The Mental Metronome

As of last Friday’s lesson, I’m officially shelving the first movement of the Bach and focusing on the third movement. This is good. I think I’ve accomplished as much as I can on the first movement for the foreseeable future, and I’ll progress faster on the third movement if my practice time isn’t any more divided than necessary.

One of the main things I was working on for the last couple of days was speeding up the third movement. And you know what? I think I used to have a more reliable sense of tempo than I do now.

In the old days, on occasions when I practiced with the metronome, I obviously had the experience with every passage of eventually hitting a tempo where I couldn’t keep up physically. However, as I ran through the passage, I always had a good sense of what the metronome was doing and where I was in comparison. I could stay on tempo mentally.

These days, even at tempos where I can physically keep up, I find myself straying from the prescribed tempo. Of course, I don’t want the end product to sound metronomic, but for the sake of working up the speed in practice, I want to be able to maintain consistency within a passage. I want to trust that I’m actually following the metronome without having to stay glued to every blink and click.  

So, pardon my bragging: How do I know that I used to have a good sense of tempo? Well, arguably this relates to pitch as much as tempo, but in my early teens, I started to notice the difference between the tempo of pop songs when I heard them on the radio and when I heard them on records played on my parents’ stereo. My parents didn’t believe me. I finally recorded “Stand By Me” on cassette from the radio, and recorded it again from the record played on their stereo, and timed the two recordings. (These recordings were from the same “original” recording, so they should have been identical.) It turned out that the record/cassette version was four or five seconds shorter--if I remember correctly--than the radio/cassette version. My family’s turntable just turned too fast. Drove me crazy. Again, that might relate to pitch too since the “faster” versions of songs were also higher pitched, but I swear that the tempo difference was what struck me.   

How or when did I lose that? Will it come back? One thing I’ve tried is letting the metronome run for a bit at each new tempo before I start to play. While it’s clicking away, I look at the music and tap a toe, mentally running through the passage first to try to fix the sound of it in my mind at that tempo. Then I actually play it at that tempo (or as close as I can). This seems to help in the short term to get something out of the metronome practice, but in the long term, I really want my old mental metronome back!

This (above) is the version upon which the experiment was performed. And like the espresso-sipping, NPR-listening, import-driving liberal I am, I really like this version too.

The Ghost Fingerboard

Having another work event tonight meant that I was able to take a couple of hours off today. So, I watched Germany vs. Greece in the Euro Cup quarterfinals.* I watched from a café that was showing the game, and had the third movement of the Bach going through my head the entire time.

And—I can’t be the only person who does this—the music in my head just had to find a physical outlet, however subtle. For me today, inside my left hand, the signals were firing away. My coffee cup served as the fingerboard. I held it lightly in both hands and let my left fingers pulse against it with the fingerings of the first page or so. Yeah, this went on for the whole game.

It occurred to me that if I could mentally run through bowing in this fashion, maybe my bowing would improve faster. Something to work on?

* I liked the symmetry of Marco Reus scoring one of his first international goals in the same game where Miroslav Klose scored his umpteenth. As life goes on, I find myself rooting for the old guys.

Playing From Memory, By Necessity

When I sat down to practice this evening and was pulling my music out of my case, I cussed. I had forgotten the Bach music at home. I’d had it out last night to look at something, and forgot to put it back before leaving for work today. (I live in a condo with thin walls, so I don’t practice at home. My violin travels with me to work most days, and I practice in my office—or elsewhere, nearby—after hours.)

Anyway, I cussed. Then I did my warm-ups and scale and Kreutzer, and then figured I’d see how much of the first movement of the Bach I could remember. Playing it from memory was really, really interesting. I remembered almost all of it. And as I was playing, I felt as though I was noticing so much more in terms of how I sounded.

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, but it was. I realized that in practicing, sometimes I’m just noticing something I need to adjust, marking it in the music, playing through it another couple of times to move it in the right direction, then playing on. Not gonna solve it today, it’s just something to keep working on. I rely on the marking to remind me to make the adjustment and, on some level, if I’ve marked it, I’ve done my work for the day.

It sort of reminds me of being in graduate school and having huge, scary papers to write. Since this was the mid-1990s, I actually had to track down paper sources (journal articles, books) in the library and photocopy them. I’d then haul home stacks of stuff to read and feel as though, on some level, I’d spent X hours on my paper. Not gonna write it today, it’s just something to keep working on.

Playing from memory tonight and relying strictly on sound to monitor myself instead of just using practice time to put more pencil marks on my music is sort of like sitting down and actually banging out word count on a paper instead of just killing trees at the library.

That doesn’t mean I need to extend practice sessions endlessly to internalize an adjustment by brute force. It just means that I probably need to get my eyes and brain away from the notes more often.

Sources of Tiredness

As today's practice session went along, between the 30-minute mark and (ultimately) the 60-minute mark, stuff on my left arm started to get tired. First my wrist got tired, then my shoulder, then my elbow, then my left hand itself. Not sore, just tired. Aaaaargh! Am I back where I started?

I guess my fitness for violin playing, such as it is, is still tenuous. To recap, I started playing and taking lessons again last October (eight months ago) after not playing in a structured context for more than 18 years. I knew that getting back into physical shape for it would take a while, but I had thought I was pretty much there. Then I took two weeks off of playing in late May while on vacation. Then I played for a week. Then I slacked off for a week. Now I'm back on the wagon again. I'm glad about that, but it was a bit frustrating, after only the first 30 minutes of playing today, to feel as though I'd been playing more than twice that long.

But other factors surely played a role in today's tiredness, too. I only slept about 5.5 hours last night because I was spending time yesterday on (I admit it--superfluous and perfectionistic) finishing touches for a big work event today. For that event, I had to haul a couple of heavy things from Point A to Point B in hot weather, coordinate the timing of several sub-events, answer a couple of challenging questions, keep people calm under anxiety-inducing circumstances, and that sort of thing. Over the whole day, it added up. I got a little dehydrated and was completely wiped out by the end of the day.

Given all of that, it's probably no wonder that my ol' bod (not to mention my mind) was not fully prepared for an hour of Fleisch, Kreutzer, and Bach.

What I Did This Week While Blowing Off Practicing

Generally, I think I have built up a pretty consistent practice habit. Since last October, I have only cancelled a lesson once due to insufficient practice—until this week, that is. Here are some things I did this week (in addition to, you know, my full-time job) while I was not practicing: 

• Watched two-plus games from Euro 2012 (Germany vs. Portugal, Italy vs. Spain, and parts of Croatia vs. Ireland). A couple of friends have been trying for years to turn me into a soccer fan, and they’re definitely making progress. I can now relate who and what I’m seeing on the field to what I saw at the previous two men’s World Cups, at least. 
• Read an entire novel in two sittings. The book was Gone Girl, and it was unlike any other thriller I’ve ever read. I’m usually one to wait for the paperback, but in this case, I am thankful I read it soon enough after its publication to avoid spoilers. Wow. 
• Started looking at houses with my real estate agent. I saw seven houses and actually liked three pretty well. It’s too early for me to bite—I’m not pre-approved yet—but I saw enough to be encouraged that I will find something in my price range, in a good location, that I really like. I need to remember that feeling of excitement when packing my stuff and selling my place become a massive PITA.
• Went to a baseball game. Ate a bratwurst, filled out the entire scorecard, enjoyed luscious spring/summer weather. It was as restorative for me as, say, going to a spa probably is for some people. The breeze soothed me. Tracking every play on the scorecard focused my mind. Eavesdropping on the family behind me as they talked about the game reminded me of going to games as a kid with my family. It doesn’t get much better than that. 
• Inspired by my baseball experience, I re-watched Bull Durham. Now that it’s been around for almost 25 years, I feel comfortable saying that it qualifies as one of my favorite movies.
• Bought, wrapped, and will mail a gift for the 8^th birthday of one of my favorite family members.

So yes, I was slacking on practicing, but I made the most of the week anyway! I get back on the wagon this weekend. 

"This sonofabitch is throwing a two-hit shutout, he's shaking me off. You believe that shit?"

Focusing on Fundamentals, or Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic?

I've been out of town, so today was my first practice session in more than two weeks. It felt more like I'd been away for two months, but I'm glad I pushed through it. Gotta (re)start somewhere.

Today was about relearning:

• To shift and play in tune (especially on the high notes/positions in Kreutzer #10). At one point I actually checked if my D and A were still in tune with each other because it sounded so crappy as I shifted while moving from one to the other. Yes, they were fine; the crappiness was me. 
• To police the new bow hold. Having said that, although I worried a bit about reinforcing old habits, I actually didn't sweat this too much today.
• To make all the little physical adjustments I've worked on in the first movement of the Bach (a higher elbow for downward string crossings at a couple of points, some flexibility but not floppiness in the wrist at a couple of points, etc.) while hopefully paying attention to the big picture of the flow of the sound. I didn't appreciate how much progress I had made on this until I backslid. 
• To call it a day, recognizing that this is not the day to attack the pseudo-double stops in the third movement of the Bach.  

Throughout this practice session, I was torn between giving myself a break on certain things that needed improvement (recognizing that nothing is going to sound particularly good after two weeks off), and cracking the whip (again, to avoid reinforcing bad or ineffective habits).

Even when you do narrow down to one thing to work on, at what point are you focusing on fundamentals, and at what point are you rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

I realized today that when the going gets tough, I have a tendency to focus on intonation. It was the first bullet point above because it's the first thing that came to my mind. For me, it's the easiest thing to fix. Again, does that mean I'm focusing on fundamentals? Can't be missing shifts--it's like missing free throws. Or does it mean I'm chickening out of working on the harder stuff?