February 26, 2005 at 11:55 AM

Although I have been playing for only six months I still feel ashamed of having nothing particularly interesting to play when someone says "Play something!"

The first time this happened to me, I was playing in my room at the Collej Kajetanka in Prague with the window open. An Asian man who was standing on the entrance stairs yelled up at me, "PLAY SOMETHING!" Until then I'd been happily experimenting with "sirens" on my student violin and found myself quite flustered at the request. I didn't know anything to play; I'd had my violin for less than a week. At this point I hadn't even mastered Twinkle-Twinkle.

"Play something!"

A great deal of my practice, when I'm not practicing the homework out of the Violin ABC book, is just me making up a one or twoing theme and then seeing how I can expand on it using what vocabulary is available to my hands. The point of this is, in my mind, to build fluency with the vocabulary of the violin.

To me, notes with bowings are like words, but since I haven't had any music theory or composition training, I haven't a clue what the grammar is. The only thing that helps me is my ear. Which, like a native speaker, can at least tell me if what I'm babbling makes sense, sounds pretty, is accurate, etc..

"Play something!"

It's like asking for a poet to make an instant poem, or for a debater to come up with an interesting argument for whatever is on his mind...or worse, for a mathematician to come up with an interesting conjecture on the spot. Unless the poet, debater, or mathematician already has a stock thing that they whip out on such occassions...

...and so since I know nothing, I need to know everything.

The happy and amusing news from this weekend is that I think I caught one of my flatmates listening to me in my fluency practice. I put an end to my extemporaneous composition, put my violin down, thought for a minute, and burst out of my room, only to find my flatmate scampering into his room. At first I thought he'd been doing some cleaning, but everything was still a mess. Was he snacking? No... So either he was heading back from the bathroom (but the toilet wasn't running), or he had been listening to me.

...or I'm the vainest adult student in the universe, of which there is also a good chance. Still, it tickles me to think that my playing around is interesting for other people to hear.

From Scott 68
Posted on February 27, 2005 at 2:21 PM

be persistant, it takes a long time to be able to make anything sound good

play for you and try to have fun with it

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February 26, 2005 at 11:55 AM

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