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!