As I wrote yesterday just before my lesson, I was happy for the opportunity to work through my new Gavotte with Teacher in our first lesson in three weeks.  We worked on the piece the whole time, going slowly and noting some rhythmic and bowing patterns that I need to work on.  But as with […]

Another lesson, another milestone – well, it is to me, anyway.  She’s been teasing me with it for a while, but yesterday we spent most of the lesson on introducing me to some techniques for producing vibrato on the violin.  On one hand I’ve been itching to get going on it, but on the other […]

I had a great lesson last Wednesday – I played through Humoresque for Teacher and we started some refinements on it.  The piece has so many little moments where subtleties make a big impact.  Dynamics are just the tip of the iceberg.  No piece I’ve worked on to date so fully explores the nuance of […]

Yesterday’s lesson was welcome.  We worked on the final four lines of Humoresque that I had yet to work with, so now I have all the pieces and can put the whole thing together.  The toughest parts of the piece – two slurred sections that are done in third position – are in these four […]

The music looks quite complicated, and maybe I’ll admit that at this point in my playing I think 32nd rests are a little silly.  But since discovering it, I’ve been quite taken with Dvorak’s famous Humoresque.  It’s the fourth piece in Book Three of the Suzuki repertoire, and Teacher started introducing me to it in […]

The latest rhythmic/bowing pattern with which I’m playing my Wohlfahrt etude is causing me some problems, so I need to slow it down – we work these etudes with many different patterns; I think this is the eighth for me.  Interestingly, perhaps, I’m still on the first etude of a book of 60 of them […]

Last Wednesday I arrived home from work and was chatting with Michael about my violin lesson that morning, and telling him that Teacher is encouraging me to be more expressive in my playing.  It’s not as if I stand there like a robot; I do move with the music to a certain extent, but Teacher […]

I’m still plugging away at this Bach minuet plus minuet – in yesterday’s lesson after Teacher checked my etudes we went to start in on the piece, but I stopped us to confess that I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the G melodic minor scale.  I’m working with this scales book, but for […]