What I Learned Today

Since my last post about violin lessons, I’ve had the pleasure of learning the following new bits:

• First four-finger fingering pattern (termed “red” in Fingerboard Geography), which consists of a whole-whole-half-whole step pattern (played on any string). This is, conveniently, just what you need to play in the key of D minor, at least on the D and A strings. I’ve been doing “finger marches” up and down these notes, which helps train my ear and also helps strengthen my pinkie.
• D Major arpeggios. I’m finding these *hard* because they not only skip notes (challenging my newbie ear) but also cross strings. Much more challenging than a scale.
• Bowing variations. The default back-and-forth bowing is termed “détaché.” We’ve also discussed staccato (slight pause at the end of the note, stopping the bow on the string; feels “sticky”) and slurs (playing two or more notes with the same bow motion, yielding a smoother sound).

I’m enjoying using Pachelbel’s Canon as a “piece” to work on. It’s conveniently in the key of D, and it keeps presenting new and interesting challenges, such as a high G-natural that requires a fingering change (from the “red” above to “blue”, which is whole-half-whole-whole steps). We encountered this in today’s lesson, so I left with additional homework: to learn the blue fingering, as well as “yellow” (whole-whole-whole-half) so that I can get the low C# on the G string. Yowza!

It’s a weird brain-inverting feel to read music for the violin. I had piano lessons for a short while as a kid, and I remember how sharps and flats were a mark of deviation (from the white keys) — because both the music and the piano are set to the key of C by default. Yet with this “red” fingering we started with (and I think is the most common way to start on the violin), it’s the key of D that’s easiest to work with. This means that the marked sharps (C# and F#) come for free on the D and A strings and it’s the sneaky G-natural (on the E string) that requires special handling. It takes a sharp eye to notice this!

But then I was reading through some of Wolhfart’s Etudes (a book I have from my previous violin lessons, which always defeated me with its difficulty) and realized that, because they’re written in the key of C, the blue fingering is just what’s called for, throughout most of the first etude! So that’s another way to practice it. I’m glad to start being able to map these fingering concepts to what the written music needs.

I’m also getting more of a view of all of the pieces that learning to play the violin entails — like cresting a hill and beginning to make out new landmarks in the distance. I started paging through later parts of Fingerboard Geography and noticed where it introduces *shifting* — moving your left hand up or down the fingerboard! Yikes! It’s presented as “no-fear shifting,” which manages to be both comforting and intimidating at the same time (evidently shifting is scary for a lot of people, else there would be no such term). I don’t expect to be ready to learn that for a while, although it’s needed about halfway down the first page of Pachelbel’s Canon (we’re skipping that section for now). Always more to learn!

Learning a new physical skill is hard, and it takes time. Unlike acquiring a new concept, in which illumination can enter your brain in one dazzling flash, physical skills require time and repetition. There is a rule of thumb floating around that claims it takes ten thousand repetitions of some action to truly “learn” it. That’s a lot of repetitions, and can be a very daunting thought when faced with any particular skill-learning setting!

Ten thousand. Really? Let’s say I want to learn to produce a D major scale on my violin (which I do). Let’s further say that I dedicate myself to this goal by running through the scale ten times, every day. It will then take me *three years* to reach 10,000 repetitions. Somehow, I think the scale would have gotten as good as it’s going to get well before then.

But of course, the number of repetitions needed might well depend on the complexity of the particular task.

For now, in my violin studies, I prefer the approach advocated in The Secret of Practicing, Part 1. The idea here is that it’s not raw practice, but good practice, that helps you improve. Instead of executing something a fixed number of times (some or all of them poorly, since you haven’t mastered them yet), you aim to get five perfect repetitions. That might mean you actually practiced a lot more than that, but you got to the point where you could do five perfectly. This likely also requires breaking down the task (e.g., the sequence of notes) into a smaller and smaller unit until you can get five perfect repetitions. The other benefit is psychological: you get an immediate sense of where your current “ceiling” is, what you can do perfectly five times in a row, which should increase over time, rather than repeatedly throwing yourself at a big long complex piece and repeatedly failing. Maybe I can apply this strategy profitably with my swimming, too!

Part 2 of the series on practicing also recommends including overlaps between the chunks you’ve broken your piece into, which I think makes a lot of sense.

While the rest of this sequence on how to practice embarks on example pieces that are far outside of my playing ability, I’ve still enjoyed reading them to glean tips that may come in handy in the future. For example, I would have assumed that one would practice by playing the music as written, but these posts show how to break down the complexity of the music so you can work up to being able to play it. Great resource!

Today was my second violin lesson. My, how the time flew! I was pleased that my practice on open strings had paid off, as I was able to demonstrate a much better and more consistent sound than last week.

We did a bunch of string-crossing exercises, which involve switching between the four strings without any messy intermediate noises or scritches from the bow. This requires decoupling the sweeping bowing motion from the angle at which you hold your arm, when intuitively your body wants to do it all together in one fluid movement. Therefore, you have to practice by bowing on one string, stopping, changing the arm angle, then bowing again, etc. It’s definitely baby steps, but I can already see that it’s the right path to increased control.

One of the most unexpectedly fun parts of this lesson was playing with another person. We played G-D-A-E-A-D-G which is about as boring as it gets, and it was still fun, making music together.

Right at the end of the lesson, my teacher (re-)introduced me to fingering. I now get to practice playing G-A, D-E, A-B, and E-F#. That is, going from an open string to a whole step up by dropping my index finger down at the magic spot on the fingerboard. This is all sorts of stressful. For some reason, mechanically executing bowing and arm position is fine, but when I now need the ability to not only hear the right pitch but be able to reproduce it, I freeze up. I think in my head the ability to hear and interpret pitch seems like this magical skill to see the invisible that some people have and some don’t. Intimidating! I’ll have to work on giving myself permission to be horribly out of tune and gradually work up to in-tune.

My teacher also noted that it’s important not to put the finger down and then roll it forward or back to correct the pitch (tempting), as instead the goal is to get to the point where it comes down, smack, at exactly the right point the first time.

She recommended these books:

• String Builder
• Fingerboard Geography: a visual fingering pedagogy that uses colors to make fingering easier. Intriguing.

And listening to my Suzuki method CDs will help with the ear sensitivity.

Eleven years ago, I took up the violin for the first time and embarked on one of the most humbling learning experiences of my life. As an adult, it is easy to intellectually grasp your instructor’s advice, but it simply takes a frustrating amount of repetition before your body can learn to execute it. I worked my way through the first Suzuki book, supplementing it with etudes from other sources, and gradually gained some basic competency. Then I moved, and got sucked into the final push for my dissertation, and the violin fell by the wayside.

Today I finally returned to the instrument by signing up for classes with a new instructor. And wow, the sheer volume of things I’d forgotten! “You’ve played violin before?” she asked. “Yes, but let’s pretend that I haven’t,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

Here’s what we covered:

• Holding the bow: loose, draped hand, with the middle and ring fingers over the frog, the index finger resting ahead of them, the pinkie perched behind them, and the thumb curved under.
• Holding the violin: bring it in to your neck and let it “land like a helicopter” on your clavicle. The chin lowers to grip the violin, and does most/all of the holding (so the other hand is free to move about for fingering), but aim to minimize strain.
• The fingering hand is also relaxed, wrist straight. The thumb rests against the neck but does not grip it. The fingers bend in little table-shapes to press straight down on the strings.
• Bowing: Relaxed, with enough pressure to generate a nice sound. Breathy sound indicates too little pressure and crunching/squeaking indicates too much.
• Tuning: Mainly I just watched her do this. I’ll need to play around with it to re-learn how to listen and tune on my own.
• Reading music: I probably should have reviewed this before the lesson! Violin strings are G-D-A-E, and the treble clef has spaces for F-A-C-E, so with some thought you can figure out how the notes map to open strings and the intermediate finger positions between open strings. Hard to do on the spot without prior review, though.

We concluded by loosening the bow (I’d completely forgotten that too!), and she gave me some photocopies of exercises even more basic than the starting Suzuki ones. I’m to practice holding the bow, open-string bowing, and simple string changes. I’ll also dig up my music theory book and start reviewing its contents. This is so exciting!

Last weekend, I took the train north to Olympia, WA, to visit my friend Marcy. She put together an action-packed weekend with tons of new experiences and fun times. The list of “firsts” for me included:

• Eating Voodoo Doughnuts that I picked up in Portland during the train’s stopover there, at Marcy’s suggestion. My favorite was the butterfinger one. Yum!
• Attending a punk house show (that’s when a collection of bands show up at someone’s house, set up in the living room, and play for the benefit of a group of strangers who’ve also shown up). Imagine a house painted completely black (with some wood trim), decorated with things like a poster of Shirley Temple with “SHIRLEY’S FIRST BLACK EYE” written on it, a slouched crowd of smokers out on the stoop, and punk music booming from inside. A sign on the bathroom door urged you to pee outside. There were three bands that evening, the best one being TacocaT — aside from scoring points for their palindromic name, they write cute/edgy songs mainly from a girl perspective. Check them out!
• Playing Urban Golf through the streets of Olympia. This involves dressing up in your best argyle, tweed, or houndstooth and hitting nerf balls with golf clubs on a predefined course. Marcy and I set up the course she’d scouted by duct taping squares of astroturf (to tee off from) and then marking “holes” to aim the balls into. It was an absolutely hilarious time. We got lots of strange looks but only a few comments, and no one called the police. Hooray!
• Waving my hand through the water of Puget Sound to trigger bioluminescence. This is completely awesome. Too bad the water’s so cold. I can only imagine how phenomenal it would be to SWIM while glowing blue!
• Attending a rock concert in hipster bar. I only recently learned what a hipster was! But this place apparently sold the right beer and attracted people with the right fashion sense. The highlight of the evening was a Japanese band called Mugen Hoso, which consisted of two too-cute Japanese guys in the middle of their “BIG BANG! BANG! BANG!” tour. They’d driven 40 hours from Austin, TX, to arrive 5 hours before this concert, but were buzzing with energy and played their hearts out. So charming, so rockin’, so cute!
• Climbing up on a bench to escape a moshing crowd. At first I thought Mugen Hoso had inspired some massive brawl, but it turned out that the people were intentionally slamming into each other and apparently enjoying it. Beer quickly slicked the floor, and it got harder to pay attention to the band. Even though I had a great view from the bench, I had to be ready to catch and push back on random bodies that came flying at the bench. Headbanging I’d seen before, but this? Wow.
• Picking blackberries and eating them with vanilla ice cream. Mundane for many, perhaps, but a marvelous treat for me :)
• Attending a roller derby match. I didn’t know anything about roller derby, so was grateful to have an informed friend along! Basically, it’s two teams of super-athletic women racing to score points by passing the other team’s members around the rink. It’s quite a spectacle, with players decked out in fishnets and face paint, but what really steals the show is the amazing skating (on old-fashioned four-wheel skates, no less). Olympia has a world-class team, and they demolished their opponents from Cincinnati with a final score of 299 to 81! (Check out this picture from the match.)
• Watching salmon prepare to head upstream, and seeing a “fish ladder” that helps them get past a dam. Wow, those salmon are huge! We also saw seals swimming around them ready to catch a meal, and blue herons winging all over — beautiful.
• Cutting someone else’s hair. I got to use a comb and scissors, just like a pro! Marcy is a brave, brave woman.
• Attending a party where I was the only one without a tattoo. Well, okay, I think Marcy is also tat-less, but we were definitely the only ones. Turns out that tattoos don’t keep people from wanting to play croquet, though!
• Mutton Bustin’. Technically I didn’t actually get to see this, although we did call up some videos. Marcy and I met up with a high school friend of mine who talked about how her son had just won 3rd place in a Mutton Bustin’ competition at the fair. This is a sport in which small boys are put on sheep (yes, sheep), then the sheep is tickled and prodded into a frenzy, and then they are let out into a yard where the boy tries to cling to the sheep and not get bucked off. Wow!
• Being in a comic strip. That’s right, one of Marcy’s friends who also golfed with us, Chelsea Baker, is an illustrator and comic artist. She created this summary of Urban Golf, and I ended up in it!
  
  That’s me with the hat and argyle sweater over my shoulders.

Now that’s an incredible, learning-filled weekend!