Toilet Training?

October 22, 2008 at 11:32 PM

Greetings,
Because of the way I organize my library I tend to associate different areas of study with different parts of the house. Since my literature my literature on Bhuddism is stacked in the lavatory it will forever be associated with the porcelain and early morning ablutions. Once the mind moves in a certain vein then if you open any book at random related information will almost always pop up. Thus today I opened one of these tomes this morning and it was discussing our over attachment to things and the need to –lighten up- on just about everything because it really doesn’t matter that much.
Well lightening up has been on my mind for a while. One of the many faults of my playing over the years has been using the bow too heavily. A truly beautiful violin sound comes fromm drawing the sound out of the instrument rather than pressing the strings. Whereas in my case this is a technical deficiency I think there has actually been an overall trend towards `heavy` playing with adequate contrast over the years which often makes it a relief to turn to players such as Oistrakh and Milstein (or Julia Fischer for that matter....) and just take a breather.
On a technical note, I find it invaluable to spend at least thirty minutes every day on exercises that isolate sound points and use as much bow as possible. One of my favorite exercises is the pulsing exercise. The importance of working on this relates very strongly to the idea of drawing rather than pressing. One can do a pulsing exercise by adding weight on each impulse or try to avoid this and really focus on increasing speed and keeping the necessary weight increase to an absolute minimum. It is this small but crucial difference that makes the difference between moderately useful bowing work and really learning to lighten up and make the violin ring as much as possible. After doing this kind of work one starts to become conscious of how perhaps one is using primarily an increase in weight to provide musical expressiveness.
The use of variety of bow speed may actually be missing from one’s palette. That is in essence, half a bow arm.
Cheers,
Buri

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Toilet Training?

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