This new song is really something.  As I indicated in Part I, I’m playing it in G major, which takes only one sharp, so on the A string I play C natural, “low second finger.”  At the moment C natural is anything but natural.

I’ve only been training first position for a few months, if you don’t count the childhood years, but for whatever reason getting the second finger close to the first isn’t coming naturally at all – to me it definitely seems like my middle two fingers are more naturally inclined to flock together; the index finger wants to go it alone.

So I play scales, drilling it.  I am getting better, but I’m at this point in absorbing the position where I know where the finger needs to go, so I somewhat violently move the first finger “out of the way” so I can place the second finger very near where the first was.  I need to get to the point where I can leave the first finger down – it’s just that “leaving it down” is really not as simple as it sounds.  Contortionists, I’m sure, would have little difficulty, but my fat fingers and I are struggling.

The song itself is lovely, at least I imagine it will be once I’m a little better at C natural.  I’m only playing the first 2/3 of it or so – that might be part of my struggle too; I’m literally stopping in the middle of a measure!  That’s where the pattern breaks in the song, so that’s where we stopped last week.  I’m struggling to memorize it – I have the music, but the song is all big string hops and intervals, with one or two notes changing, repeated two or three times, and it’s hard for me to latch onto the pattern.

One beautiful thing about playing this new difficult song is that my last difficult song seems much less so now.  But hey, nobody gets into playing the violin because it’s easy!

Thanks for reading.

Ryan