I’m back to working on my bow hold: Bend the thumb. Bend the thumb. Bend the thumb. Touch the hair with your knuckle. Touch the hair with your knuckle. Touch the hair with your knuckle. Playing while obsessing about bending my thumb is causing me to struggle a bit. In the last lesson Teacher really […]
I ended up rescheduling my Wednesday no-go lesson for yesterday, so instead of the minor week I had planned I’m having a big one. I started in on my first Beethoven, a minuet; Teacher wrote across the top of the music, “bow distribution.” It gets complicated, with slurs of many notes constantly – I told […]
I’m playing louder lately. I’ve been trying to bow more confidently, and to produce decisive strokes. It’s causing my tone to improve, and it’s helping me sound better overall, for sure. But it is louder. Now, we’ve lived in this condo for over 10 years, and it’s been quite quiet the whole time. I added […]
I won’t have a lesson on Wednesday – instead, I’ll be attending the funeral of a friend’s father. So that means I’ll have to wait another week to start in on the Beethoven I’ve been anticipating so wildly; the extra week I forced myself into with Gavotte by Lully will become two. Of course I […]
In yesterday’s lesson we worked on the finer bits of playing that increase musicality. What I’m talking about is a version of the “bow boldly” theme that’s becoming prominent for me, but it goes further than that. Yesterday we focused on playing sections of the music that naturally flow together as a unit – a […]
Last night I was talking to my friend who has just taken up the cello. She’s slightly north of 60 years old and she’s never played any instrument before at all. I talked to her about the difficult nature of fretless stringed instruments – there’s just so much that goes into playing the things. I […]
In 1806, Beethoven wrote a series of three quartets for strings, Opus 59, nicknamed the Razumovsky quartets, after the Russian ambassador to Vienna who commissioned them. This morning I ran across a performance of the first quartet from the work, Beethoven’s 7th String Quartet overall. The quartet takes a place beside the Kreutzer Sonata and […]
Well it’s been a terrible few days for me in violin land. I have not played since Saturday, when I got in a quick 45 minute practice session. The main reason is my broken A string, compounded by the blizzard – I wrote I would head to the burbs to visit the luthier on Tuesday, […]
Yesterday I published a rather sad post that accepted many of the criticisms noted violinist Mark O’Connor has leveled at Shinichi Suzuki, father of the Suzuki method of music instruction. I removed that post last night. I know myself relatively well, and while every day I age I get better and better about not reacting […]
What is the perfect Chicago blizzard activity? Playing the violin at home, of course! What did I find when I opened my case to do just that just now? A broken A string, my first broken string ever – leave it to me to have a broken string on one of the best days for […]
Ryan Libel 