In our lesson yesterday we worked on left hand positioning – it’s a common point of focus, but I worked specifically on keeping my fingers better facing the violin, which allows me to keep them tall.  An ever-so-slight rotation of the forearm/wrist from my habitual position seems to be in order.  Once my hand is in the right position, in order to move my fingers efficiently I need to focus on moving them from the first joint at the base of the fingers, versus on moving my hand, which will mess up the relative position of the fingers.  Especially when moving them over strings, the taller the fingers are vis-à-vis the fingerboard, the better and more efficiently I can move them into place.  I have some scale exercises with which to continue the lesson on my own.

We also worked on vibrato.  While I have a meager vibrato on my better days, I feel my progress has stagnated – fundamentally I’m just not doing it right.  I expressed some dismay at my lack of very good progress, so Teacher shared another exercise, and encouraged me to work on slow, big vibrato as a training tool.  I suggested that perhaps I should stop doing it otherwise so I can retrain it better from the ground up, and Teacher seemed to think that might be a good idea.  So I’m going to try to go back to square one for a while and see how it goes.

And the Bach Double Violin Concerto, my current focus, is coming along.  Teacher and I are up to playing three of the five pages of the Suzuki score together.  The challenges are myriad, progress is slow, but week by week it’s getting better.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan