think was a big plus. I can remember both from my own training and my daughter's earlier training, a number of intimidating and/or unpleasant incidents related to playing standing up, and especially posture. Having the teacher hover over you when you are short can be just plain scary for kids. And, when she had to stand, there was always the inevitable whining about her legs hurting, her arms being tired, needing a bathroom break, and so on. Sitting, she was able to focus on playing for the entire half hour. It flew by and was over before we were ready.

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More entries: February 2009

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