We have thousands of human-written stories, discussions, interviews and reviews from today through the past 20+ years. Find them here:

Search the site Search

A Well Tempered Practice Diet - Open Strings

November 5, 2011 at 2:29 AM

During lessons this week I was given an assignment to work through the entire piece (Max Bruch's 'Romanze') with open strings with the caveat to demand nothing less than perfection in my bowing. I didn't fully appreciate how much a challenge this would be until I tried it.

After two sessions at home taking the left hand out of the picture, I apparently don't know what string I'm supposed to be playing without my left hand getting involved, let alone adding any sort of color that can only come from the bow (dynamics, accents, 'color').

It took a tremendous amount of effort to try to play the piece with all of the correct bowing techniques and phrasings without left-hand involvement, even while singing it out loud. All of the deficiencies in my right hand are glaring: weird swellings and dithering of notes in all the wrong places, lack of dynamics, accents that aren't accented, etc. etc.

Once I thought I had one single measure mastered and added the left hand back into the equation. But alas, my bow arm went passive again with all the weird ditherings and lack of color until I removed the left hand once again.

It is much like the trick of rubbing your belly and patting your head in opposite directions...

Tweet

another installment in our parallel lives, Mendy. I too have been relegated to mostly open strings, but in my case it's to work on long-tones & playing close to the bridge. It can be pretty gruelling work, but if I stick to it I think the payoff will be huge when it comes to sound projection. I love it when my teacher prescribes things that are so mind-numbingly simple but can lead to such significant results.