"Don't Force It"

I think my positive attitude from Thursday's practice carried into Friday's lesson. The current double stop exercise went pretty well. That was one that I really dug into the night before. I reminded myself that 1) it's piano, so there's no need to go crashing and crunching through it, and 2) it thus lends itself to being played with the bow away from the bridge--which in turn makes it easier to play on two strings at a time since the strings are closer to each other farther from the bridge. When I played it today, I played through it with only a few stops between measures to reset my fingers. That sounds like faint (self-)praise, but this exercise is a bit of a booger. I don't know the source, but it has some precious finger-twisting moments.

When I finished, Ms. L said, "I bet you're missing Kreutzer now." Heh heh. Actually, I'm not. A lot of Kreutzer stuff deals with tricky bowing, and I will take tricky left hand work over tricky bowing any day. In fact, I've been practicing this exercise with separate bows rather than doing the slurs. Up next: adding in the slurs.

The Bach still had some of the same issues I've been contending with (uneven tempo, some jerky shifts, a few areas of iffy intonation), but it had some decent moments too. At least we were able to work on some actual playing (using less bow in a few places, shaping a few phrases) rather than forearm/wrist exercises! Using less bow in some places made a big difference--I'd been thinking "bow speed" and just covered too much ground. Ms. L said the mantra with the Bach now should be, "Don't force it." I think I'm on track to have a fairly good sense of accomplishment when I set it aside.