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December 13, 2005 at 1:32 AM

Had a third lesson at Juilliard last Sunday, with Ms. Cho. It went really good, and before I elaborate I'll post this summary I typed of the things she said. It probably won't make much sense, but here it is anyway.

Don't "lead" with wrist. Passive wrist. Motion starts in shoulder.
Draw a figure 8. Maintain resistance of bow against string. Carve sculpture into string. Play around with hair, hair contact with string. Watch for middle finger. Abdomen, pulling in opposite directions. Triceps. Listen for sound. Shoulder down, elbow open and close. Breathing exercises on floor. Exhale, count as long as you can. Don't tighten shoulders. Loud counting. 3-5 per day.
Shifting -- Wait with bow for left hand.
Yost exercise -- 1 to 3 position. French and Russian shifts.
Scales -- thumb pivots. Can play in highest position and lowest with thumb in one spot the whole time. Unstable if thumb on the face of the violin.

She was talking about this exercise book called Yost -- haven't heard of it, but she explained it to me so I'll start doing those. Anyone know of it?

On the way up to the lesson we stopped at Starbucks, and I got a peppermint hot chocolate. Yuuuuuum. That was so good. On the way back we listened to the Messiah on the radio, unfortunately as we got farther from NY, it started breaking up.

--alice

Yost is out of print I think... Delay students lived off of it. It's a bunch of shifting exercises.
Hi, Alice, My teacher assigned me Yost last year. It is out of print so she loaned me her copy to xerox. It was very systematic to the point of being self evident once you know the basics of each exercise: you just repeat it in different positions.
You know...when she says maintain resistance of bow against string, and especially carve sculpture into string, it reminds me of something. When you're sharpening a knife with an oilstone and the knife has gotten very sharp and it's about to turn into a razor, you know you're holding at the proper angle to the stone because it feels very different there, something like it's slicing into the stone. Similar to the sensation she's trying to describe, I think. At least it's a similar enough sensation to me to make me think of it:) It's mechanical, so I don't know what's happening like I would if it was electrical. Some mechanical resonance maybe. Not important to know. Not interesting either. My apologies:)

I like your sound a lot in the recordings you've posted.

Just to say that you can catch "Alice's" From the Top programme on the website www.fromthetop.org
I enjoyed it Alice!
Alice, I listened to the recording of you on From the Top, and I enjoyed it, too. I look forward to hearing more. You're right: I didn't understand much of what you wrote about your lesson, but I'm sure it made good sense to you.