Switching on the "Mood". Technical Works for AMEB Grade 8 (are they crazy??)

September 28, 2006 at 11:22 PM

I've been playing some easier pieces lately to compensate the with more time needed to learn the technical works for Grade 8. In particular, Meditation and Theme from Schindler's List. They are beautiful melodic pieces, but in order to play them beautifully, you need to be in the right mood.

I wonder how you can just switch on the correct "mood" everytime when you play a certain kind of music. I believe this is where I fail to play more expressively (among other problems).

By the way, I've just counted, there are 118 different "items" required for Grade 8 Technical (e.g. A major 4 Octaves 8-slurred would count as one, E major broken chords 3 Octaves in 4-slurred, C# major subdominant arpeggios 3 Octaves 12-slurred, double-stop 2 Octaves C minor harmonics in 3rd etc etc), and the list goes on. I had to use Microsoft Excel to list them all down in case I forget to practice anyone of them! Where am I going to find the time for my 4 exam pieces???

From Jim W. Miller
Posted on September 29, 2006 at 1:22 AM

Record it and see if that really matters.

From William Yap
Posted on September 29, 2006 at 3:09 AM

I hated listening to my own playing with a recorder. I'm so overly self-critisizing it discourages me to touch the violin again. My teacher suggested I don't record if it becomes too discouraging.

From Jim W. Miller
Posted on September 29, 2006 at 7:25 AM

If your teacher said that, that's what he wants you to do. If it was me, without a teacher, I'd record just a line or two and fix the first thing I didn't like, and so on, until I liked that line or two. Then I would go on to the next couple of lines. It might be near impossible at first but I think the effect is additive and by the end of it, you wouldn't have to change much. I'd pick something very easy, probably not a piece I was working on.

Something that impressed me about Joey Corpus was he said in a interview somewhere that violin playing is about learning to hear. With most instruments I think the natural tendency is to improve at some rate no matter what you do. I don't know if intonation just gets better naturally though. If it does, it probably takes a long time, so it's important to learn to hear violin well. I can tell you the effect isn't because it's close to your ear. I know this because a similar kind of thing happens with an electric guitar with the amp clear on the other side of the room. The act of playing can have a masking effect on your hearing. Maybe it diverts your attention from where it would optimally be. As technique becomes second nature, attention seems to naturally broaden. All you have to do to sound very, very decent on violin is just play in tune and in rhythm. Oddly enough just playing in rhythm won't get you by on guitar or piano. Apparently most people listen for the same different things from different instruments when they're judging quality - almost as if people are so cringing that they're going to hear out of tuneness that if they simply don't they're ready to throw money, phone numbers, underwear, etc. This is all theoretical of course:)

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Switching on the "Mood". Technical Works for AMEB Grade 8 (are they crazy??)

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