May 20, 2005 at 5:56 AM

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.

From Pauline Lerner
Posted on May 20, 2005 at 3:33 PM

I teach adult beginners, and I can tell you that they experience the same difficulties and joys that you do.

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