Good lesson

I played better at Friday’s lesson than I have in a long time.

• The droning double stop exercise went well until the last two lines or so. I groaned at the end because of the halting way I’d played the last two lines, but Ms. L pronounced it “much improved” and is having me move on to another double stop exercise that’s more challenging. Naturally! 
• The Bach double stops went reasonably well. She had me work on speeding them up, and when forced to, I found that I could play them faster than I’d have guessed I could. She suggested that with the second set, I should work on speeding it up measure by measure. That is, play one measure as fast as I can, pause and set my fingers for the next measure, play that measure as fast as I can, etc. until the pause between measures gets shorter. Simple, and yet I really see how it will help.
• Ms. L pointed out that in the second set of double stops, I tend to raise my fingers slightly (not fully pick them up, but displace them) when hitting the open E. I had no idea—I probably was doing it subconsciously to play the open E cleanly, without stray fingers getting in the way. But clearly this creates two or three times as much “work” per measure in terms of placing my fingers accurately.
• I am really enjoying the Haydn. It is falling under my fingers relatively easily—I’m sure that scales and arpeggios have something to do with that, so yay! The rhythms are also coming more easily to me now than they were when I first started on it. Specifically, the constant gear-switching between clusters of notes in multiples of three and clusters of notes in multiples of two is making more sense.
• Toward the end of my lesson, as Ms. L. was having me run through part of the Haydn, Mr. R stuck his head in as he was leaving the shop to nod goodbye. I noticed him out of the corner of my eye but kept playing, then saw Ms. L react to something. When I got to a stopping place, she explained, “Mr. R started to walk away like he was leaving, but then he stopped and listened, and went like this.” She raised her eyebrows and made a face as if to say, “Nice!” So. I’ll take that as a positive review!