Ingredients

The abbreviations (KV, etc.) for the indexes of works of various composers make great password ingredients...

Discombobulation

My lesson was moved up a day this week due to a gig Ms. L has tomorrow, meaning that I had less practice time than usual between last week’s and this week’s lessons. A more disciplined person could still have figured out a way to fit in the usual amount of practice, but I am not that person—not this week, anyway, when other aspects of my schedule were changing as well.

The bottom line was that I only practiced 2.5 times this week before my lesson, an all-time low since I restarted lessons last October. I only felt about 30% prepared, though realistically, I was probably about 60-70% prepared. I would say I played to a level of 60-70% preparedness, which I guess constitutes breaking even. :-/

L2 vs. L3, etc.

When I was an exchange student in my junior year of college, I (as exchange students have been known to do) struggled with the local language. (Let’s call the language L2.) Because there is always more to learn—more automaticity to gain with grammatical accuracy, more pockets of vocabulary for this topic or that, more everything—I didn’t appreciate the progress I was making with L2 until I traveled to a couple of neighboring countries where the languages were different.

In Neighboring Country 1, the language (call it L3) was one that I had studied before but neglected during my exchange year. I got by fine as a tourist in L3, but often when I was speaking L3, bits of L2 would come out instead. Sometimes I didn't notice that until people looked at me funny; I'd internalized L2 in ways I hadn't realized.

In Neighboring Country 2, the language (call it L4) was completely unrelated to L2 or L3 or English. I couldn’t begin to read signs, understand numbers, or any of the more basic things you can sometimes do in a language that’s related to one you have studied. Traveling in the country where L4 was spoken was fun in the usual ways that travel can be, but also exhausting. Coming “home” to my host country and L2 felt like a huge relief. Finally, I could see my struggles with L2 paying off and could appreciate the level of proficiency I had developed.

Something similar happened tonight in returning to the first movement of the Bach A minor violin concerto. A few weeks ago I hit a plateau in my progress with it, and was getting rather tired of flailing away at it. For the past two weeks or so, I have barely touched it while ramping up my work on the third movement.

Tonight, though, after appreciating some of the challenges of the third movement, I decided to come back to the first. I played through the first page, then a bit of the middle. My intonation had slipped a bit, but in terms of flow, it suddenly sounded smoother than I’d ever played it. I also was better able to imagine it in terms of lines or phrases—you know, like music or something—instead of experiencing it as a sequence of multidimensional physical problems (hit this shift while distributing my bow properly while keeping my right thumb bent while crescendo-ing, then keep crescendo-ing and cross strings smoothly and and and and…).

I’m not saying that my playing reflected the music I imagined, but I was drawn into that movement again, encouraged by signs of progress, and just flat out had fun practicing it.

Teacher Appreciation Week: Ms. Y., My First Violin Teacher

The first full week of May was Teacher Appreciation Week in the U.S. I appreciate the impetus to think back on my violin teachers. It’s just hard to write something that can do them justice, which is why the whole week went by without my doing so! It took me the whole week just to draft this set of memories of my first violin teacher.

My first violin teacher was Ms. Y. She taught strings in my hometown school district, and she quite literally taught me how to pick up the violin for the first time in fifth grade. After I started private violin lessons in ninth or tenth grade—I had never had any other sort of music lessons outside of school—she was still my orchestra conductor at school until I finished high school.

Those of us who started instrumental music as fifth graders (typical in our school district) had weekly lessons in groups of four or five students. I believe that each lesson lasted thirty minutes, and we met in a windowless interior room with cinderblock walls. There was just enough time for each of us to play a couple of short (one- or two-line) pieces we’d been working on, get a little individual coaching, and then practice as a group on material for the following week. Looking back, I can’t imagine how she got us through all of that—plus tuning—in such a short time!

Every time I offered up my ¾ size rental violin for her to tune, Ms. Y would exclaim, “Hi, lady!” or “Hi, Miss TR!” and “How’s your kid?”—"kid" being her universal nickname for everyone's instrument. She found praise for everything we played, and established an elaborate reward system for learning our short little pieces. If you played your assigned piece well enough at the group lesson, you earned a happy face sticker in the margin of your music. For every ten happy faces, you earned the candy bar of your choice. I always chose a Nestle Crunch bar. (Just writing about it makes me want to have one—haven’t tasted one of those in years!) I think the happy face system only applied to fifth and sixth graders, but it really got us to practice. Maybe parents these days would quibble about junk food, but at the time, I never heard anyone question it.

I don’t want to romanticize Ms. Y's policy of spending her own money on stickers and candy bars for her students, which she did over the course of decades. Too often, public school teachers are either spoken about like saints for their sacrifices and selflessness on behalf of their students, or spoken about as lazy parasites who care nothing about their students if they want more compensation for their work (or want to actually collect the compensation promised to them when they signed up for the job). (The Daily Show has handled this contradiction brilliantly.) Spending her own money to encourage her students to practice was just part of who Ms. Y was; I have equal respect for other teachers who found different ways to encourage us.

Many of Ms. Y’s students followed the same path I did—taking small group lessons with her in fifth and sixth grade, then taking “Orchestra” as a class from seventh grade through the end of high school. When a bully in junior high left notes in my locker from a fake secret admirer, or when another bully paid a boy $5 to grab my butt in P.E. class, or any other thing that made junior high feel like torment, orchestra was a refuge. Ms. Y made me—and all of us, I think—feel understood and valued. Frankly, even though I had a wonderful family and trusted circle of friends, orchestra was sometimes the only part of my daily routine in junior high and high school that did not stress me out, bore me silly, or involve constant fear of impending humiliation. At a point when I had the opportunity to switch to a different high school in our community that might have offered a better social and/or academic environment, I refused to consider it—that school did not have Ms. Y.  

So: Just one of the teachers to whom I thank my involvement in music, and all that it’s done for me, is Ms. Y!

More Progress

I stand by my assessment that my Monday practice session last week was crappy. Perhaps I was trying to make too many adjustments at once. However, it also just so conveniently happens that my violin was a bit out of adjustment.

Mr. R., the luthier who takes care of my violin, had asked me to bring it in before my lesson on Friday—his shop is just upstairs from the music school. He adjusted the sound post and bridge, and lubricated the pegs. In my lesson, as I was playing the double stops, the chords rang and rang, just like my violin did when I picked it up from him last October. It’s a joy to practice when it sounds like that, though I almost feel the need for earplugs with so much sound hitting my left ear. Mr. R. seems to be stunningly good at his work, and I appreciate him even more because he is such a friendly, welcoming guy. He explains everything he’s doing, and bustles around the shop to show one thing or another that makes his point.

In other news, I’ve commented here before about shifting up to fourth and fifth position out of nowhere. Two months ago, I had to practice like crazy to land those shifts in tune. In my lesson on Friday, Ms. L. was having me sight-read Kreutzer #10, and I hit an F on the E string in fifth position. In fact, with the note being so far above the staff, I didn’t even recognize what it was—I just took a stab at it and got lucky. (OK, I played this etude in college, so “sight-reading” may not be the right word. But it’s marked in my college teacher’s handwriting as having been completed on November 3, 1990, and I highly doubt that I have touched it since then.) Not only did I hit it right that one time, but I have been accurate on it about 80% of the time without having to practice it to the death. I will call that progress!