May 2005

May 24, 2005 13:02

This week I had my ups and downs in practice, and during the first part of my lesson this morning, I felt slow and stupid, like my body feels when I try to walk under water. My left hand had a mind of its own, and nothing DM said seemed to change what that hand was doing, even though I thought I understood her.

DM's words concerning position and fingering made sense, of course, in an intellectual way. But deep inside, I was having a hard time understanding what it was I was supposed to do, and why I had to hold all of the fingers in position on the string, even though I was only trying to play one note. It seemed much easier to just place the finger needed to produce the note I wanted, for instance, just the ring finger when I wanted to play G# on the D string. Putting all of them in position felt awkward and uncomfortable, and I didn't see the point. I just wanted "Twinkle, Twinkle" to sound right.

She could see I wasn't getting it, but that I wanted to and was trying to, and so she patiently kept trying to explain things, frequently referring to "muscle memory". I understood what she meant by that, but my understanding wasn't translating into anything useful with the violin.

Finally, when we were both frustrated (although she was kind enough not to weigh me down with hers), I asked if she would play and just let me watch. So she sat down, and I stood over her, and she began to play the exercises she wanted me to do.

I watched DM's fingers closely as she tried to explain, and suddenly I understood. Keeping the fingers in position allows one to hit notes reliably. My keeping my fingers in position on the strings would help me memorize where those positions were relative to the violin and the other fingers.

As I watched even more closely, it came to me that the violinist's left hand performs a dance on the neck and strings. That dance defines the frequencies of the notes given voice by plucking the strings or bowing. Bowing is, no doubt, another, quite different, dance all its own.

As soon as this metaphor came to me, I relaxed. I love to dance, understand the process of learning a new dance, and being able to tap into that understanding allowed DM's explanations to become meaningful to me in a deep way. Muscle memory? Of course! All became clear and I saw my path before me.

Right now, for me, learning the violin is like learning to dance - it's all about position. And, as in dance, knowing the starting position and being able to return to it is of the first importance. DM had been focusing on position all along; I just hadn't accepted everything she had to say about it. When I was a child, I would have accepted her instructions much more readily.

Again it became obvious to me that to succeed at this, I must be as a child. So easy to do in some things, so hard in others. Not only must I have the playfulness of a child, I must also have a child's acceptance of my teacher's instruction. I needed, in fact, to let go of control, of my image of myself as someone with expertise. Not easy for an adult to do.

At the time, I wasn't able to voice my insight to DM in this coherent way. But I felt a resistance I didn't know I had just melt away. Maybe she could feel it, too. I think she could see that my eyes had been opened. She told me about how, when she first started teaching, she'd hand a student a book, violin, and bow, show them the left and right hand positions, and then not understand why they didn't just up and start playing. Finally, she realized her job was to break it all down into a sequence of tiny tasks her students could master, one at a time. Only then could she teach and her students learn.

Now that we weren't battling my hidden resistance, she could explain more to me and I could listen with acceptance and understanding. She suggested exercises I could do that would help me pin down the E position on the D string and the Bb position on the A string.

We learned a new song, "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and she promised "Ode to Joy" soon. Then it was over and she was on her way.

I'm exhausted, but from the emotional conflict I went through, not from playing the violin. I can see that I will be my biggest obstacle to learning.

Here on Violinist.Com, under the topic, "Practicing Well", Aleksandr Salamov says, " You must know what do you need to do...." Simple and seemingly obvious, but profound. Until today, I didn't even know I didn't know what I needed to do in order to learn to play the violin.

Now I know my next two tasks:

1. To learn to accept instruction like a child.
2. To learn the basic steps of the left-hand violin dance.

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May 23, 2005 23:41

I hit a personal high in time spent practicing today: 2 sessions of a bit more than 15 minutes each. And they were both productive.

What changed from the evil practice the day before?

I wasn't tired.
I had something to drink before I started.
I used a stop watch to measure what I could do, instead of a timer to dictate what I should do.
I relaxed and worried less about being perfectly on pitch.

The other thing I did was read a lot here about practice and technique.

And that is one of the most important sources of my confidence that I can succeed. I have this website to turn to. Being home-bound, without Violinist.com I would be without a community to turn to for information and encouragement.

I am back to having to restrain myself from running into my "boudoir" and practicing to the point of pain.

Thanks, all.

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May 22, 2005 21:29

Do not practice when you're tired. Do not practice when you're tired. Do not practice when you're tired. I'm going to write that a hundred times longhand if I do it again. It doesn't matter if I haven't practiced that day or not.

The scale that was reasonable on Saturday was awful tonight. "Twinkle, Twinkle" didn't. It was all frustrating and disheartening. For the first time, I wasn't happy working with my violin.

Fortunately I wasn't too tired to realize I should stop.

And I'm going to do a search here tomorrow and take all of the advice I find about practicing to heart.

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May 19, 2005 22:56

At 6 A.M., Her Highness, the felinity I currently serve, decides her dish is not full enough, and so she wakes me up. Mindful of my duty, I drag myself out of bed with only 6 hours of sleep to attend to her. In her defense, I must say she seems to be sharing with every skunk and coon who's figured out how to get in the cat door. She'll stand down the coons if she reaches the cat door before they get in; the skunks she ignores completely. Thank god.

Now that I'm up, I remember it's THURSDAY! And am too excited to go back to sleep. Lesson Day. Also, DM called last week a day after the lesson to ask if she could take me up on my offer to photograph her violin. I bought some special grey-covered foam board to use as a background. Maybe I can take a few shots of my violin this A.M. and calibrate things before she arrives.

As far as preparing for my lesson, well, I've been plucking loudly and with pride all week. My biggest problem is keeping my three idle fingers on my bow hand curled under. The first day I practiced, I could only do about 2.5 minutes before resting. By Wednesday, I could do an entire 10 minutes with nothing but the occasional drop-'n-shake of my right hand. Was it boring to pluck GG, DD, AA, EE, etc.? Nope. I had too much to pay attention to. My left fingers and thumb, keeping the last three fingers on my right hand curled. Sometimes frustrating, not boring.

So, all that's left is calibrating the photo-shoot. I set the foam-board up on the daybed in my study (my husband calls it my boudoir), get my camera on the tripod and use a bit of my Silly Putty (same grey as the board) to help coax my violin into standing up.

Even with diffuse light, the first few pictures have too many shadows. So I lower the ISO manually to 100 and turn off the room lights. Wow! With just the flash, the violin pops out, glossy and defined. But now it's 8:57 and she's due at 9, and I'm still in my PJs. So I run through the shower and she arrives just before I get out.

I come out of the bathroom in my terry robe and hair turban, and find her chatting with my husband in my boudoir. So of course I join in and there I am, running back and forth, taking pictures and putting them up on my computer screen for her to see. One comes out looking like violin porn, to drool over, so I crop it a bit in Photoshop and burn it to CD. At that point I realize I'm still not dressed and run into my bedroom to change.

Finally, the lesson starts. It's been very humid for several days, with almost constant drizzle or rain, and even her violin, which she had tuned the evening before, was slightly off. So she tuned it, then for fun we turned on my electronic tuner. Every string was perfect, except the D, which was slightly sharp. She adjusted her D string, which she discovered was unwinding due to a sharp (I think she said) bridge. Then she bowed a note and showed me what happened to the sound as it decayed, using the display on the tuner. She sings A, G, D, E, all perfect, as far as the tuner is concerned. Then she tunes my instrument which is much more out of tune.

DM, in her excitement about the shoot (she's had her violin de-dinged and everything), forgot to bring her dots to mark my fingering positions. Well, I say, let's try anyway. So she shows me on the A string and I manage to play a B-sharp without too much difficulty. Then a C# and then a D. Although I'm having some problems with my thumb and wrist position, which she constantly, and patiently, corrects, I can hear clearly when I'm not in position and move, sometime by degrees, to the right location.

Before she had me try, she showed me the positions, but I understood nothing, really, and hit the B-sharp by rote. Now, I stop and ask her to show me again. She does, and then shows me the relationships between the location the string is pressed, and the result. Press the string at the half-way point, and you have an octave... I love math, so we discuss that a bit too. Then we try to play guitar-style for a bit, to allow me to see the fingerboard and the positions of my fingers, but my right arm is not comfortable, and I go back to holding the violin on my shoulder.

Now we do the Ding. D, E, F#, G#. Again, I have problems with my thumb and wrist positions, which she continues to correct, but I can definitely hit the notes most of the time. We talk a bit more about math, and she tells me she sees a particular color for each note. I tell her how, sometimes, especially when I'm tired, if I listen with my eyes closed, I see curves when I hear music, as though the bars were being plotted on a graph.

It's time to play a tune, she says, so we play my first violin melody, pizzicato. I best know the piece as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". (It's the first thing I learned in high-school Latin, too.) When I have successfully completed it, DM says, "There, you have played Mozart!" And, of course, she's right! In my joy and excitement, I hug her. No doubt to her great surprise. But she's smiling, too.

She decides I can start doing scales. D Major. So we start on the D string and do the lower tetrachord (four notes) and then move to the A string and do the upper tetrachord.

That's it. Oh, and she shows me how I'll be holding the bow for pizzicato, and allows me to practice the holding part, but not the while doing pizzicato part.

She writes down the lesson notes for the day in my journal, with Twinkle Twinkle and the D Major scale, and discusses practice a minute. Then she packs up her violin, takes her CD, I walk her to the door, and she's gone. It's over. For another long week.

The fingertips on my left hand burn. My right shoulder is tired and sore. I have a cramp in my upper left arm. We leave in an hour to hear the SF Symphony play Strauss. It's time to be done. But my heart isn't finished and keeps trying for more. Just one more time through Twinkle Twinkle, it pleads. No. And to show it I mean business, I slowly lock my friend in music away in its case.

Later on, after watching MTT conduct Don Juan, parts of the Brentano Lieder and a performance of Zarathustra that literally raises the hairs on the backs of my arms, my husband and I stop on the way home for an early dinner.

"What was your favorite piece today?" he asks, stopping mid-dip in the salsa to watch me while I respond.

"Twinkle, twinkle little star," I sing, and we both grin from ear to ear.

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May 11, 2005 20:50

I wake up to the sound of heavy machinery on the street outside our house. They're fixing pot-holes. Great. My first lesson is in an hour, and I can hardly hear myself think.

An hour later, they're still going strong. And the doorbell rings.

It's DM, a woman approximately my age; I recognize her from seeing her play in the symphony. As I swing the door open wide, before I can say anything, she looks at me, smiles and says, "Hello, Debby."

And, with only that, I can feel the music in her.

I welcome her in, we go to my office, and the pot-hole cacophony stops. She's 5 minutes late, because she had to park down the hill and walk up. The pot-hole truck was blocking the street.

She is full of energy and focus. Today, she says, is the day I become acquainted with my violin. She takes it from the case and begins to tune it. G and D are fine, but E is awful. Even I can hear it.

Uh, turn off the ceiling fan, it's distorting the sound.

Next, the shoulder rest has to be adjusted. She shows me how to hold the violin by the neck and swing it up into place. We tinker with the height and angle a bit, and realize that the chin rest is not in a good location. She and I are about the same size, and she uses a center chin rest. Perhaps I should as well. Another trip to Ifshin's is in order.

As we fiddle about with the shoulder rest, she talks a bit about the classes she teaches in some of the local schools. She stops at one point and shows me how she teaches the kids to hold the bow correctly for a particular type of bowing. DM has done a careful analysis of her own movements, and can clearly demonstrate how everything moves, and she understands why. Her explanation would do a Physics professor proud. She says most of her kids get that technique in one lesson, and I believe it.

The joy of teaching violin weaves through everything she says, and every movement she makes. It is, she says, her calling, and what she likes to do best.

DM teaches rank beginners like myself one hand at a time, starting with the left. I don't know if that is normal or not, but it does make sense to me. We are going to begin by positioning the violin correctly and plucking the open strings. Pizzicato, of a sort.

For the warm-up exercise she is going to show me, my left hand mostly needs to be relaxed, its fingers out of the way. Relaxing those fingers is so hard, but I do my best. We may be working on the left hand, but today the right hand is much busier. I position my right thumb where she tells me, and place my index finger above the G string. Is my arm in the right position? What part of my finger will I use to pluck the string?

DM takes her violin out and demonstrates different sorts of pizzicato. My violin is still very new, but hers has the patina and character only age and kind use can give. It sounds better than mine, as it should.

Ok, so we play one, two whole notes on the open G string. Then we play two whole notes on the open D string. No, I should be moving the finger in a circular motion... that's right. That's better, no, don't be afraid to make a big motion and a big sound. "This is so much fun," she says, engrossed in plucking the strings. "We can't do this in orchestra."

There is nothing jaded about this woman, anywhere.

She continues her exaggerated pizzicato, plucking the strings with enormous gusto, a satisfied smile on her face, and looking at that smile, I find myself loosening up a little. I start forgetting about how difficult it is to learn to play the violin, and concentrate on adding a little gusto and exaggeration to my pizzicato, instead.

And so it goes, with her correcting my finger position and arm position as we work our way back and forth across the strings. Whole notes, half, quarter, eighth...

I have a problem; I'm hitching my right shoulder up a little as I lift my arm while I play the G string. Nothing I can do about it right now, because of the broken shoulder. I hate to develop bad habits, and I can see she hates it, too, but my only other choice is to wait, maybe as much as a year. I'm not willing to do that.

Oops, another problem. My nails are too long. Sigh. I used to bite my nails and hate to lose them, but one must be prepared to make sacrifices for one's art, so off they come, as she tells me amusing stories about desperate teenage girls, willing to make any bargain to keep their nails.

A couple more times through the warm up exercise, we discuss how to practice, and the lesson is over.

We look at her website, talk computers a bit, and I offer to take a picture of her violin for her website, when she's ready to have one taken.

We talk schedules. We settle on Thursday mornings as our normal time. I'm going to be gone a total of 4 weeks over the next four months, so we shift days where we can, but there are two weeks in August I won't have lessons.

We talk money. She likes to get paid monthly, in advance. That's fine with me. Before we set up our first lesson, I made her accept an extra $5 a lesson for coming to my home. After discussing it with my husband, I have decided to pay her for any days we miss because of our schedule. She is surprised, but we can afford it, and it seems the courteous thing to do. I'm self-employed, too, and if a client wants guaranteed access to my programming services during particular periods of time, they pay for it whether they use it or not.

And then she is gone. I am completely exhausted. But very satisfied. DM has already revealed a very important secret to me, I think, although she doesn't know it.

To learn the violin with facility, like a child, I must be as a child. This week, during every 10 minute practice, I will relax, grin, and relish making the most exaggerated motions and the loudest sounds I can while I pluck out my Looney Tunes pizzicato.

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May 10, 2005 21:12

I'm 49 years old; tomorrow morning I begin studying the violin. Everyone online has been so kind to me that I thought it might be helpful to other adult beginning violin students if I kept a diary about my experience.

Since I made my decision on May 1st, things have moved very fast. Thanks to Craig's List, I found a teacher in my area who has played in our county orchestra (a very good one) for 30 years. Her ad is attractive and she sounds pleasant and dedicated on the phone. I have heard her play many times; she is happy to take adult students; and she agrees to come to my home. That last is very important, as I am unable to drive because of my injured right shoulder. From now on, I'll call her "DM".

DM suggests I go to Ifshin's, in Berkeley, CA, to buy or rent a violin. And she suggests I might want to try a Jay Haide violin. So my husband, who's being incredibly supportive, drives me over on May 4th. I'm nervous about going to Ifshin's, even a little embarrassed, because of my complete ignorance. But we find a parking place directly in front the store, which I take as a good omen.

Ifshin's is everything it should be inside; lots of wood moldings and trim, lots of instruments. The sales clerks move quietly, peacefully. A customer is testing a violin. I feel good about the place; it is welcoming, not intimidating.

We go upstairs to the rental department, and, after waiting a bit, the head clerk asks how she can help us, and I say I'd like to rent a violin. She hesitates for a second, and then asks if it is for a child or, hesitating again, myself. When I tell her it is for me, she and the other clerk give me a warm smile and congratulate me. Another customer, there about her son's violin, looks at me with pity and scorn and says, "How nice." It's my first direct experience with the age bias people discuss online.

But the clerks are wonderful. I say I'd like to rent a Jay Haide, and they bring out a violin that looks lovely, much nicer than I expected it to be for $22 a month. It looked much nicer than the clerk expected, too, so she runs downstairs with it to make sure it is available for rental. It is. She gets the other clerk to tune and play it for me. I think it sounds great. Very warm and rich. The violinist says it has an unusually big sound for a student violin. The head clerk knows my teacher and says she is sure DM will like it.

Its previous keeper put Obligattos on it, so that might account for some of the sound, although I certainly don't know enough to say. The clerk suggests I use less expensive strings. But I had read about Obligattos here, so I kept them.

The violin comes with a bow, fine tuners (ugly), rosin, and a case. I buy a music stand, a shoulder rest, a tuning fork, a pitch pipe... and then the clerk says, "Oh, there are electronic tuners." So I go look at those and buy one that is also a metronome. The clerk puts the violin under my chin and adjusts the shoulder rest. I sign a bunch of papers, they hand me my stuff, and that's that.

I bring it all home and play with it. Every day I take the violin from the case and look at it. The wood is so beautiful I can't help but caress it. The clerk showed me how to tighten the bow correctly, so I do, and draw it across the strings. The sound is lovely. Finally, several days after bringing it home, I put it under my chin; I'm amazed at how light it is. I draw the bow lightly over the open strings. My husband calls to me and tells me how beautiful it sounds from the living room. I know he is telling the truth.

I know how to hold neither the violin nor bow, nor how to position the bow correctly on the strings, but this bubble of wood and varnish rewards my fumbling efforts with beauty, with music. What a generous spirit it has!

Yes, yes, I'm sure it's obvious -- I have fallen in love with my violin.

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