Ambivalence / Pep Talk

As excited as I was earlier this year about the prospect of joining a community orchestra, I am now having some ambivalence. 

One thing tamping down my enthusiasm is that I feel--make that I AM--underprepared for auditions. August is just so rough at work that I have been too tired when I got home to keep up with practicing. 

Another thing bothering me is--and I know I should not dwell on this--ghosts of auditions past. Am I remembering the good ones? No, I am remembering the ones where my hands shook and the bow did spiccato on its own and I convincingly demonstrated that you cannot fake high parts when you are the only one playing. (Academic Festival Overture, I'm looking at you.) 

So, how can I turn this mindset around? What was my best audition ever? My audition for the school orchestra when I started high school, hands down. I went in with no expectations and put no pressure on myself. I was secure in the belief that I would get in, and I didn't care where I sat. I have no memory of what I played or how I thought it went at the time, but I ended up third chair in the first violins.

With these auditions, I have different reasons in the case of each orchestra to think I am no sure thing to get in. It's absolutely true that I don't care where I sit, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. 

How else can I take pressure off of myself? Maybe I could think of it as a job interview in a situation where I already have a job that I like and am reasonably secure in. I don't need to nail this. No matter what happens, I am gaining experience with the audition process and making local orchestra contacts. 

Do I judge people when they get nervous and don't perform at their best? No. I  need to treat myself the way I treat other people who are nervous. (In August, I interact with a lot of nervous people at work.) I need to politely ignore the nervousness and envision only calmness and confidence. I need to convey that I anticipate success and comment on every bit of success that I notice. Thank you and goodbye, nervousness--calmness and confidence and success are going to take over now. 

Now that I think it through, this is sounding very much like what Noa Kageyama wrote about a few weeks ago on The Bulletproof Musician and what Joyce DiDonato spoke about in the video he included. It's reassuring to think that you can overachieve, in a way, in relation to your technical preparation (or maybe it's more accurate to say make the most of your technical preparation) by investing in some mental preparation. Not that I have done a ton of mental preparation, but--OK, no second guessing. Time to get in some productive practice and a good night's sleep.

Picking Up the Pace

I have been working on audition excerpts for a community orchestra for the last couple of months. All but one (let’s not dwell on that one!) fall under my fingers somewhat decently now, and I’ve got an approximation of the dynamics and articulation. Much of my recent effort has focused on playing the stuff faster.

I’m reminded that there’s a lot more to speeding something up than just starting with a lower number on the metronome and plowing upward through muscle memory and brute force. Here are some things I am working on that set the conditions to play faster:

• In a couple of passages with lots of string crossings, I have to make sure my right elbow is high enough to let my lower arm do the work of moving the bow from one string to the next. Moving my whole arm slows things down. 
• Elsewhere in the bow arm, I have to work on keeping my upper arm still. Again, moving my whole arm slows things down. I finally have a mirror in my practice space, so that’s a constant reality check.
• Yet elsewhere in the bow arm: How many times have I written “Less bow” in my music? In learning new music, I just have to be more conscious of passages that will need to speed up a lot and use less bow from the start. 
• In shifting, I have to keep my fingers (and thumb) light. This has been a recurring theme in my return to the violin for a number of reasons, but I have a particularly hard time with left-hand tension in passages that call for me to squeeze and press with my bow hand. My left hand wants to squeeze in misguided sympathy. 

Ms. L. has had me try things like playing the rhythm of a particular passage on one note at the target tempo—that is, not worry about left hand for the moment, but let the bow arm get a feel for the target tempo. “Let your bow lead the way and let your fingers catch up,” she suggested. “Even if the notes sound mushy for now, keep at it. Your fingers will catch up.”

Those sorts of tactics seem more important for me than anything I do with the metronome. In any case, I am pretty sick of the sound of my metronome right now. The other day it fell off the stand and the lid to the battery compartment popped off and the battery sprang out. I looked at it lying on the floor in pieces and had about as much desire to pick it up and put it back together as if it had been road kill.