Bad Practice Day

Is it possible for some practice sessions to do more harm than good? I think that’s the path I was on this evening with my practicing. So after about 25 minutes, I pulled the plug. Aborted the mission. Stick a fork in me, I’m done. Let’s call the whole thing off. Get the hook.

My bow was skating all over the place, possibly due to yet another variation in the new bow hold. (I still believe in the new bow hold; I’m just in another state of transition with it.) As I focused on my bowing, my intonation didn’t just go off the rails, it went over the cliff. On passages that I’ve been playing decently for a good week or two (or more), I was suddenly stinking up the joint, big time.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, is my off day. Hopefully on Wednesday I can Ctrl + Alt + Del.

Strong Enough To Crush Things

After practicing double stops tonight, my left hand was a bit tired. But when the tiredness wore off, it felt strong as hell. Strolling through the grocery store, I kept wanting to wiggle my fingers and flex my left hand. It felt strong enough to crush things. Awesome. :-)

Ms. L. -- Problem Solver Extraordinaire

The double stops went well in my lesson today. Ms. L. seemed pleased. I certainly was pleased. 

With Kreutzer #9, I told her how tired and weak my third and fourth fingers felt on those 4-3-4 fingerings. She acknowledged that lack of finger strength might be a factor, but also had me work on bringing my thumb under the neck and getting my index finger away from the neck. This relaxed my hand and allowed me to reach much further. Then, where there's an open A between 4-3-4 sequences, she had me pick up my fingers more and slap them down--again, with relaxation. Reaching back for a B still wasn't easy, but it was definitely easier. Yeah, Ms. L!

Left hand adjustments have always come more easily to me than right hand adjustments. My new bow hold is still a work in progress. Here are the things I have to adjust relative to the bow hold I'm trying to get away from:

• Rotate my hand inward. Actually, she suggested today that I might need to think of it in terms of rotating my whole forearm. 
• Have the side of my index finger in contact with the stick, between the first and second knuckle (but closer to the first). 
• Keep more distance between my index and middle fingers.
• Curve my thumb.
• Curve my pinky.
• Sink my hand down into the bow. 
• Squeeze the thumb and pinky to gain more control over the bow when playing near the frog. 

As I work on this bow hold, I have to stop and adjust constantly. When I do have it right, though, it's amazing. Everything flows so easily. It sounds as though someone much better than me is playing. :-) If I can stabilize this new and improving bow hold, it will be so worth all the work. Thank you, Ms. L.!

Double Stops, Part II

So yesterday I was all like, “Double stops are no big deal, I can do this, I played like two whole lines of them in a jury in college one time.” Today I’m thinking I might just as well have said, “Mission accomplished! Bring it on!”

After practicing today I drove home and jumped in the shower, which was where I noticed that my left biceps is tired (not hurting, but tired), as is my left shoulder, as is some muscle somewhere in the middle of the left side of my back. And my left fingertips just feel, for lack of a better word, used. When I’m not typing, my left arm is resting in my lap like a wet noodle. Did I mention that my left biceps is tired?

One factor might be that on top of the double stops, I’m also working on Kreutzer #9. Kreutzer #9 makes you move your fingers a lot. A lot. That’s not such an issue for 1-3-2-3 fingerings, but on measure after measure of 4-3-4 fingerings, my third and fourth fingers feel so weak! Should I count on the etude itself to strengthen them? Could/Should I be doing other things to strengthen them?

The good news is that the double stop exercises themselves actually are sounding pretty decent. I’m only working on a little over a line’s worth. There’s still room to make them smoother and more consistently in tune. Obviously.

Hello Double Stops, My Old Friends

Ms. L. has me starting--in a way--on the third movement of the Bach. I believe the way she put it was, "The third movement has some tricky stuff in it, so you might as well get going on it now." 

This means...double stops. From about 2:18-2:30 and 2:55-3:11 here, though it's not written as double stops, that's apparently how you have to finger it to make it work. Ms. L. wrote up some exercises for me to gradually work my way into it, so practicing those has been a big part of my week. 

So far, it's (deceptively) not bad. Transferring those exercises into the piece while attempting to sound musical will be the hard part!

My big learning experience with double stops came in college when I learned the Beethoven Romance No. 1 in G, which has some double-stop playing. I got those bits under my fingers (with a ton of practice), and that piece is still one of my favorites that I've ever played. 

So I'm not scared of double-stops, and I feel capable of learning them, but it still feels like a big step. They can be a bit of a strain, physically, so it feels like progress to just be working on them. Five months ago, I couldn't have done this. 

Bowing and Batting

Know what made me think about bowing recently? Reading “Albert’s Second Act” by Tom Verducci in the baseball preview edition of Sports Illustrated.  Among other things, the article had this to say about hitting a baseball and Albert Pujols’s prodigious skill in this area.

Verducci: “Pujols's swing is a technical wonder, a kinetic event that causes the most mayhem with the least effort” (p. 1 of the online edition of the article).

A bow stroke, too, is a “kinetic event.” A good violinist should be able to foster musical mayhem (in a good way) efficiently, not wasting energy on bow strokes, but channeling that energy into the strings.

Pujols: "The high fastball, when I hit it, it's like, Wow, I didn't even feel it. Why? Because all I did was throw the hands. Sometimes in BP I try to hit the ball as far as I can, and most of the time it's impossible. I can't do it. But when I take a real nice easy swing toward the ball? Man, the ball just goes" (pp. 5-6 of the online edition of the article).

He’s talking about a high fastball that he hit more than 400 feet for a home run in the 2011 World Series (edit: video below, 0:02), and he “didn’t even feel it” because the finely calibrated flow of his swing merged perfectly with the energy of the 96 mph pitch. I wish I could get my bowing to do that. Sometimes I feel like I’m flailing away, expending all this energy, and it just isn’t translating into my sound—not in a good way, anyway.

I’m working on that, but it’s one of those things that’s getting worse before it gets better. I’ve talked about working on bow distribution in the Bach. However, another thing that Ms. L. has been having me work on all along is my bow hold.

It started with, “Curve your pinky.” OK, I get that, I knew I was slipping into straight-pinky mode sometimes, and I knew that was bad. Then, “Curve your thumb.” Did not realize I was playing with a straight thumb. More consistently curving the pinky and thumb must have created a domino effect—next thing I knew, my index finger was gradually slipping too far around the stick. Ms. L. advised me to mentally check it after every measure and stop if I needed to adjust. “It will drive you crazy, but it will work,” she said. Well, I found that the slippage was happening too gradually for me to notice it.

A few times she molded my hand the way it should be as I stood holding the bow on the string. When I played with that bow hold, it felt great. My hand felt odd—it felt like it was turned way sideways/inward, and my thumb felt like it was coming at the stick from the bottom—but bowing was just plain easier. Without my changing anything else, passages in the Bach suddenly flowed much more smoothly. The angles just worked. It felt as though energy was being transferred instead of being wasted. I felt like Pujols connecting with that high fastball.

But in practicing, I could not reproduce that bow hold on my own.

Ugh. I tried visually inspecting my hand in its Ms.-L.-approved configuration, I tried molding it myself with that sideways feel in mind…and finally, this week, I think I have started approaching that bow hold on my own. I have tried being mindful of it in my warm-ups, in a C major three-octave scale and arpeggios, and on the last 2/3 page of the first movement of the Bach. I’m not consistent with it (YET), but I’m slowly approaching it, to the best of my non-Pujolsian ability.

(Edit: This video shows the three home runs that Pujols hit in Game 3 of the 2011 World Series. Unbelievable.)

 

Long Absence

Work has been crazy--not much more to say than that. I did get to see that Philadelphia Orchestra concert, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope to write about it sometime!