The Best of All Things Viola: American Viola Society Festival 2024

June 22, 2024, 1:19 PM · So much viola and so little time...

The Primrose International Viola Competition and American Viola Society Festival took place last week at the Colburn School - starting Monday and wrapping up tonight. There were dozens of other solo recitals, group viola recitals, and workshops. Plus there was entire competition as well.

I could go for only one day - on Thursday - but it was a brilliant day.

Violists dance!

I started the day at Karen Rischter's "Get Grounded!" workshop. Karen is a violist who also teaches dance, and the class promised to "a session of embodiment and alignment, to strengthen our connection to gravity and play from our more deeply connected hearts."

We talked about the 5Rhythms dance movement, which was founded in the 1970s by Gabrielle Roth and focuses on five "body rhythms." Those rhythms are: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. We danced the whole class, working through the various rhythms with a crazy array of musical genres. We worked in groups, following and leading, as we would in chamber music.

After that, I have to admit I needed to sit down for a bit.

But instead, I ran into a friend who was having her strings updated by the people from Thomastik in a string consultation. So of course, I joined in. She played her viola, I played her viola, they changed the strings back and forth. In the end, she decided on Rondos on the A and D for clarity, and Peter Infelds on the G and C for warmth and that rich deep viola sound. It reminded me that some day I need to have a loud viola, a soft viola, a Mozart viola, a Brahms viola, and at least half a dozen others.

L-R: Violists Sakari Dixon Vanderveer, Kira Blumberg and April Losey, testing strings.

After lunch I went to a wonderful lecture-recital given by DePaul University Associate Professor of Viola Ann Marie Brink about music from Chicago-based composers. The program spanned music from 1850-1995. The highlight for me was a "Barcarolle" for Viola and Piano by Blanche Blood (1882-1933). (Download the music here.) Most of her music has been lost, but this was simply lovely.

Mid-afternoon was the time set aside to mingle with the exhibitors. Hundreds of violas were available to try, and at least half a dozen were being played at all times. Nowhere else could you hear Hindemith, Clarke, Bach, Walton, and - surprisingly to me - the scherzo from Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." That's not one of the pieces I use to try out violas, being more of a "Haffner symphony" kind of person.

I browsed through Yesterday Service Sheet Music's huge selection of viola repertoire, ending up with PDQ Bach's Sonata for Viola Four Hands and Harpsichord, some duets for my students and me to play together, and Kenji Bunch's Four Flashbacks for Clarinet and Viola.

I absolutely need to play the PDQ Bach at least once in my career.

I wandered up and down the aisle mingling and soaking in the viola-ness of everything around me. It's a great feeling of camaraderie. One of the vendors said that he goes to a ton of these kind of conferences, and the viola conference is the only one where people seem to like each other. Hah! But in all seriousness, people were very supportive of each other. Young and old, new friends and old friends.

My final workshop of the day was a two-and-half-hour behemoth - and the whole reason I went: "Building a Better Practice," lead by Molly Gebrian and Sarah Niblack. Molly Gebrian is a violist and neuroscientist whose book Learn Faster, Perform Better comes out next month, and Sarah Niblack is the founder of Spark Practice.

Their lecture was all I hoped for and more. My brain is still spinning. They talked about what current studies are showing in terms of best practice techniques.

They talked about interleaved practice as a way to build up your tolerance for performance. They talked about the illusion of mastery that is often gained during block practice (ie. What we have all been taught: play something over and over again for a long period of time) and how that illusion is broken when you have to play for a teacher or in a performance situation. How mental practice actually forms the same brain pathways as physical practice. And of course they gave ways to practice that are quite different than my usual patterns.

I came home and babbled to my family, happily explaining everything viola. I also tried an interleaved practice session today. Five sets of five minutes each, with a timer, deciding beforehand what I would work on. I came out of the practice session very discombobulated. I normally practice large chunks of music for large chunks of time. This was very small bits: five bars of an etude, thirds in my scale, a half bar of octaves in a piece. It made me focus at a very deep level. It was also fairly uncomfortable mentally, but that is part of the idea.

Hopefully tomorrow when I practice the same things again, my progress will be evident. Smacking the brain around and practicing each bit in as many ways as possible is the idea. As a yoga teacher of mine once said, "If you are comfortable, you probably aren't learning anything."

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The Best of All Things Viola: American Viola Society Festival 2024

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