Exceeded Budget for Music

So says Mint.com in the stern subject line of an e-mail sitting in my inbox. And to Mint.com I say: Damn straight.

All this musicizing has made me seek out music and more music. It’s not necessarily classical. A couple of weeks ago I spent much of a weekend afternoon downloading songs for an eighties playlist. Whitney Houston got me started—is there a term for the rush of downloading that must happen when a famous musician dies?—but I also picked up a few stray tunes by Tears for Fears, OMD, A-ha, Peter Gabriel, Don Henley, Bruce Hornsby & the Range, and so on. (I had forgotten Bruce Hornsby & the Range existed, and yet could sing every word and anticipate every piano lick of “The Road Not Taken” the first time I heard it again.)

I haven’t just been seeking out actual music; I’ve also been reading like crazy about music. I’ve added probably a dozen music-related blogs to my Google Reader. On my Kindle one day, I rather compulsively searched the store for “violin” and ended up buying Violin Virtuosos, a collection of interviews from Strings. Read it in about two days. Best of all, I am re-re-reading Daniel J. Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, one of my favorite books of all time. (Here is an NYT article that touches on a few of the points I found so fascinating in the book.)

Finally [squeal of delight!], I picked up tickets to see Leila Josefowicz, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, play the Salonen Violin Concerto later this spring with the Philadelphia Orchestra. That was actually what sent Mint.com over the edge. I cannot wait to hear it live.

Playing violin again is having so many ripple effects like this. It’s as though I have re-opened a door to another dimension of my life and found another gear for my brain. It’s a joy.



Edit: The video above contains only part 1 of 2. You can see the second part here.

The Power of Progress

After that horrific practice session on Wednesday, I felt like I did not know where I stood with any of the stuff I’ve been working on. Despite redeeming myself a little bit in my practice on Thursday, I did not know what to expect from my lesson yesterday.

Luckily, some of the trickiest bits went better than I expected. The last few lines of Kreutzer #6 were almost entirely in tune, even the shifts up to fifth position from nowhere. I undershot the last shift up to fourth position from nowhere, but all in all, the etude still went better than any of my practice sessions would have led me to expect. I repeated those four- or five-note bits with big shifts SO MANY FREAKIN’ TIMES this week to try to get those shifts right.

One of my strengths, relatively speaking, is playing in tune. But what does that mean, really? Intonation is in one’s head to some extent, so maybe good intonation says something good about one’s ear. But a lot of the rest of it is muscle memory. Couldn’t a trained monkey do that?

In Bach I had been working on 1) managing my bowing (when to travel on groups of four sixteenth notes, and when not to), 2) not scratching (i.e., keeping my bow straight and not playing too close to the bridge), and 3) getting the last half page or so under my fingers better.

I made only moderate progress with #1 and #3. But on #2, Ms. L. said at the end of my lesson, “Your tone is sounding better—more open, more resonant.” In my head, I went, “YAY!” The scratchy, choked sound was really bothering me. I don’t think I normally play like that, but it’s certainly been a problem for me in Bach. Making progress in that area means a lot to me!!

Rhythm of the Week

Anchored by my lesson on Fridays, the musical aspect of my week has developed a distinct rhythm.

Saturday: The day after my lesson. My lesson usually gives me a lot of food for thought, so in that sense I should be able to get a lot out of a Saturday practice session. However, practicing on Saturdays requires me to drive 7.5 miles from home to Practice Facility (and back) when I would typically have no other reason to do so. So…I practice maybe 40% of Saturdays.

Sunday: When I haven’t practiced on Saturday, I simply must practice on Sunday, or I might as well write off the whole week. Besides, practicing on Sunday tends to be a leisurely thing. I can practice in the middle of the afternoon and not have to watch the clock—a very different situation from my practice during the work week.

Monday: Practicing after work tends to come easily to me on Mondays, though I do have to watch the clock to make sure I leave enough time for evening obligations at home. I have the luxury of not having to get worried yet if my etude, scale work, and/or piece still sound like crap.

Tuesday: No practice due to a standing Tuesday evening obligation. 

Wednesday: The weakest link. I always intend to practice on Wednesdays, but work tends to go long, and my energy level seems to be low. I am also starting to feel the pressure because I know that if I skip practicing on Wednesday, I have (realistically) only one more practice session before my lesson. I did practice Wednesday of this week, and it was horrific! Here are my lame excuses for why:

• I practiced in a new place—call it Alternative Practice Facility (APF). I wasn’t 100% sure how much of my noise was getting out and didn’t know who could be walking by and hearing me, but knew it could be some people who know me in my non-musical life, so I was playing self-consciously. That’s never good. 
• APF had no stand, and I had not brought my own. Had to jerry-rig a way to keep my music upright. 
• I was wearing a skirt, so whenever I played on the E string, my bow hand ran into fabric. I couldn’t practice standing up due to the aforementioned jerry-rigged pseudo music stand. I need to relearn how to play in a skirt.
• I had not pressured myself to make much progress on Kreuzer #6 on Sunday and Monday (“Plenty of time left this week to practice!”), so the last two or three lines were still a bit of a train wreck. On Wednesday, I was telling myself that I only had one more day to get it together. It didn’t help.
• I had not pressured myself to make much progress on the last half page of Bach on Sunday and Monday... (see above.)

Thursday: A must-practice day; the last chance to get things together before my lesson. Not coincidentally, I tend to practice longest (maybe 75 minutes) on Thursdays. Luckily, things usually come together by then (by my standards), so I feel fairly comfortable going into my lesson.

Friday: I go straight from work to my lesson, and have 15 or 20 minutes to warm up very quietly with a practice mute—there is no practice room-type place to air it out and accomplish anything. Within my lesson, though, and mentally, I accomplish a lot thanks to Ms. L.’s good advice.

So in a lazy week, I practice three times (Sunday, Monday, Thursday). (Wow! That sounds incredibly lazy.) In an average week, I practice four times (Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday). In a diligent week, I practice five times (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday).

Captain Obvious says that if I am going to make more progress, I need to aim for more diligent weeks. In the meantime, I just need to learn from these wise words I found in magnetic poetry yesterday near Alternative Practice Facility:

Author unknown. Photo by TR, 22 February 2012 

Playin' my Fiddle, Ain't Got Nothing to Lose

I have to confess that as I was driving to my lesson a couple of weeks ago, I almost felt disoriented. Going to my lesson felt like a chore.

Driving the last mile or so through a part of town I never visited before starting my lessons, where I still have to keep an eye out for the Walgreens at the light where I need to turn, I wondered: Am I doing this just so I can say I’m doing it? Is this about my self-image, about wanting to seem cool in some way, the SO-not-a-musician who plays the violin on the side? Is this about wanting to feel like I still belong in my circle of old friends who were (and in some cases still are) deeply involved with music? Is it about feeling like an insider when I go to a classical music concert or just read a blog about classical music? Is any of this actually about getting down to the business of lessons and practicing? Isn’t there something wrong if lessons and practicing aren’t motivating and rewarding enough in and of themselves?

(That lesson actually went well. I think I just needed some encouragement, which Ms. L. provided, whether she knew I needed it or not.)

Today, my attitude going into the lesson felt totally different. Leaving work, I fired up my MP3 player in the car, in random mode. What came on first? The first movement of Bach’s A minor violin concerto—currently my main squeeze, repertoire-wise. What are the odds?

I am a total sucker for these sorts of coincidences, so I chose to interpret it as an affirmation. Should I be doing this violin thing? Yes. The gods of MP3 randomness say so. As a grown woman of a certain age with a fairly respectable set of accomplishments in life, I find it a tad disconcerting to need this sort of affirmation, but I’ll take it.

The affirmation strengthened as I arrived at the music school. As I pulled into the parking lot, the song playing was the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” The significance? One thing that pushed me to return to the violin this fall was reading Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life. I hung on the passages where Richards described what playing with the Rolling Stones feels like. In one such passage, he said:

“I can hear the whole band take off behind me every time I play ‘Flash’—there’s this extra sort of turbo overdrive. You jump on the riff and it plays you. We have ignition? OK, let’s go [….] Levitation is probably the closest analogy to what I feel—whether it’s ‘Jumpin’ Jack’ or ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘All Down the Line’—when I realize I’ve hit the right tempo and the band’s behind me. It’s like taking off in a Learjet. I have no sense that my feet are touching the ground. I’m elevated to this other space.”

Odd as it may sound, I identified with that. Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt playing the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah back in the day with my college orchestra. We’d move from the incisive, fast-paced, grimly Old Testament, minor key tenor air “Thou Shalt Break Them” straight into the bright, major key “Hallelujah.” Winter clothes rustled and auditorium seats flipped softly upward as the audience stood. They were still awake, after all! Maybe the sudden reminder of their attention pushed us into another gear. In the best performances, the piece built, layer by layer, until each stroke of my bow matched a syllable sung by the choir, a tone sounded by the trumpet, a blow booming from the timpani. It was as though each up and down motion of my arm, in synch with my violinist friends around me, generated the exploding, pressing, pulsing, surrounding sound of the 40-some instruments and a couple of hundred voices. The stage vibrated through my shoes and chair. It was powerful stuff.

Richards’s book reminded me of that feeling. So that’s why I’m doing this violin thing. I need to get back in shape, get with a community orchestra of some type, and aim for that feeling again. The practicing and lessons produce some rewarding moments, but there’s potentially another thing out there to aim for.

Fired Up!

Good practice session today! My work day ended with an energizing event that really helped propel me into my practice time with energy. (Yes, a person with actual self-discipline would practice at the appointed time whether s/he had energy or not. I am [usually] not that person.)

First up: A minor scale on the D string, arpeggios, thirds. The thirds are still a struggle. I will have to ask Ms. L. what to do with my hand on those very highest notes. I feel completely unmoored up there. At least I was able to practice it without feeling strain in my hand/forearm.

Next up: Kreutzer #5, spiccato. I’m supposed to be working on keeping my right thumb bent to aid in hand/wrist flexibility, keeping my upper arm relatively still (i.e., no sawing back and forth), playing fast enough to get some bouncy momentum going, and staying far enough away from the bridge to avoid scratchiness.

For moral support, since spiccato is not my favorite thing, I watched this video by violin teacher Todd Ehle before venturing into Kreutzer #5 today. The advice about imagining V-shaped and U-shaped bow strokes helped reset my thinking a bit, as did the point about tilting the stick of the bow just a bit away from you. And holding the bow a little ways up the stick helped me figure out what spiccato might be supposed to feel like without the extra challenge of supporting the (heavier) frog end of the bow.

Anyway, keeping my mind on that advice freshened my approach to Kreutzer #5, and it started to come a little easier. Hopefully all of this is in line with Ms. L.’s advice. It would be nice if I had three or four more days until my next lesson to keep working on it instead of…um…19 hours…but it’s still gratifying to experience a tiny attitude adjustment and a sense of progress.

Best for last: I spent about 45 of my 70 minutes of practice on—I feel like I should give this piece an endearing nickname since I am becoming so enamored of it, but I’ve got nothing—the first movement of the Bach A minor violin concerto.

I still have not worked my way through to the end—I have about four or five lines to go. I spent much of my time today on part of the middle section. (It’s the stretch from 2:45-3:12 or so on this video of David Oistrakh performing this movement.) Just getting my fingers in the right place has been the challenge up until now, so today I was working a bit on the zillion little crescendos and decrescendos in there. Ooooh, it is fun. It feels like someone taking three steps forward and two steps back (in a good way), getting closer and closer to something good, but taking their time and exploring the permutations and nuances of that good thing in a very Bach-y way. Mmmm hmmm.

Slacking

I slacked off of practicing today, which bums me out a bit. I can’t practice at home (I live in a condo with thin walls), so I have to practice elsewhere, and it’s not convenient. Ugh.

Getting Back Into Playing Shape

The day I picked up my violin from its adjustment and bows from rehairing, after playing around for about 20 minutes after 15+ years of violinistic inactivity, I thought my left arm would fall off. Driving home, I rested my left hand at seven on the steering wheel, rested my upper arm against my ribs, and still my biceps burned. I wondered: How long will it take before I can practice for 45-60 minutes? Make it through a rehearsal? Stretch myself into playing something beyond the skills I’d developed before, as opposed to just catching up?

Four months down the road, I am in much better playing shape, but still not at full strength. Here are some precautions I took for the first three weeks or so:

• Before each practice session, I did exercises—like the one at 3:30 on this video by percussionist David Kuckhermann—to “loosen up” my wrists. (Apologies for my technical terminology. Needless to say, I am not offering medical advice here.)
• I limited practice to 30-40 minutes at a time. I usually practiced four times per week, spread out during the week. For example, I’d practice Sunday and Monday, take Tuesday off, practice Wednesday and Thursday, have my lesson (preceded by a light warmup) on Friday, and take Saturday off. 
• After the wrist exercises, my actual playing began with shifting exercises (from Whistler, I believe—I just have one page photocopied from somewhere). However, I only did the first finger and second finger shifts, first to third position and back, at the start of a practice session. Shifts on the third and fourth fingers—even putting my third and fourth fingers down—felt like too much of a strain to serve as a warmup.
• From there I moved on to playing a real piece at a slow pace. For me, the right fit was the first page or so of Kreisler’s Tempo di Minuetto.
• Next: Kreutzer etude No. 2. Not fast. Moving my fingers too quickly gave me that warning feeling of strain in my wrist and forearm, so I played slowly enough to fall under that threshold. 
• Last: Three-octave G major scale (week 1), A major scale (week 2), etc. I found that playing the scale last, after I was as warmed up as I would get, worked well for me.

Despite all these precautions, I think that a different body part (jaw, shoulder, etc.) hurt every day for the first two weeks or so. I figured that as long as the pain was moving around every day, I wasn’t doing any lasting damage!

Anyway, after a couple of weeks of the routine above, I gradually ratcheted things up: playing for 10 minutes longer, adding one practice day per week (some weeks), adding the third and fourth finger to the shifting exercises, playing faster. I let the wrist exercises fall away, and added some exercises for bow hand flexibility. Now, four months later, I still am doing the shifting exercises as a warm-up, and I still sometimes “save” my current scale and other Carl Flesch treats for last.

More often than not, by the time I have practiced for an hour (or a little more), my left hand feels fantastic: loose, warm, and strong. However, this past week, doing the A minor scale all on the D string (and arpeggios, and thirds) is provoking a little bit of left hand rebellion. So, I’m calling things off with the thirds and will make my excuses to Ms. L. at my lesson this week. I remind myself that I’m still not fully back in shape.

I'm Sure it Serves a Legitimate Purpose, But Today, From My Perspective...

Spiccato sucks.