Bloch Blog (aka Lesson Blog)

January 10, 2009 at 4:44 AM

Tonight I had the first lessons with my teacher in nearly 3 weeks. The last lesson I had was before the holidays and he walked through the Bloch Suite Hebraique with me once so I could practice on my own over the holidays.

We started with the requisite scale - this time a key for the new year: F-Minor. Oh boy... that's a tricky key, and a bit high on the third and final octave. Without further warm-ups, I jumped right into the Bloch. About a week's worth of studying this piece got me this feedback from my teacher:

Good rhythm, esp. on the opening notes (Ha!!! I knew he thought he'd have to work on those with me, so I practiced them - ALOT!!!)
Good runs of notes. Left hand is fine, it is all about bowing. Attack the starting note from OFF the string. Holding the note AFTER the shift a little to long (ooops!)
Nice sustain on the A (in 2nd pos) even at the tip (insert smiley here)
Cutting short the dotted 8th chords - hold them longer
The chords need to be 2-2, not arpeggiated
The tempo changes in some spots needs to be more gradual.
Learned few wrong notes in the nose-bleed section (accidentals are called that for a reason - they are accidents waiting to happen)
F-sharps need to be SHARP
G-sharps should be approached as a small shift, not a finger extension.
No gliding the shift from C (1st position) to high Eb (9th position). There is a pause between those two notes. A little bit of prayer, wishful thinking and luck will help me pull the high Eb out of thin air.
A small amount of dynamic changes...
LESS to no vibrato in a few measures.
Vibrato though is getting much better! Also noticed the 1st finger vibrato that actually happened again! Yippee!!!

And the final verdict that I got was that I had come along way since our last lesson and we can now enter the "final polishing stage", then it will be absolutely beautiful. WOW! I mean WOW! I have never gone from a walk-through to "final polishing" within two lessons and a week of study before!

I'm not fooling myself that going into "final polishing" means 1-2 more lessons and that's it. "Final Polishing" with Joel is alot of work. What it really means is that he doesn't have to work with me so much on learning the notes, getting them in tune and basic rhythms. Instead we focus on all the other musical aspects such as phrasing, dynamic changes, tempo changes, tonal colors, and "stage presence" (the final note).

It took two years of hard work with him to get to the point where learning a new piece is more about polish and not so much learning the notes. I have a fun and exciting road ahead of me!

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