7 Creative Ways to Work on Intonation

January 1, 2024, 10:01 AM · I’ve been asking myself for years: How does good intonation happen? I don’t mean how does intonation unfold in the middle of a performance, because that’s a thorny issue all by itself. What I mean is how does the process of developing a great ear and the formation of “intune” practice happen? How do we train ourselves to hear accurately, even in difficult keys (for me, lots of flats)? How do we avoid out-of-tune practicing, only to discover our boo-boos late in the game when everything is already deeply embedded?

I found out in graduate school that despite all my best efforts, I was not always hearing pitches exactly as I should have been. Roman Totenberg, my wonderful teacher at Boston University, would sit at the piano, put the pedal down, and play simple chords to accompany me. “Can you hear that?”, he would say. And indeed, I could, but I hadn’t the day before.

That started an obsession with drones and tuners that proved invaluable for getting my ears in shape. Once I started teaching, I needed more tools in the tool chest, things I could draw on very quickly and without having a piano or device to go through. I feel like intonation is like slowly unwrapping a rubber band ball - it takes a lot of time, and we can’t skip steps. It’s also like string theory, where individual particles are represented by strings, and they all interact with each other. Just like one out of tune note will likely lead to another out of tune note.

I’ve come to the conclusion that intonation is both a “not hearing” problem and a patience problem. To solve both, it helps to have as many different avenues for discovery as possible.

Here is a video I just made for my studio of college violinists to capture my most common approaches for single stops in one position. None of them are original, all of them mentioned to me by some teacher, or book. But I wanted to capture them all in one place. See if there is anything new to you that might help you in your quest for the holy grail:

For a quick summary of what I cover in the video, here is a list of the seven creative ways to work on intonation:

Leave out notes
Add notes that aren't there
Play notes out of order (for example, improvise, or play it backwards)
Play finger patterns of string crossings on one string only
Check your double-stops
Record yourself and play it back against the tuner
Finger all the notes but only listen to those that have the same name

As I allude to in the video, intonation in shifting (or shifting and blocking) requires some different tools, and I have videos up on my channel that I made some years ago. You can find the channel at Youtube.com/practiceblitz.

And then, of course, there are double stops (sigh). If hearing one pitch right is difficult, multiply that by many times for double stops. Double stops are not only hard to hear, but physically difficult to master, due to increased tension. For all those things, I made a video the summer before last. I thought I would also share it while we are on our favorite topic of intonation.

My New Year's Resolution is to keep finding many different ways to approach a singular problem. And yes, also to patiently work on my intonation!

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Replies

Diana Skinner

January 3, 2024 at 12:18 AM · Thank you for this valuable information, Susanna! I am a better violinist for having taken your online classes during Covid. You inspired me then to work on double-stops. I will take your intonation tips to heart as well.

Paul Deck

January 4, 2024 at 01:03 AM · Interesting teaching materials, Susanna!

Seven tools is getting to be a pretty full toolbox, so thoughtful practice will call for selecting the right one or two for the job at hand.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm just not hearing things correctly. Let's say I'm playing a passage that includes an F#. I can hit the same F# every time, reliably, and it sounds okay to me. But is it really the right pitch? It's not like tuning a G or a D. So, how do I know? I could play it against a tuner, but then I have to worry about temperament, or I could play it against a drone, but then I have to worry about just vs Pythagorean intonation. A frustrating problem.

And then there is the problem that in tricky passages one's hand position has to compensate for accidentals and weird intervals, so if that passage has several F#'s, there's a good chance, in my hands anyway, that they won't all be the same, depending on the previous and sometimes even the subsequent note if the passage is hard.

This weekend I'll be reading through Dvorak Op. 81 (a piano quintet) with some friends, and I've been assigned the viola part. I could tune my part against the ensemble, but not in real time -- not at those tempos! Certainly I'm preparing in advance, but in this kind of music often there aren't many "islands" to provide tuning references.