Today's Lesson

January 11, 2009 at 3:36 AM

I came a conclusion several months ago that I may not have the technique necessary to get into a grad school program. I have a technique but it lacks consistancy and is entirely too difficult to use. Today, this was confirmed. I had a lesson with a teacher in the cities which confirmed my worst fears about my playing; I'm still clearly working on basics. My playing needs to be broken down and rebuilt from essentially scratch. It's inefficient and I cannot accomplish any of my goals with it. The teacher was very supportive however and encouraged me to study with him to do this. He could very clearly see where my problems were with my playing and other elements surrounding my playing. He was clearly did not like the fact that I have not touched an etude in 3 year, though this was not my choice to do. We would begin the dissection of my technique with the simaltaneous study of several etudes aimed at specific problems. My learning of rep would be curved or nearly suspened during this time while I work on developing a solid and consistant technique to prepare me for the learning of the advanced violin repetoire.

In reality, I should have done this 4 years ago when I started at Luther but it did not happen. Perhaps I was too pushy in my desire to learn repetoire that resulted in this but I was also keenly interested in the pursuit of etudes during this time. The study of etudes is really the key to a solid technique on the violin and I've always thought that but some teachers disagree. Some students can learn technique by playing repetoire but learning technique by playing repetoire double's or even triples the learning time of a piece. It is not efficient nor is it useful. Seperating out "music" from technique is absolutely ESSENTIAL for mastery of the instrument. One must learn the basics of intonation from scales, arpeggios, etudes and basic music. Accurate rhythm (an ability to keep an inner pulse) needs to be learned in the practice of etudes and easier pieces of music. By easy pieces of music, I mean to say music which does not require a significantly developed technique. Also, good sound production must be learned on pieces requiring a less than fully developed left hand technique.

This is not to say that I will not audition for grad school next year, because I've applied I will. However, I am significantly leaning toward going to Red Wing and taking lessons with this teacher I found in the Twin Cities, who is a member on this site. Though, I am in no way, shape or form sure. Quite the contrary, I am completely confused to what I should do. Sometimes, I feel completely insecure with my ability to play the violin. Other times, I feel as if I was just having an off day because the next day is 10X better. However, I know that I would greatly benefit from a large dose of focusing solely on my technique or, in this case, obliterating my old one and replacing it with a new one.

I have a lot to think about and only time will tell what happens.

From Anne-Marie Proulx
Posted on January 11, 2009 at 11:03 PM

Really good luck!

Anne-Marie

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