February 26, 2005 at 11:55 AM

Practice slowly!

This is the one piece of advice that I can't seem to reliably carry out. It came as a sort of double-edged compliment when my teacher told me yesterday that he can tell when I've practiced slowly and when I haven't.

I mean, it means that I don't suck so much such that I sound just as bad whether I practice slowly or not. It means that practicing slowly makes a big difference for me.

Of course, from what I understand, my teacher has a sort of logarithmic scale for the goodness of a violinist. It's a big like the learning curve: It takes a lot more to get very high on the curve than it does to get to mediocrity.

But he notices, which is good. I still don't think he understands why I can be so teary at some lessons. I'm not even sure that I understand, although it seems to be proportional to the amount of time I was supposed to have spent practicing, divided by the amount of quality practice I actually put in.

This week we chose some pieces to help me work on my rhythm. I think this might just be the week where I get the hang (a pun, by the way, the Hungarian for "noise" is "hang", pronounced "hauhn-g") of the dotted quarter-note, a concept which has eluded my rhythmic abilities ever since music classes in middle school. So this is very exciting!

In the meantime, I am continuing my experimental bowing studies. Today I discovered that something I've been practicing is called "spiccato." I'd heard people talk about it before, and it sounded very difficult, although I had no idea what it was. Now that the connection is made, perhaps I'll be able to learn more about sculpting the technique. I also watched a little online video of staccato; now that I understand that staccato is not slurred spiccato (although the idea brought interesting results), I'll try to practice the right thing.

Slowly.

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February 26, 2005 at 11:55 AM

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